Naked at Lunch (32 page)

What were the English painters afraid of?

“It’s a distinct fear of female bodies and what the body can hold, what it doesn’t show,” Mara said. “There’s really interesting links about venereal disease in female bodies, you know; you have to watch out for women because they might not look like they have a disease, but they have one.”

Which made me think of the
vagina
dentata
, the deadly toothsome female reproductive organ of legend.

Mara laughed. “They never say that per se, but it’s—that’s kind of in the background of it. My hunch is that this strong aversion to the body must have made its way over with the settlers and the Pilgrims.”

It’s hard to imagine the Pilgrims unbuckling their shoes, tossing off their doublets and breeches, and skinny-dipping on the cape, let alone what they might’ve thought of Lee Baxandall and his family invading beaches on Cape Cod.

Mara continued. “There’s a wonderful section in
The
Faerie Queene
where one of the female characters is stripped and her body is described in this horrific manner. I mean, she’s a witch, which is important in some ways, I guess. She has a pig’s tail and she has cloven hooves and she has the body of an old woman. I think the quote that Spenser said was something like, ‘It was worse than I could have even imagined.’ I’m always struck by that kind of horror at undressing, of what could be underneath those clothes.”
********

Mara explained further, “There’s just this really strong drive towards keeping women covered. There’s this great early sixteenth-century manual about how to be a good woman, and basically it says if you go out at all, you should be fully covered with only one eye showing. It’s bizarre how the body is both flaunted so much in certain ways and then hidden so much in other ways. Really bizarre, actually.”

I asked her to expand on that idea.

“I remember growing up and the beach we used to go to, there was a nude beach kind of connected to it, and there was always one guy who we would see jogging up the beach and it always felt really exhibitionistic and really aggressive. And then, of course, throwing it back on you, you’re clothed and you’re uptight and, you know, all of that stuff, or maybe it’s just that clothed people feel that way . . . I mean, speaking as one of the clothed people.”

“It forces the clothed people to think about why they’re clothed, why they have to be clothed and what the clothes mean,” I said.

“Which brings us back to the Puritans. I think feeling good is somehow seen as wrong, you know. Anything that does feel good seems to be taking away from God. I think we still feel guilt about feeling pleasure.”

Which reminded me of the famous H. L. Mencken definition of Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

I asked Mara if she thought there was some kind of latent Puritanism in our culture that made people feel embarrassed or ashamed or sometimes offended and angry when they saw a naked person in public. She considered it for a moment and said, “I’m just thinking this morning, my daughter was running around outside and took off her shirt. She’s running around in little shorts and I think of the pleasure kids take in being naked. And then it stops at some point because you can’t do that anymore. At some age, I will be uncomfortable if she’s running around without a shirt on.”

I said, “Your social conditioning kicks in and her nudity becomes sexualized, or at least if other people are looking at her, you suspect that they’re sexualizing it.”

Mara agreed. “Yes, exactly right. I’m not going to want people looking at her in that way. But I think it’s that whole idea that you can do that because you’re a kid. And so for nudists, there’s a sense that they haven’t grown up yet. It’s still this kind of primitive pleasure.”

Our social conditioning is a strange cocktail of fears—fear of losing control, fear of microbial dangers hiding in the body, fear of being sexualized by others, fear that a naked person is engaged in some kind of deviant sexual behavior—mixed with a
j’accuse
of the nudist being an immature, nonconformist hippie freak who may or may not be mentally unstable, shaken and strained through an illogical legal system made bitter by a dash of Puritanism. All this fear of someone who wants to skinny-dip or hike in the forest in the buff? Have we really thought this through?

Mara said, “Going back to the naked jogger as being aggressive . . . you’re forcing other people to think about their choices. And no one likes that.”

********
Twice a week, apparently.

********
The
Faerie Queene
is an epic poem published in 1590 by English poet Edmund Spenser. It’s an allegorical work with knights and noble men and is considered one of the longest poems written in the English language, which might explain why I’ve never read it.

Fashionista

O
n July 23, 1951, the
Singleton Argus
,
a newspaper in Australia,
reported on a nudist fashion show held in New York City. The fact that the event was called a nudist fashion show seems oxymoronic to me, but then there are nudist jewelry shows where naked models display belly chains and penis clips, so, okay, there was a nudist fashion show in New York. The paper reported that the clothes “had a minimum of buttons, zippers, and snaps.” Which makes them sound like one of Diane von Furstenberg’s wrap dresses. Or a bathrobe. The
Argus
went on to quote the “chic, suntanned Mrs. Norval Tackwood,” wife of the Sunbathing Association’s executive director, saying, “The clothes are all designed for quick and easy removal once the wearer is safely inside the nudist camp.” Even better, “they can be slipped off in ten seconds.” Because once you’re safely in the nudist camp, why waste a precious second messing around with buttons?

One of the highlights of the show was an apron used to serve tea. As Mrs. Tackwood noted, “If a woman nudist gives a tea party she naturally has to wear an apron when she serves.”

What is it about clothes and fashion that would make nudists want to display some style, even when they’re supposed to be naked? Isn’t the grooming of pubic hair enough?

I started wondering what fashion designers might think about nudism. After all, they make their living creating and manufacturing the textiles that make us textiles. In Montreal, Canada, there is a fashion design company called Against Nudity. The Against Nudity website claims that designers Louis Moreau and Thierry Charlebois “looked at fashion as if it had never existed.” I’m not sure what that means, but their clothing apparently “thrives on the unconfined energy of its motherland: Montreal.” Which, just keeping it real, is a city where you might want to wear something warm most of the time. I can see why they chose that name: they wanted to avoid frostbite.

I arranged an interview with Los Angeles–based fashion designer Erica Davies to ask her what she thought about nudity and why we wear clothes. She has worked with Richard Tyler, Sean John, Max Mara, and BCBG, and has her own label.

Erica met me at a little café in Silver Lake. She’s petite and pretty, with light brown hair that was disheveled from the yoga class she’d just come from. Despite having just spent the last hour and a half down-dogging and sun-saluting, she looked stylish, wearing a sweater and scarf over her leggings. Erica announced that she was starving and ordered a cappuccino and croissant in her crisp Wales-meets-London accent.

I had been hoping to have some lunch and now I suddenly felt piggish about ordering a sandwich while the svelte yogini picked at a croissant, but then you see, that’s how they do it; we hadn’t even started talking about clothes and the fashion designer had me worried I was too fat. The waiter was not amused by my equivocations and muttered something under his breath as he spun away from the table to fill Erica’s order.

I turned to Erica and asked what I thought would be my trick question. “So what does a fashion designer think about when you see a naked body?” I was sure her answer would be that a naked body needs clothes, casual wear for antiquing and gardening, maybe some stylish suits for the office, and some of those signature pieces that help you transition from the office to the nightclub—in other words, a wardrobe full of fashionable prêt-à-porter and things like that. But that wasn’t her answer.

“You know it’s funny because when I design, I always think of the naked body first. Because you have to kind of figure out how to fit that body. It was from Richard Tyler that I started to develop that. But at Saint Martins
********
their main concept is you always started from the female body.”

Her coffee arrived and I managed to ask for the same thing. The waiter did not seem impressed that I had come to a decision.

Erica took a sip of her cappuccino before continuing. “It was funny because they always made you kind of look at the female body or a male body in a completely different way. Even before you’ve thought of the clothing you always think of what’s underneath the clothing.”

Which makes sense, but I was surprised that she designed a dress in the same way an architect designs a building: by studying the terrain. I wondered if this was common.

Erica nodded. “Richard Tyler worked that way. He would always kind of . . . study the client’s body. Like he’d have them come out in their underwear. And that’s how he would start. Because he would never . . . he didn’t really work with a patternmaker, he worked straight with his cutters. He would understand the female. How she was structured. And then he would cut into the fabric. I mean . . . he was genius.”

Tyler is a long-haired Australian who lives in Los Angeles and has designed clothes for celebrities like Elton John and Cher, but is more notable for his elegant suits for men and women and red-carpet dresses for actresses Julia Roberts, Anjelica Huston, and many others. In 2006 he redesigned the uniforms for Delta Air Lines flight attendants and customer service representatives. I couldn’t imagine Tyler looked at every flight attendant naked to make those dresses. But still, the fact that he based the cut of the clothing on the naked body was a surprise to me. “A nudist might say you can really only see a person, really see who they are, when they’re not wearing clothes. Is that why he did it?”

Erica pulled off one of the ends of her croissant and popped it in her mouth. “I don’t really know why he did it. But he felt that if he saw them naked and then put his ideas onto flat paper it would never translate. He could understand a woman’s body, but he had to see it. He didn’t take any measurements. He would work with his cutter. Just him and his cutter, because his cutter would study the woman too. It was unbelievable.” She took a sip of her coffee and added, “He’s the sweetest. He’s such a charming man.”

“Is that normal in the fashion world?”

“Most people drape. You know what I mean? Like they’ll drape on a form, but it’s still not the same.”

What little I know about draping and fashion design comes from the television show
Project Runway
and watching the designers fret and frown over some bolts of fabric thrown over what looks like a pincushion shaped like a torso while the design instructor, Tim Gunn, puts his finger on his check, scrunches up his eyes, heaves a sigh, and uncorks his catchphrase: “Make it work.” So for me, that was as close as designers came to the human body until the clothes had been sewn and the models would come in for a fitting. Apparently Richard Tyler simply dispensed with all that frowning and fretting over a stuffed torso.

“Do you design that way?”

“Whenever I start, like I’ll always start with some kind of . . . I’ll draw the body first, you know, then the clothes kind of come on top. Saint Martins did very interesting stuff about the female body. It’s like if you don’t study the human body, you can’t really dress it. You know what I mean? When you do a piece of clothing, you know, the proportion, the silhouette, the way you cut it. If you don’t study that body before you put it into the clothing it becomes like a sack. So the difference is if you study the body . . .” She paused and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Then you’re actually enhancing the form instead of just covering it. Trying to bring some body-ness out of that.”

The idea of enhancing “body-ness” with textiles is fascinating to me and, I think, the opposite of what most fashion customers think about when they buy clothes. How many times have I heard people looking for clothes that cover up any perceived flaws in their waistline or bustline, their flabby triceps or cellulite-riddled thighs? Isn’t it less about an individual body and more about some idealized version? But then, Richard Tyler was designing for a particular body, which was his unique talent.

My coffee finally arrived. I looked around and noticed that the café wasn’t busy. The waiter saw me scan the room and gave me a nod, confirmation that I was simply being punished for my indecision. Which is fair enough.

Erica spent some of her childhood in Saudi Arabia, a country that knows a lot about covering a woman’s body but not necessarily anything about bringing body-ness to the forefront; in many ways it’s anti-body. But she didn’t agree.