Look at Me--Savage Beauty revisited

July 20, 2011 by Patricia Spears...

Yesterday, I wore a pair of blue Lucite earrings.  I bought them at Knobkerry, a design/fashion/art space created and curated by Sarah Penn.  I was thinking about her store which was one of the first boutiques to connect the visual arts and furniture items from what some called the First World (Africa and Asia) with garments, accessories, and ephemera.  On Spring Street in the 1970s, the culturati aka the niggerati bought colorful dresses, robes, scarves, one of a kind pieces designed by Ms. Penn.  I still have a red silk Chinese jacket that costs $75! In 1977.  It is still in good shape and someday I will pass it on to my grand nieces.

I was thinking about Knobkerry because its last outpost was on West Broadway & Franklin in the 1980s and early 1990s until Penn lost her lease. It was an open, intensely welcoming space to poets, artists, musicians as well as fashionistas of the Afro-bohemian sort.  Indeed, a book party for my first collection, The Weather That Kills took place there in 1995.  Sarah Penn is one of those Black women who remain under the radar even as the kind of commercial space she created became the template for just about every boho boutique that connects design/fashion/art.  Her store, those colorful robes and trinkets, the important pieces from West Africa, Japan, China and her own imagination are like the blue Lucite earrings, unexpected and well designed. 

And this all brings me back to Savage Beauty, the Alexander McQueen exhibition that I wrote about recently.  An older woman (very feminist) asked if his clothes really worked for women.  I realized she was asking if as a man could he really make clothes with women in mind as opposed to clothes that simply improved their status (as wealthy, powerful, trendsetters, you know). Really, what she was saying was whose sexuality is being explored, his or hers?  I am sure it was both. 

But, I said he made clothes for women (very wealthy ones of course) who wanted to wear his clothes because they amplify femininity; show the power of female sexuality and the curves of the adult female body.  They are clothes that say “look at me.”  And any woman wearing them (Michele Obama for instance in a red dress earlier this year) know full well that all eyes will be on her in that dress/suit/body army.  McQueen’s runway shows were highly theatrical—which means they showcased conflicts within culture and across history. I think that McQueen understood that much of the female experience is about lack of safety and security, even if women have some form of agency (her own money, property, etc.)  His understanding of that vulnerability is best expressed in the room with the dresses from the “Highland Rape” series—his denunciation of England’s brutal colonization of Scotland with a tartan plaid including a red that seemed like the color of menstrual blood.  It was to me the emotional heart of the entire exhibition. 

Women are never safe.  Violence and intimidation stalk each of us daily, no matter the number of locks or alarms.  No matter the depth or lack in our bank accounts.  McQueen’s response was to flaunt the curves that set off misogyny.  He finds a way to make vulnerability powerful, so that these garments are extraordinarily well-made; they become a new kind of armor.   They demand, like the blue of my Lucite earrings, to be seen in motion on a woman who knows that she knows that she is being seen and who can open her eyes and look back at you.