The Clothed Body

Intertextual Strategies and Mythology
object such as a scarf, a brooch or a slogan on a T-shirt, can sometimes
convey the passage to a utopian world. The meaning thus conveyed by
these objects is no longer simply functional or practical, but a means of
entry to the utopia of a body which is not ours, or of a world with which
we share values and ideals and to which we feel we belong, perhaps
depending on our adherence to a group.
The recommendation of a way of dressing as far away as possible from
luxury and ostentation was characteristic of utopias in the past, like More’s
(1516) and Campanella’s (1602); clothing was supposed to be comfortable
and differed only according to the age and sex of the person wearing it. In
Campanella’s La città del sole, for example, the inhabitants wear a kind of
toga over a white undergarment, knee length for the men and full length for
the women. On the island of Utopia wool and linen fabrics are the most
widely used, because of their purity. Silk is abhorred because it is too close
to the dress aesthetic of More’s own day, from which he was trying to distance
himself. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624), on the other hand, is
inhabited by characters who seem to have stepped out of an oriental fancy
dress party, in turbans and colourful baggy trousers (see A. Ribeiro, 1993).
In the nineteenth century women’s trousers were considered a revolutionary
garment by women who were just beginning to fight for their own
utopia, their civil rights. Around the mid-nineteenth century across the
Atlantic on the streets of New England, the famous bloomers appeared, the
wide, calf-length trousers worn under a skirt and named after Amelia
Bloomer, a women’s rights activist, who was one of the first to wear them.
Bloomers were also worn by members of the fifty or more utopian socialist
communities inspired by the theories of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen,
which emerged in America between 1820 and 1860.
In the twentieth century utopian foresight was entrusted to science
fiction, beginning with the modern utopia created by H. G. Wells (1905),
a critical disciple of Fabian socialism, who conceived his ‘samurai’, rulers
(of both sexes) in an imaginary society, dressed in the style of the ancient
Templars. Yet often the science fiction world is also the world of dystopias,
like the well-known example from cinema, Metropolis, by Fritz Lang,
where the inhabitants of the underground city, all depicted with their heads
bowed because of the work to which they are submitted, are dressed in
identical dark uniforms. A similar scenario is that of Orwell’s 1984, in
which a blue boiler suit is prescribed for all party members. In Orwell’s
dark imaginary world the maximum simplification and homologation of
clothing finds a parallel in the mono-thematic reduction wrought by the
principles of the ‘new language’, which the English writer predicts will
have substituted common language by around 2050.
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