Classic
Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism
by Mary E. Davis
University of California Press, Berkeley,
Los Angeles, 2006
333 pp., illus. 100 b/w; music examples.
Trade, $39.95
ISBN: 978-0-520-24542-6.
Reviewed by Richard Kade
Ubiquitous Iconoclast
Stanford, CA 94305-6004
ubiq_icon@hotmail.com
This book probably will be of moderate
interest only to those in the Leonardo
Community most immersed in the arts as
there is little to nothing to be found
in it relating to sciences or technology.
With that understood at the outset, readers
should also be warned that the whole premise
of Mary Davis' workthat some
reciprocal relationship existed between
early twentieth century French fashion
and musicis fatally flawed.
The two most glaring weaknesses in this
notion of "fashion-music fusion" are that,
despite abundant annotation of contemporaneous
accounts, little valid substantiation
exists and those examples citedfor
the most part, commentary on music and
musicians from fashion publicationshave
been roundly repudiated by the passage
of time.
Much of what awaits within the book's
covers is utter nonsense. The best clue
of that is the near oxymoronic nature
first two words of the book's title. That
which is considered "classic," by definition,
withstands the test of time. "Chic," of
course, tends to be that which is trendy
or currently in fashion (in Vogue?).
The author seems almost to be conceding
as much by quoting Cecil Beaton in the
epigraph for Chapter 3, "Fashion, the
ephemeral, shares the last laugh with
art, the eternal." Similarly, all instances
of "modernism" are those which were new
a century or more ago.
The old aphorism of a picture being worth
a 1000 words becomes comes to mind early
into the first chapter. Atop page 7 is
Figure 2 captioned, "Concert-room evening
dress from La Belle Assemblée,
1809." A woman is shown playing harp in
the most outlandishly contorted position
with the top of the instrument's neck
almost buried deeply into her left armpit
while her left hand seems, effortlessly,
to reach the bass register. All the while
her right armfortunately disproportionately
shorter than the leftis able
to pluck the upper register. Such representation
seems to set the tone for so many citations
throughout this and subsequent chapters.
After exhaustive setup of Serge Diaghilev's
cultivation of all up-scale Parisian print-media,
only the skimpiest and most ambiguous
assessments were to be found in La
Gazette du Bon Ton of the 1913 premiere
of Le Sacre du printemps. Although
mention is made of the Ballets Russes
connection between Picasso and Stravinsky
resulting in the collaboration on Pulcinella,
there is no discussion of Picasso as the
"Stravinsky of art" or Stravinsky as the
"Picasso of music!"
Readers even slightly familiar with the
"usual suspects" involved, after seeing
the blurb's contentions of connections
between music and fashion, anticipate
far more links than those offered. The
strongest tie put forth is that of Erik
Satie with his substantial connections
to Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky andin
the world of artto Picasso.
Indeed, a quick scan of the index shows
that the bulk of musical references are
for Satie and Stravinsky.
Conspicuously absent, however, is any
real cause-and-effect as to how fashion
affected music. Perhaps that is because
there really is none to be found! The
sole attempt at making the case is a brief
suite of 20 short "monologues with music"
for piano by Satie titled Sports et
divertissements with illustrations
by Charles Martin which Professor Davis
terms an "extraordinary and category-defying
work that celebrated and cemented the
relationship between music and fashion
in the early twentieth century."
Hmmm ...
In what reads in almost a defensive tone,
Davis writes how brilliant Sports et
divertissements was in the estimation
of Darius Milhaud and John Cage. She further
adds that to "Les Six"so labeled
by Henri ColletGeorges Auric,
Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Louis
Durey, Germaine Tailleferre and Milhaud"Satie
was their elder statesman." But how enduring
in the grand sweep of musical history
were they? As individual composers only
two have written anything that survives
in anybody's memory and, for each of those
two, just the smallest handful of compositions.
Only two works by Milhaud are performedwith
ever decreasing regularitythe
Scaramouche Suite and Le Boeuf
sur le toit and of Poulenc, the Concerto
for Two Pianos, Gloria and
Stabat Matter.
An approach for this book that might have
worked far better would have been to posit
that the world of French fashion had impact
upon all the arts, thus encompassing far
more of the non-familiar set-design and
wardrobe work of Picasso for Diaghilev,
not only on Pulcinella and Parade
but, also, on Manuel de Falla's El
Sombrero de tres picos.
While discussing all the luminaries who
thrived in France in the early twentieth
century, Professor Davis made only two
fleeting references to André Breton.
Had the book been written to cover other
forms of artistic expression, a discussion
of Salvador Dali and his Paris stint could
have touched on such seemingly unrelated
topics as the short film by Louis Buñuel
with Dali Un Chien Andalou from
1929. Doing so might even have shed light
upon the question of what led his thinking
eventually to what would be called "pixels"as
seen in his Lincoln Portraitso
many decades later. Then again, perhaps
a book is not the ideal venue for fleshing
out this tale with its undercurrent of
exactly where one draws any line of distinction
between genius and being certifiably nuts.
A better vehicle for that might be cinematic
collaboration between Tim Burton and Johnny
Depp as Dali.
Readers are given accounts of the rise
of Vanity Fair and Vogue
as well as the life of Coco Chanel but,
here again, little insight is afforded
into how music and fashion affected each
other. At the least, some account of what
music might have been playing in the background
while Chaneland her successors,
Christian Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent, Nina
Ricci, Aldo Gucci, et aldesigned
successful fashions might have been more
illuminating than the recitation of people
who were hobnobbing.
In that regard, a quick check of one of
today's most exciting designers, Alfredo
Menotti of Menotti Couture, reveals that
his preferences in background music for
stimulating the breakthrough "Eureka!"
moments while reconciling spherical trigonometric
problems of accommodating sloping shoulders'
or hips' effects on hemlines, range from
Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi and Puccini
to Barbra Streisand. In more casual contemporary
garb, one imagines that fashion designer
Sean John (Combsaka "P. Diddy")
tends to prefer hearing Notorious B.I.G.,
but this is not easily verified.
Perhaps "Paris is passé" is "le
plus ultra example" of redundancy. On
a far smaller scale, the entire notion
of Paris even as center of the world of
fashion is probably the most outlandish
cliché, if not anachronism, of
all. Why does the knee-jerk reflexive
look thereas opposed to Milan,
New York, Madrid, Tokyo or anywhere elsepersist
to this day for any hint of the future
of the fashion line? After all, the idea
of French "linear thinking" could not
possibly be more obsolete were it conceived
by André Maginot, himself.
Such examination of recent (within the
past century or two) artistic activity
in Paris tends also to shine a blinding
light of reality upon the ever-lessening
number of homegrown contributors. Is there
anything beyond the large number of people
with francsokay, these days,
eurosto attract (Picasso,
Dali, de Falla, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Balanchine,
Nureyev, Stravinsky) external artistry?
Maybe the answer lies in the fact that
the words "dilettante" and "poseur" come
from French.
The quote used by Ravel on the epigraph
of Valses Nobles et Sentimentales
from Henri de Régnier probably
would have served best as both a dedication
to and summation of this book: "... à
le plaisir délicieux et toujours
noveau d'une occupation inutile" ("...
to the delicious and always novel pleasure
of useless pursuits").