Get dressed, let's go to sleep

On the same topic:

“When did I start to abandon myself to sleep like this, that I stopped resisting? Is it really possible that I was once always full of energy and completely awake?” Banana Yoshimoto wondered in “Deep Sleep”. Terako, the young protagonist of the story, after the suicide of her best friend, falls asleep in long sessions of restorative sleep, in a form of torpor that cloaks every fragment of daily life. Terako's is in fact an emotional filter projected onto everyday events as have appeared in abundance among the pillars of literature, but which also touches on certain apical moments of fashion and art, where that very trend of fashion and art that, in a veiled or direct form, is inspired by the world of sleep and its manifestations: the bed and the clothing accessories that are similar to it have in fact no small importance in museums and catwalks. If we dig into the origin of “intimacy,” a word so closely connected to alcoves and sheets, we get what we already instinctively feel, even if we rarely stop to weigh the value of such a widespread term. The etymology test tells us that “intimus” means “the deepest,” in the logical and more or less spontaneous sense of a gesture or event nestled within a perimeter of inaccessibility, of protection from the gaze of others, in essence of a dimension of life jealously guarded within the confines of domestic walls.

On paper, in short, the sphere of our most intimate desires and behaviors would not be a matter to be negotiated, we common people would do anything to seal its contents from prying eyes and unwanted morbidity. And yet, on the contrary, contemporary fashion and art show us that intimacy itself has become the object of collective sharing, sometimes to be flaunted in the face in the crudest and most disturbing way, sometimes to be exhibited with the ease of a gag. Fashion and art, as they said. Flying free between wardrobe and painting, one only has to turn one's attention to the end of the eighteenth century to admire two exceptional experts in terms of intimacy, with the intent of distilling the diagnosis of a cultural turning point, of a way of thinking tired of the status quo, that is, of the Age of Enlightenment: the time had come to reject the cult of what appeared "clear and distinct", and consequently to immerse oneself up to the neck in a bubble of darkness, among the folds of the "deepest" unconscious . How can we not mention, then, the work of Francisco Goya? The author of "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" depicted hordes of witches and demons that fueled the black tailoring of Cristóbal Balenciaga, if among other things we think of the two figures placed in the background of Majas on the Balcony . Speaking of beds and pillows, however, it is the double declination of the “Maja desnuda” and the “Maja vestida” that gives us a glimpse of fashion and at the same time of intimacy capable of digging deep into style, impulses and desires. In the desnuda variant, Goya describes a young woman in erotic profusion, blatant and mischievous, as happened in parallel between the pages of “Philosophy in the Boudoir” by the Marquis de Sade and as will happen later with the “Olympia” by Edouard Manet. As for the vestida version, another blue-blooded personality, Hubert de Givenchy, must have had it well in mind, who for Audrey Hepburn in “Funny Face” made one of his famous suits with a blouse, broken up – as the Maja teaches – by a visible pink band.

Of course, regarding subjects “in intimacy” full of torments, equally harbingers of creatures that seem to have emerged from the most hidden corners of the unconscious, “The Nightmare” by Heinrich Füssli is perhaps the clearest and most striking example, with the poor girl surrounded by a group of demonic and dark monstrosities. The dress? A dressing gown, given the obviousness of the nocturnal context; however, it is good to remember that in the same period the heavy paniers and oppressive corsets of the late Baroque were replaced by large, light and frothy dresses not at all distant from the déshabillé of “The Nightmare”, in the name of a trend that would go down in history with the name of Empire Style. Ultimately, portraying – and wearing – loose and light clothes meant – and ultimately still means – sanctioning the rights of an existential assertion, of a choice of attitudes that celebrate the body and its freedom of expression, both physical and sexual, paving the way for a fashion and of course an art that in contemporary times would have tested a thousand other shades of a life in “lingerie” terms. In this regard, we must recognize Jacques Doucet – a couturier who is in reality little understood by the history of costume – for having officially cleared the typical garments of underwear to make them clothes to be worn in everyday circumstances, and the courage and creativity of Lady Duff Gordon alias Lucile, an English couturier who also survived the sinking of the Titanic, known for the transparencies, for the “spider web” hems of her creations, said Gabriele d'Annunzio, taken directly from the world of dessous, are no less. On the other hand, wasn't it the Poet himself who christened "Domina" - the mistress, the dominatrix, the mistress - the famous line of underwear-clothes by Biki, another splendid spokesperson for Italian fashion and one of the forerunners of Made in Italy?

Let's move on to more recent times, in a mix of art and fashion that between the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies, thanks to the protagonists of Body Art, exhibits the qualities and the sometimes bloody lacerations of naked and raw bodies. The extreme performances of Gina Pane or Marina Abramović, just to mention a couple of names, in their aims and intentions are comparable to the clothing philosophy of Sonia Rykiel, a Parisian stylist and writer who in the same period proposed clothes to be worn without underwear in direct contact with the skin, and who accompanied them with declarations of freedom contained in books such as “Et je la voudrais nue” (Paris, Grasset, 1979, there is still a copy available on Amazon): “I thought I was handling fabrics, wool, colours, and instead I was turning myself inside out, from my guts. I was tying, I was cutting, but in the meantime I was tearing my body apart”. Yes, the French designer shouted, “I would like her naked”, in the same Adamic or almost Adamic condition of Yoko Ono and John Lennon curled up between the sheets of Bed-in, in a protest hymn against the raging war in Vietnam but with the same scale of values ​​promoted by an art that doesn't know what to do with morality and respectability. More bedspreads, more blankets, more intimacy.

In 1976, Rykiel again created a winter jacket made from a duvet, demonstrating a fashion that could even compete with the extreme experimentation of the master of Dadaism, Marcel Duchamp, known for his “as is” objects – the so-called “readymade” – and the number one inspiration for another catwalk champion, Martin Margiela: who, in turn, following in the footsteps of Rykiel and for the 1999-2000 autumn-winter collection, created a series of duvet-coats with an effective effect of estrangement due to the reinvention of household items, as if redeemed, redeemed, torn from their anonymity. We must look at reality with different eyes, Margiela seems to suggest, we must live the experience of every day – the real one, in contact with our most prosaic and predictable surroundings – with a renewed attitude, capable of massaging, of soliciting, of provoking more vivid sensations than the monotony of habits and conventions. In doing so, the Belgian designer allows us to enter a creative field full of existential references, not least with the unmade beds, still warm with warmth, that appeared in giant posters on the streets of New York by Félix González-Torres. A simple, banal bed to be fixed like there are millions of others, one might say, except that on the whiteness of those same sheets the contours of a dramatic loss are consumed, of a love that ended in a hopeless tragedy: the bed in the photos is the cradle where the artist slept with his partner Ross, who died of AIDS. The “deep sleep” so well investigated by Yoshimoto in her book of the same name is therefore not a simple moment of refreshment, in this light it takes on the thrust of a much more incisive awareness, a reagent against the patina of habits, even at the cost of exposing, see González-Torres, one's own torments and fragilities.

Tracey Emin also shows us a paradigmatic example of this in “My bed”, with all the object traces of a real life witnessed by used tissues, cigarette butts and dirty laundry, in an installation without play and without irony. The story is very different for Viktor&Rolf. In 2005, in “Bedtime Story” the acrobatic Dutch stylists created a collection entirely dedicated to the bedroom, but with their typical tones of exaggeration and playfulness, that is to say with a triumph of garments where stereotypes become ironic and surreal games: the “out of bed” style is rendered literally, with the models on the catwalk adorned with cushions and duvets. Associate professor, he teaches Contemporary Styles and Arts, Forms of Contemporary Fashion and Contemporary Fashion at the University of Bologna. Her most recent essay is “The Voice of the Devil. Contemporary Art and Fashion” (Einaudi): a reflection on the history of art from the end of the eighteenth century to the 2000s that uses the acrobatic evolutions of the wardrobe between technology and sexual revolution as a compass and metronome.