MARK SIMPSON.com

D&G are cunning bastards. No wonder they are now a World Power.

No other fashion brand better understands the nature of 21st Century desire, where it lives, what it looks like, what it looks good in - and where its taking us in the back of a taxi on Saturday night.

This ad for D&G jewelery, currently airing in heavy rotation on TV and in cinemas across Europe (and causing a barrage of complaints in some), is devilishly clever, on so many different levels - and devilishly disturbing. Like a kinky lover, it toys with your expectations and then, right at the end, when you think you know what it’s about, you slowly realise that yes, it’s kind of about that, but actually it’s much more about something else, something even more salient and unsettling, something in fact beyond sexuality.

And strangely hotter.

And if you prefer to focus on the dark-haired lad(s) pouty, sulky lips :

In the midst of this blinging self-love-fest, I can’t help but quote (no gag reflex) from my own devilisly clever, diabolically prophetic, 2002 essay ‘Meet the metrosexual’:

“The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis - because that’s where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modelling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they’re pretty much everywhere.”‘

I think I should give myself a high-fashion snog.

Oh, I already have.

BearForce1, Holland’s answer to Take That - which in turn was the UK’s answer to the Village People - have landed.

And make the Village People look, like, totally straight. Not to mention well-dressed.

Suddenly millions of straight men realise with horror where their studied furry ‘retrosexual’ ‘real guy’ look came from….

Gran Canaria.

The new England rugby strip, launched for this year’s World Cup, somehow manages to be even tighter than the last, launched just four years ago to massed gasps. Are our lads going to be able to breath in? Are we going to be able to breathe out?

What’s more, it has an added sash/arrow plunging from armpit down to large, firm thigh, as demonstrated by the very lovely young David Strettle, pictured left (snapped dancing on a spotlit podium at Heaven nightclub). Is it just me, or does it seem to shout: ‘If You Wanna Score - Flip Me Over!’?

Apparently the new strip’s ‘asymmetric’ design will confuse opposing players. I could make the obvious joke that they won’t know whether to tackle them or kiss them. But then, why can’t you do both? (I certainly find this a very effective tactic with rugby players myself.) The way things are going it can only be a matter of time before this approach becomes compulsory.

So instead I’ll point out that if there’s any truth to the science of eye-tracking, which suggests that most men like to look at other men’s packets rather lingeringly, our opponents’ main confusion with that ‘dressing to the left’ pendulous arrow will be working out where to actually locate our boys’ tackle.

[See how the meaning of 'rugby shirt' has changed over the years from ‘baggy beer towel’ to ‘gay disco cocktail top’.

By Mark Simpson (Arena Homme Plus, Spring 2007)

The American Dream has turned into a nightmare. Count the shudders and the sweats in reel time: Bush. Iraq . Guantanamo Bay . Global Warming. Iran . Tom Cruise. Pop a Nytol or three with a glass of warm milk and put on ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and regress to a happier, more Technicolor dreamtime.

Once the lean, shining beacon of freedom and aspiration, as innocent and happy-go-lucky as Dorothy’s freckles, now lumbering, flak-jacketed, trigger-happy, and yet terrifyingly impotent, America is deeply unpopular. After the twister of the War on Terror the Statue of Liberty has been replaced by an effigy of the Wicked Witch of the West.

America’s triumph in the Cold War and the rapid globalisation/Americanisation that followed has, with irresistible hubris, undone the American Imperium. Everyone is American now so no one needs America any more - so Yankee Go Home. Russian President Putin’s widely-reported recent speech attacking the US ’s arrogance encapsulated this sentiment: ‘the United States ,’ he said, ‘has overstepped its borders in every way.’

All this is as obvious and objectionable as America ’s obesity problem. Except for one small detail: It isn’t true.

Or at least, it’s only half the story. For all it’s troubles, the American Dream is anything but dead. Much of the world may say it hates America now, but really its heart still belongs to Uncle Sam - it will still pay top dollar to dress up in the lineaments/linenments of the American Dream - as the global triumph of classy Yankee dream-merchants Ralph Lauren shows, this Spring opening up not one but two major new stores in Moscow itself (and perhaps providing the real reason for Putin’s outburst).

Meanwhile, as part of the Yankee rag-trade pincer-operation on the global psyche, Abercrombie & Fitch, purveyors of the frattish American Wet Dream is building its own overseas Empire, opening its first international flagship store in Europe - on Saville Row, London, home of the bespoke tailor, the place where the British Establishment has gone for hundreds of years to have its inside leg measured. To rub our noses in it, A&F have erected huge billboards of towering god-like Yankee models flaunting their abs and pecs at dumpy London pedestrians shuffling past at crotch level.

At a couple of fashionable strokes, American cultural imperialism has knocked down the Berlin Wall again and humiliated the British Empire Suez-style. Not bad for something as dead as a Norwegian Blue. Hollywood may be in terminal decline, and this year’s Oscar Ceremony a glorified AA meeting, but American men’s fashion brands are still exporting the American way of life, liberty and snappiness.

Perhaps that’s because Ralph Lauren is the real Hollywood , or rather its merchandising wing. Born Ralph Lifshitz in 1939 in the Bronx this Jewish boy modelled his clothes on the black and WASP grainy High Summer Hollywood of his childhood: Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Gary Cooper - as is often the case in the world of images, his faux moneyed Yankee style supplanted the ‘real’ thing. Transformed from privilege into a polo shirt or a cable-knit jumper it was more democratic, more ‘American’. More saleable.

Memorably described by one fashion critic as ‘a white elephant covered in cricket bats’, Ralph Lauren wore the 1980s tied over its shoulders like a cashmere tennis sweater. RL’s cool, leisured classiness symbolised aspiration in the most sweatily ambitious and nakedly American decade. Ralph Lauren rapidly became the world’s first and most successful lifestyle fashion brand, a total, wraparound vision that everyone wanted to share. The Polo logo became the more tasteful, more international version of a Stars and Stripes lapel pin (in 1999 RL formalised its status by donating $13M to preserve the Star Spangled Banner). Today RL have sales of nearly $4B, making it a behemoth covered in cricket bats. RL’s flagship store in Moscow ’s Tretyakovsky Passage, one of world’s most expensive shopping areas, will paint 8000 square feet of Mother Russia a Yankee shade of red white and blue. No wonder Putin is pissed off.

Mind, the Russians don’t seem to be as upset as the Brits, whose outraged protests forced A&F to reduce slightly the size of the body parts terrorising Saville Row. But this all seems to be part of the naughty A&F gameplan. ‘We’re shaking up the neighbourhood,’ a chirpy spokesperson explained to the press. ‘It’s going to be an extension of the irreverence of the brand into London . It’s going to be fun and we’re thrilled.’ What’s more, the store will be ‘just like our one’s in the US ‘ and the staff will be British ‘but look A&F.’

In fact, A&F are re-enacting in England itself a battle against dusty ‘Englishness’ that they have already won Stateside. Ironically, A&F was once almost the brand that RL sold itself as. Founded in 1892 as an excursion outfitter their clients included Katherine Hepburn and Ernest Hemingway. Elephant-bagging American Empire builder Teddy Roosevelt was one of their regulars.

After the 60s A&F went into decline - it was seen as ‘too square’ and ‘too English’ - and in 1988 were bought by The Limited Inc. who sexed it up, moved its target age down, and wrapped it n a mythical, all-American, 1950s, tanned, athletic boyishness as toothily innocent as it was knowingly tarty; in other words: ‘Weberist’ (Bruce Weber is A&F’s signature photographer). If RL is timeless High Summer Hollywood, A&F is endless Summer on Campus - plus MTV and webcams. RL is the America the world wants to go on safari with: A&F is the America that the world wants to party with.

With sales over $2B a year the A&F lifestyle has sustained unrivalled year-on-year levels of growth. A&F is catching up with RL. As if acknowledging this, RL recently opened a slightly A&F flavoured ‘Rugby’ chain of stores in the US . What’s more, the move into Europe is part of the transformation of A&F into an international luxury brand - once again threatening to tread on RL’s loafers.

For now though there’s plenty of room for both brands on the yellowbrick road of the Global High Street. Whatever they may think of America ’s actions, Dowdy Anti-Americanism isn’t, in the final reel, something that the world’s huddled masses actually want to wear. London will no doubt be a great, chest shaving, success for new Yankee imperialists A&F.

But one that will be dwarfed, I’m sure, by the shrieking, fainting, hair-pulling success of any store they open in that supposed capital of America-hating - Paris.
© Mark Simpson 2007

Dolce & Gabbana and the New World Order

by Mark Simpson (Arena Homme Plus, Winter 2006)
If you think that Italy won this year’s Football World Cup, think again. In actual, historical fact, this year’s World Cup was won by Dolce & Gabbana, the Milan-based, city-state fashion brand run by two rags-to-rag-rich prince(sse)s, that seems increasingly unassailable, particularly in the world of men’s style. Which increasingly means in the world of men.

In a post-metrosexual era in which masculinity has been well-and-truly aestheticized, and men all over the world have become more Italian, it’s entirely right and proper that Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana should be, in effect, designing masculinity by decree for the 21st Century. The Italian team’s sensually shiny yet coolly elegant blue suits and shirts – and the spornographic ad campaign for D&G underwear, featuring team-members hanging around the showers in spectacular briefs, oiled up and waiting for our attention – shows D&G’s total mastery of the new masculine universe.

To spell it out: the Italian team won the World Cup because, thanks to D&G, the world, male and female, would much rather celebrate in their changing rooms than with those of the rather dowdy, rather plain French team. D&G understand better than anyone the modern male desire to be desired in a world where desirability increasingly means victory – and rather liking what you see in the mirror.

This is, after all, why the city state of fashion D&G has become a World Power (they even have their own Navy – at least in their recent advertising campaign.) As Domenico and Stefano gushed in their forward to a delicious photo book of the Italian stallions published before the World Cup: ‘Really good and all handsome. Handsome, really handsome… We love Italy… long and narrow, warm and sensual come rain or shine, the Italy that has faith it itself and never gives up. Quite rightly envied and rich in art, because taught to appreciate beauty,, having grown up surrounded by beauty.’ Replace ‘Italy’ with ‘Dolce & Gabbana’ and you have the truth. The seamster boys have staged an aesthetic coup d’etat, effectively absorbing ‘Italy’ herself into their own brand; their March on Rome more of a sashay than an assault, but no less effective for that. [Arguably, given that Dolce is from Sicily and the romantic styles of that island carried through to the brand, they also represent the first serious union of North and South since the time of Il Duce.

And of course they know it. It’s not just a vain fashion boast that their Men’s Autumn Collection is called The New Power and, with it’s almost Austro Hungarian (i.e. Milanese) motifs, appears to announce the foundation of an empire. Or perhaps merely the acknowledgement of it. After 20 years in business, they have more than 100 boutiques worldwide and over 2000 employees, wholesale revenues of over $1B (the company is soley owned by the two designer princelings), and have just bought a large cinema in Milan to showcase their collections; a D&G Colliseum (Milan was also once the capital of the Western Roman Empire). Little wonder that Hollywood can’t get enough of D&G (who are in many ways the new Hollywood). Hip Hop and RnB keep name-checking them (e.g. Black Eyed Peas and 50 Cent), and David Beckham imitates them (see his new ‘Intimate’ fragrance ). Meanwhile the casual-yet-noble, slutty-yet-stylish, approachable-yet-mythical, naked-yet-dressed (those astonishing shiny suits are fully-dressed nudity) approach of D&G looks more and more like the ideology of a mediated, pornolized age.

But then, D&G began their fiendish work back in the 1980s, the decade which laid the foundations of metrosexuality, beginning the transformation of masculinity into an appetising commodity. Perhaps this is why their Men’s Summer 2007 Collection is replete with Chariots of Fire, Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber references – as well as more oiled athletic limbs and lip-glossed suits.

The future foretold has finally arrived, guys. And it’s D&G.
© Mark Simpson 2006

In the Seventies advertising was doing its best to swallow Western manhood whole, but it just wasn’t up to the job.  It couldn’t quite suppress its gag reflex.  Or ours.  Men’s advertising was almost universally a joke and an hilariously camp one at that that. 

It wasn’t until some way into the Eighties, the decade in which advertising became sexier than sex, and with the arrival of slick, slutty allies in the form of men’s fashion magazines - the poppers of men’s marketing - that it really began to get the hang of deep-throating masculinity without even blinking, turning it into the shiny, hard-cash, quiveringly serious commodity it is today.  The rampant Nineties and Noughties metrosexual was fluffed by the Eighties.

Richard Jarman’s just-published ‘Smooth Operator’ (New Holland), a light-hearted, hilariously illustrated and captioned bijou book-ette anatomises that almost-innocent period from the Seventies and into the early Eighties when suited admen were doing their manful best, but were really only barely managing to get the bell-end in before dissolving into splutters and traumatic public-school flashbacks.  

The kind of man they were selling and slicking back then was of course as ’smooth’ as their own man-swallowing action was dodgy and toothy.  He was, in other words, utterly absurd, but rather likeable for that:

‘Smooth Operator celebrates that distinctly ’70s and ’80s breed of man - the Hai Karate-wearing, lounge-suit-sporting, big-hair-boasting hunk.  Modern man can only aspire to the God-like status of these Smooth Operators, photographed here in their natural habitat of cool bars, poolside loungers and, er, knitwear catalogues’

Or, as he puts it elsewhere, the Smooth Operator is ‘the metrosexual’s grandad’.  Jarman himself is closely related to the subject: ‘I would like to thank my father and his man-clogs and fuzzy perm for the inspiration for this book,’ he writes.  The ‘Smooth Operator’, like Jarman’s dad, was a ‘ladies’ man’ - or at least, he would have been if ladies were actually putting out in the 1970s without first being promised, as a minimum, a finger-buffet reception, two weeks in a high-rise in Magaluf and a lifetime’s bickering in a semi-detached in Macclesfield. 

Unlike the metrosexual, the Smooth Operator hadn’t discovered Wilde’s maxim that loving oneself could be the start of a lifelong romance - one uninterrupted by in-laws or kids or in fact anyone else, save your stylist.  The Smooth Operator though wasn’t really capable of loving himself.  I mean, could you love matching coloured vests and Y-fronts?  The Smooth Operator, like much of ’men’s’ advertising itself back then, was much more interested in selling himself to women.  Or at least appealing to their sympathy.  The Smooth Operator was as likeable as the metrosexual is attractive - or as unattractive as the metrosexual is unlikeable. 

Which reminds me: I should warn that some people, especially those of a sensitive or aesthetic disposition, will find some of the images collected in Jarman’s book very disturbing indeed.  Weeks of retail therapy and a year’s subscription to Arena Hommes Plus may be required after viewing them. 

Here’s a selection of some of the less shocking ‘Smooth Operator’ images and Jarman captions [and Simpson comments:

 

‘The problem with Y-fronts, and their matching vests and T-shirts, was that they led many a smooth operator to leave the house half-dressed to stand about in gangs on sand dunes looking cool.’  

[If you look closely you'll notice that all three models are wearing the same cleft chin.  Big chins were very important in Seventies advertising - big packets less so....

The new blond Bond has a surprising amount in common with the brunette original – precisely for the reasons he’s been bashed, says Mark Simpson

(Out magazine, November, 2006)

BOND IS BLOND! He’s smooth! He works out! He doesn’t have any eyebrows! He kissed a guy!

Ever since English actor Daniel Craig was cast last year as the U.K.’s most famous spy—and the face of the world’s most successful, longest-running blockbuster brand—the British popular press and Bond fanboys have been up in arms, shrieking about his unsuitability for the role.

They complain about all sorts of supposed failings, including that he required coaching to handle a gun and play poker, and that he snogged another male on film (as Francis Bacon’s lover in Love Is the Devil and also in Infamous). Apparently, you see, he’s “not manly enough� to play cinema’s most famous action hero. Essentially, they’ve got their off-white tighty whities in a twist because Bond has gone metrosexual.

However, there is something that needs to be pointed out here, like the pleasing bulge of a Walther PKK semiautomatic in a Savile Row trouser pocket: The early Bond movies were thrillingly perverse, shockingly sexy, and not a little queer. This will traumatize millions, but the original James Bond, by the dingy, stringy-vested, “no sex please it’s bath night� standards of early 1960s Britain was something of a metrosexual, albeit a latent one (he’s a secret agent, after all).

Watching again the very first Bond film, Dr. No—released 44 years ago and played a zillion times on TV and cable but nevertheless something of a revelation—I’m struck by a number of things about the original Mr. Bond, supposedly the gold standard of authentic masculinity and virility in an increasingly sissified world:

(1) His fake tan
(2) His full, glossy, pink lips, much more luscious than Ursula Andress’s (or even Tom’s in the Missy Impossible franchise)
(3) His worked-out body (Connery represented Scotland in the Mr. Universe contest in 1953.)
(4) His fine tailoring, careful grooming, and manicured hands
(5) His fetish for gadgets and gizmos
(6) His taste for fussy cocktails (shaken, not stirred)
(7) His wigs (Connery went bald in his early 20s.)
(8) His overacting in the famous big-hairy-spider-in-bed scene….

Read the article in full here:

Decadence in the dole queue

by Mark Simpson

First appeared in the Independent on Sunday, May 5, 2002
Thanks largely to a new crowd-pleasing musical, the crowd-panicking Mr Bowery’s name is forever linked in the public mind with Taboo, the fin-de-siecle drugs, sex, and dressing-up club in Leicester Square he captained in the 1980s, the decade in which the 20th century and possibly Western civilisation actually ended. I, however, will always associate him with a club called The Asylum, Heaven’s “alternative” night, where I often used to glimpse - in teenage terror - his enormous, corseted frame gliding and fluttering past like a hand-sewn battleship, Copydex-spattered head glowing under the UV light, lime-green nylon ruffs bouncing, black- lipsticked mouth pouting.

You see, just like most of the people who now claim they were there every week, I never went to Taboo. This was partly because I knew I’d get turned away as I didn’t wear astro-turf or cellophane, and partly because I knew that there was nothing I’d want to pull there. But mostly because I was scared. Like the majority of the punters at The Asylum, I was doing my best to look alternative and individual, but not at the cost of looking unshaggable. Like Mark Lamarr and Mark Kermode, I tried, vainly, to say it with a quiff.

One of the fascinating, frightening things about Mr Bowery on the other hand - in addition to the fact that you could fit three or four Matt Lucases inside him - was that he quite clearly didn’t give a f***. He was going to make you look at him and he didn’t care if the looks he got were admiring or just appalled. It simply wasn’t your call - he would take your looks how he wanted. Unlike most of us who hung around that nightclub back then thinking ourselves the bee’s knees, he really was, but he didn’t seem to be interested in what kept the customer satisfied - something which made his famous week’s “residence” in a Tokyo department store window in 1988 even funnier.

The 1980s, you may remember, was the decade of the High Street when we were constantly being told by our prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, that there was “no alternative” - although, confusingly, every club had an “alternative” night. Nowadays of course “alternative” is just a TV/TS internet chatroom, and whatever post- punk aesthetic energies it represented have been assimilated by fashion and magazine culture - but back then it could stand for a sincere and reckless rejection of normality and mainstream values, or at least a kind of decadence on the dole.

Bowery was one of the last and the most gorgeously talented decadents.

Leigh Bowery was born in 1961 in a town in Australia called Sunshine. (No, really, it’s actually called that.) After leaving school he studied Fashion Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology for a year. He then ran away to London where he became part of the Blitz scene and, inevitably, appeared in David Bowie’s kooky “Ashes to Ashes” video. Unlike many of the other “alternative” weirdos he appeared alongside, however, this was not the apogee of his career. He was the subject of his own 30- minute documentary in 1985, worked with Michael Clark at the height of his powers and posed for Lucian Freud. He also pursued a performance art career that should have drawn a line under performance art, famously “giving birth” with lashings of offal, or having an enema on stage and spraying lucky audience members with the results.

However, as these astonishing pictures taken by the photographer Fergus Green between 1988 and 1994, the year of Bowery’s early but perhaps timely death, testify, this Australian bugger was witty and playful in a way which you had forgotten could be so intense, sharp and alarming. Since the 1980s “wittiness” and “playfulness” have been employed to sell all sorts of banal and toothless things to us… including rubbish musicals about the 1980s. Bowery was more than performance art - some of his best work is better than much of contemporary art. He managed to combine conceptual art with a sense of humour (something that most “real” conceptual art, with more than one eye on the collector’s chequebook, cannot afford). His work was also truly and vividly ephemeral in a way that conceptual art these days increasingly goes out of its way merely to simulate. Oddly, for all its alleged unpopularity and difficulty, modern art is sitting behind the department store window - but without the irony.

Bowery employs surreal spotted patterns and bizarre sartorial geometry, such as lacey spherical ruffs where his head should be, and asymetrical clothing to break up the shape, form and outline of what we take to be human, rendering the familiar unfamiliar again - forcing you to realise how little you know the human body, and perhaps how little you want to. There’s a genuine queerness to these pictures, in the meaning of the word which obtained before the 1990s spoilt it. Bowery was an original “in-betweeny” - awkwardly positioning himself between fibre and skin, convention and improvisation, art and craft, male and female, humanity and commodity.

He even turns his own ample flesh into a kind of fabric, marshalling it with corsets and leggings that leave you wondering what’s surface and what’s structure, what’s inside and what’s out. As you might expect in a lad who liked dressing up, there’s more than a hint of a parody of monstrous femininity in his work: fake vaginas appear regularly. But with those pouting lips (on his face) it feels as if “sexiness” is being parodied more than femininity - his creations often resemble Dali doodling his ideal inflatable doll.

Looking, sometimes between your fingers, at these terrifyingly, exhilaratingly bold, ballsy images, in a culture which is now completely aestheticised and lip-glossed to death, you’re reminded with a jolt of when aestheticism was still a rebellious, satirical strategy. Gratifyingly, Bowery was never a “success”; he never launched his own label or got his own chat show. His death from Aids in 1994 saved him from that at least.

As these pictures testify, Leigh the Anti-Graham Norton prophesised, embodied and savagely deconstructed celebrity culture all in one outfit. In a particularly piquant photo, his head, styled charmingly as a turd, emerges blinking from a toilet seat around his neck.

Since his death, of course, celebrity culture has backed up and overflowed everywhere, forcing us to wade through shits much less talented than Mr Bowery.

 

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

Tailor to the desert stars: a tribute to Nudie

Mark Simpson

(Originally published on SHOWstudio.com, 2002)

Oscar Wilde famously donned cowboy duds for the Western leg of his tour of the US in 1882, after discovering that his usual dandy garb didn’t go down quite so well in the hard-bitten cattle and gold-rush towns as it had in the metropolitan East.

Unfortunately for Oscar, Nudie wasn’t around back then to run him up some of his inimitable, peerless, altogether aristocratic Western-style clothing.

Granted, couturing our Oscar in the manner that he did Hank Williams, Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley might have cost Nudie a few score more rhinestones and a few miles more gold thread, but it would have presented no technical problem for him: after all, he also styled Cadillacs. And if Oscar had been given the Nudie makeover, he might have had a few more Chart successes - and a better calibre of groupie than Stephen Fry.

Nudie was a late Twentieth Century not late Nineteenth Century phenomenon, but clearly there is a line of dreamy, romantic aestheticism which runs like a snagged glittery thread between them. It may have been Oscar Wilde who prefigured glam rock and David Bowie who personified it - but it was indubitably Nudie Cohen, the Jewish tailor émigré from Kiev, Russia, who stitched,seamed and patterned it. Whether or not, as legend has it, he was actually the first person to sew the rhinestone onto cloth, is somewhat beside the point.

Not only do his mesmerising creations alchemise rhinestones into rubies and diamonds, making the notion of rhinestones as clothing his own, the other-worldly-yet-worldly nature of the workwear-turned-playwear clothes, hats and boots he made for Country and Western Stars created a look which became the template of working class/hillbilly aspirationalism - the Cowboy Dandy, aka the Desert Knight, later known as the Rock Star: perhaps the most romantic and enduring figure of the Twentieth Century.

Nudie Cohen took the denim-clad mythology of a Nineteenth Century West which was already receding into nostalgia and immortalised it, literally turned it into gold, embroidering that dream into a walking mirage of down-home gorgeousness, laidback sumptuousness. The ‘tastelessness’ of Nudie’s creations is exquisite - like great rock and roll it transcends taste; its bravura is the source of both its virility and androgyny. Perhaps as a reminder that in the Old West ladies were few and far between - and somewhat costly - the Nudie-wearing dandy cowboy appropriates female glamour to himself: a peacock display that seems to be less of a mating call than an explosion of self-sufficient narcissism.
 
Perhaps this is also why in Nudie, virility turns into fecundity: the desert after rain: impossibly bright and vital flowers, grass and spiders‚ webs heavy with dew, stars glistening promisingly, gazing down benignly - all underscored by the bittersweet, happy-sad sentimentality which is the melancholic heart of Country and Western. This is the romance within the romance of the cowboy: instead of Wilde’s gutter, the real cowboy lies in the dirt, head on his stinking, steaming saddle, bathed in the rapidly chilling sweat of the day’s ride, looking up at the stars and dreaming of a better life. Or maybe just a better shirt.

And perhaps this dream-like quality is why Nudie’s extraordinary cars reference not so much the horses of cowboys, as knights‚ chargers, or fantasy Spanish Galleons (the West, of course, was Spanish before it was American).

That $10,000 gold lame suit Nudie wove for Colonel Tom Parker’s golden boy, Elvis Rockin’ Hillbilly Presley in 1957 was to become the ultimate fetish and relic of rock and roll, its Holy Grail and Turin Shroud woven into one. Over on this side of the Atlantic, its influence can still be felt, effectively defining the Seventies, coveted and referenced in their own stage apparel and gestures by Marc Bolan, Bowie, Bryan Ferry, and early (pre-Disney) Elton John.

In the Eighties and Nineties, reflections of it could be detected in the gold lame shirts of glam rock devotee and Elvis fan Morrissey, England’s last great rock/pop star, and considered by some to be Oscar Wilde, the deceased leader of the Aesthetic Movement reincarnated - albeit in a rather more ‘aesthetic’ body.

The legacy of Nudie is by no means secure, however. Fake downward mobility is now the order of the day, even ‘Nudie Jeans’, a brand which claims to be a ‘homage’ to the great Nudie Cohen, looks like the antithesis of Mr Cohen’s aspirational romance. Their products are certainly more affordable, but democratisation has translated yet again into blandness and uniformity. Instead of emphasising the gap between dream and reality and affirming the dream, the Vegas glitter, we have the tedious fetishising/accessorising of ‘authenticity’. Hiphop without the Tiffany jewellery.

The gutter without the stars.

 
© Mark Simpson 2006

 

Nudie Cohn 1902-1984

Helen ‘Bobbie Nudie’ Cohn (wife and creative partner) 1913-2006 

Click here for the family website

 

 

Rather fabulous 2004 book on Nudie by the rather lovely Mary Lynn Cabrall