Anne Hollander

The rise of Laura Ashley seems like the right accompaniment to the rise of contemporary feminism, following her initial vogue in the radical climate of the Sixties. The first move was back to natural fabrics and basic shapes; and then, just as women were trying to get out of the kitchen and down off the pedestal, she moved on to a theatricalised restoration of The Angel in the House, rural version, in all her printed-cotton glory. It was an inspired idea that was bound to succeed, especially when backed up by Laura Ashley’s own desire to live up to the domestic ideal herself while simultaneously reaping the profits of a business.

Gabrielle Chanel is famous for the Little Black Dress, the Chanel Suit and Chanel No 5. The three can effectively sum up the Modern Woman, suggesting female elegance without pretension and feminine allure without musk and whalebone. The Chanel style precludes the traditional forms of guile by which women have been supposed to arouse a man’s desire in order to lay hands on his money, rather than match his lust with their own. Chanel’s celebrated inventions clothe a female creature who is all the more sexually interesting for being nobody’s doll, besides being nobody’s fool. Even further, they suggest an unaggressive sensuality, the deep pleasure of a self-contained bodily ease that demands no sacrifice of decorum nor startling exoticism to be immediately compelling.

The death of Martha Graham on 1 April 1991, a little more than a month before her 97th birthday, finally permitted Agnes DeMille to publish her biography of the dancer, after nearly twenty-five years of work and four years of waiting. It is a measure of DeMille’s reverence for Graham that she should have withheld until after Graham’s death what is by any standards an affectionate and appreciative account of her life and art, rather than risk of fending Graham’s own sense of herself in the slightest degree. DeMille seems to feel that she is approaching something truly sacred in discussing Graham, rather than simply writing the life of a rare artist and an old friend who had become a touchy old woman. She tells us in her preface that Martha had wished to leave a legend, not a biography; and she knows she is transgressing.

The jacket photo for Kafka’s Clothes shows him without any, sitting tailor-fashion on a beach, smiling above naked shoulders and a thin chest, the prominent ears rhyming with prominent bony knees. His swimming trunks are Obscured in shadow. It’s not at all the stiff-collared, well-buttoned Kafka we’re used to, and the one introduced in the interior of this study is also unfamiliar. But he is convincing. Clothes might seem to be among the least of Kafka’s interests, since he is usually taken as a dedicated visionary, struggling only to purify his mode of expression in order to probe more keenly into the most painful matters of life and death and men’s souls, and he is remembered as someone unworldly enough to break off his engagement in order to give himself only to his work. Mark Anderson has nevertheless shown that clothes mattered hugely to him.

Isadora Duncan refused to be filmed while she danced. The most eager prophet of modern bodily movement avoided the great new vessel of the truth a motion – unwilling, it would seem, to do without the audience rapport that was indispensable to her success. Her reluctance went with her noticeably religious attitude toward her own dancing, and toward art in general. She found she rather liked going to the pictures, but the entertaining movie-camera was certainly not the thing to register the sacred communion between Isadora, her muse and her followers. That, rather, was for fellow artists to attempt.