by Jerome du Bois
It's not 'cause they wouldn't,
It's not 'cause they shouldn't,
And, Lord knows, it's not 'cause they couldn't,
It's simply because . . . -- Cole Porter, 1927, adapted
One short newspaper feature reveals two priveleged people -- Dennita Sewell, Fashion Curator at the Phoenix Art Museum, and Richard Nilsen, Feature Writer for the Arizona Republic -- short-selling their coveted positions, and shirking their public responsibilities, to display work lazy, shoddy, fossilized. Fittingly, the subject of their convergence -- Natacha Rambova / Winifred Shaughnessey, a Twenties pseudo-fashion designer -- turns out to be a second-rater, too. I've divided what follows into three sections: Richard, Dennita, and Winifred, and in that last section I'll show you what a decent review of that exhibition reads and looks like.
Before the jump, though, a few words about that word coveted. What writer wouldn't cherish a 600-word window on an audience a half-million strong every week or so? Answer: Richard Nilsen. It's obvious he's burnt out and hates his job; he's flaunting his laziness. If it was me, I would make every assignment count, even after ten years. Hell, I'm doing it now, for no compensation, crafting my sentences over days. Nilsen? He rattles off limp and tired phrases, contemptuously spitting on the notion that it's a privelege to address the public. Especially a captive public in a one-newspaper town. All the more reason to do your best. Richard, if you're tired of writing, don't waste our time anymore. Quit, go up to Roden Crater and take pottery classes from James Turrell. (You could groom each other's beards.) We'll handle the art reviews.
What museum curator, given Sewell's venue, wouldn't plunge into their best, most adventurous work every time? Not Dennita. (Her last show was about motorcycle jackets: built-in new-cachet donations, but not much else.) For this show, she looked in the closet, saw nine dresses with something in common, and cobbled this wobbly thing together as a checkmark on her resumé, when it was obvious this show was weak in every way except pathethic celebrity worship of a pathetic, ossified ex-celebrity. (She's also the one who brought Rudi's topless model to town last year, forty years on.)
Phoenix deserves better work from these two, or better than these two.
Richard Nilsen Yawns In Your Face
While fashion runways worldwide swirl with color and drama during this International Fall Fashion Season 2004, Richard Nilsen writes 520 words reviewing Denita Sewell's blankly-titiled "Personality and Style: The Fashion Career of Natacha Rambova," one of the thinnest exhibitions (nine dresses, and it's the largest collection) about one of the shortest careers (three years) of one of the lesser of Twenties Hollywood hangers-on (a pseudonym, no less) -- and he mentions nothing about the dresses themselves -- materials, color, style, fit, historical context, relevance: nothing. I wonder if he even saw the show, since any newswriter can decipher the pure press-release boilerplate in the biography-heavy piece.
He opens, because of her two names, with the hoary cliché, "A rose by any other name . . ." He would rather write about her illegitimacy (and four stepfathers), lesbianism (two mentions), marriages to fancy people, and her supposedly exotic background, from Mormonism to Egyptology. (Her real name was Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy; she was related to a Mormon "apostle.") He calls her, absurdly, "one of the most extraordinary women in America." No, sorry -- the gold-digger story is older, and a lot more ordinary, than America. He tosses in a few non sequiters --
Another stepfather . . . was Edgar deWolfe, brother of the pioneering interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe. (The brother, huh? Waow.)
Nazimova, born Adelaide Leventon, was a great diva of silent film, with a shock of thick black hair and violet eyes.
In 1923, Valentino and Rambova went on a dance tour to advertise Mineralava Beauty Clay.
-- but nothing about the dresses, the subjects of the exhibition. (He does quote Sewell, though: "with brilliant purples and pinks and rich viridian greens.")
About the fashion career -- the tiny arc at the heart of the show -- he writes:
From 1928 to 1931, she worked as a fashion designer in New York, and it is her work from that period that makes up [the exhibition].
Who did she work for? Her own label? What was it called? And why only three years, and why are there so few Rambovas as treasures in fashion collections? Let's back up one paragraph.
Valentino died in 1926. Eight years later, Rambova married Count Alvaro de Urzaiz, a Spanish aristocrat.
Do the math. Winifred was not one to languish alone, as one can see from her biography, of which the bulk of this review consists. (But no fashion information of any kind.) Obviously The Count, bless his pointed little head, subsidized this dilettante.
She reminds me of the penniless, opportunistic Polish Countess in the James Mason spy film "5 Fingers." ("Why did you leave Warsaw, Countess?" "Bombs were falling. I felt I was in the way.") Only with less wit. In the movie, at one point, as the Countess catches a mousy German functionary eyeing her enviously, she withers him: "Herr Moisich, please do not look at me as if you had a source of income other than your salary."
Rambova / Winifred sounds like someone who could identify with this Countess, as well as, say, both Anna Nicole Smith and Nigella Lawson. But not Elsa Schiaparelli, Madeleine Vionnet, Jeanne Lanvin, or Gabrielle Chanel. Which will bring us to Part Two, but first a final thought about Nilsen's job here: he didn't do it. He did not review the show. He depended on his assumption that people just love to read about Hollywoood, no matter how inconsequential. He squandered the opportunity to call Dennita Sewell to task, and to exhort her to do better. Because he doesn't give a damn.
Dennita Sewell Foregrounds Mediocrity
As Curator of Fashion at the Phoenix Art Museum, Dennita Sewell should know full well that her chosen one couldn't touch the hems of the four geniuses above; nor, for example, Jean Patou, Paul Poiret, and Edward Molyneux, all working contemporary with her.
In the wall text, Sewell says that Rambova "disdained" the French influence and went off on her own. It's obvious why: she has no talent; her clothes look like offerings from the Utah State Fair. One need only look around at the techniques, materials, and technologies abundant in Winifred's time to see how she shied from them, and how conservative her designs really were.
Why did Dennita Sewell pick a middling-talent operator whose main glow came from a three-year Hollywood marriage to Rudolph Valentino, and whose so-called fashion career lasted only a smidgeon longer? (Note that Black Friday didn't close her immediately; further evidence of sugar daddy's green.) I speculate three reasons: convenience -- nine dresses in the closet; shallow fascination -- Sewell's own weakness for Hollywood (and identification with a tiny talent); and bureaucracy -- administrative pressure to justify her job. On the latter, she doesn't.
And how does the viewing public benefit from this thin show? We don't, since the show reinforces mediocrity and laziness, and implicitly endorses emotional extortion, the cult of any celebrity (what's next? Bonnie Lee Bakely's wardrobe?) and the exploitation of the dead.
Twice a year, predictable as the equinoxes, the fashion world flashes its peacock tail in a shimmering worldwide wave of exuberance and excess. Since 2000, I haven't seen Dennita Sewell take advantage of this energy. Except for the "Garden of Eden" show, two years ago in the ample Steele Gallery, every exhibition was squoze into the glorified upstairs hallway called the "Fashion Design Gallery."
She's not proactive or creative; she's safely into history and old pop culture flash and working within very limited confines. After the central placement (or, to be pomo, foregrounding) of the "Eden" show and the success in New York of the Jackie and Armani shows, you'd think she would expand her expectations.
For example, she could have been negotiating since last year for just a section of the nontravelling Vivienne Westwood Retrospective at the V & A. Even if she had to fly to London so that we could revel in the creations of this overlooked genius, who shows up both Jackie and Armani as the tweebies they truly be. (PAM even has a couple of incredible Westwoods: the wedding couple from "Eden.") It could have been a coup. People from all over the region, from Houston to Santa Fe to LA, would have flown in.
But no. Two years later, we're back stuck in the dark-burgundy upstairs hallway looking at, basically, nine Mormon dressing gowns which ignored the frenzy, fringe, and flapper-craziness of the Jazz Age. Jeezo, man, I'm talking dirge city here. More on that below.
Dennita Sewell is simply not excited by fashion. Two years ago, Megan Bates, in shade magazine [not online], interviewed her:
Sewell explains her own attraction to fashion design: "All kinds of people really feel a connectiion with fashion design; more so, in my opinion, than some other [kinds of art]. It's a conduit for conversation. Everyone has the experience of wearing clothes and feeling comfortable or uncomfortable, everybody remembers 'What I was wearing when . . .' People can relate to it. They have opinions."
Nothing about psychology, fantasy, personae, pride, dignity, competition, vanity, or status. She's completely emotionally even. And no, I don't remember what I was wearing when Kennedy was assassinated, or all day long on 9/11. (I'll have some speculations on Ms. Sewells' own psychological reasons for picking Rambova in the final section.)
[Idea for exhibition, Dennita: a show of Sloan MacFarland's grandmother's custom-made aprons, "Someone's in the Kitschen with Edna." Available at Passage.]
The Exhibition: Featuring Fall Faux Fashion For Fossilized Fakes
Fact-index.com, which covers a lot of Rambova's life in little space, makes no mention of "fashion designer" in the long list of talents she seemed to exhibit: she was (it says here, and so does Nilsen) a dancer, stage designer, costume designer, art director, playwright, Egyptologist, and antiquarian -- but not specifically a fashion designer. (Some of these dresses do look like costumes -- for someone playing Sarah, or Deborah, or Ruth, in some Utah high school Bible play.)
[About her multi-talents: this was early Hollywood, where everyone was hustling. I remember reading about Anne Rosenthal Ayn Rand proofreading, editing, and writing scripts, designing and mending costumes, standing as an extra, always on the lookout for the opening. . . ]
There's a plain blue sleeveless silk dress with a simple rope belt, like a causal nurse's shift, or Ellie Mae on The Beverly Hillbillies going to the market. No special tailoring, pattern, material interest. It's as plain as a T-shirt. There are two silk velvet jackets, bell-sleeved in 19th-Century Russian-Chinese fashion, with heavy embroidery, almost exactly alike except for the embroidery color (the patterns are identical.) They also sport bizarre turkey-drumstick stuffed sleeves in the forearms, as if designed for Popeye. The dress and jacket combination just next to these jackets had the same sleeves, swollen as if tumorous. The "wine velvet" dinner gown, with gold braid embroidery, illustrated in the newspaper, looks as if worn by some wine-delivering court concubine from DeMille's King of Kings.
Despite what Dennita says above about the colors, they are not brilliant, but somber, and the overwhelming presence of elaborate embroidery simply underscores the pieces' mediocrity.
In fact, the most vibrant piece is a drawing, by her assistant Tatiana, of a flounced gown whose design Catherine is definitely going to adapt in fire-green satin.
This little drawing, with its bouncy flounce and sexy line, contains the only hint that Winifred / Natacha may have been aware of the Jazz Age. Really, for a supposed dancer and Hollywood fun-gal, there's no music and no motion in her work. No fringe, no scarves, no plumes, no loopy-doopy strings of pearls, no pleats, even, and no skirt short enough to flip. Not like this wild thing, for example.
Fantastic, eh? This is the bottom of a flapper dress from 1928, orange, peach, and yellow silk velvet with gold bugle bead dangles along all the edges of these jester's skirts.
I deliberately chose an unknown designer from Natacha's time to point out her lack of imagination.
As a matter of fact, Winifred / Natacha sailed through life, and her fashion fling was a mere blip in a series of easy pickings. Consider: she and the Count moved to the island of Majorca / Mallorca in 1934. The Great Depression? What's that? From thence, I presume, she and the Count made trips back and forth to Egypt, doing the colonial thang, collecting their booty, until the inconvenience of WWII confined them once again to their strategically insignificant island. The Holocaust? What's that? After the war, a few more trips to Egypt, until Nasser's nationalism made things ugly for Westerners there. So back to the island, then Nepal, then retirement and donation and endowment -- and all under Natacha's pseudonym.
This is Dennita's inspiration? If so, it is telling and true for these times of five-minute celebrity (who can afford fifteen anymore?). I speculate that as Ms. Sewell learned more about these dresses and who made them, she felt the tiny thrill of all shallow talents -- that even a few bright moments of inspiration can make up for a lifetime of undulant, indulgent and soporific mundanity, complete with a faded, but intact, halo of glamour.
CODA: There is the thread of a story here, connecting Egypt, glamour, Hollywood, cinema, fascination, and the Western Eye. I have no doubt that Winifred was fascinated by Egypt. She was raised Mormon in Salt Lake City. Mormons, as I well know, are themselves busy as bees with archaeology, genealogy, history, and anthropology; all needed to support the Jesus-in-America caper. Then she's immersed in early Hollywood, itself steeped in historical epics and costume dramas, including Ben-Hur and King of Kings. Perhaps Winifred / Natacha began her own obsession with Egyptology there. It seems to bring almost everyone under its spell.
Here is Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, pp 60-61:
Egypt invented interior décor, civilized living; it made beauty out of social life. The Egyptians were the first aesthetes. An aesthete does not necessarily dress well or collect art works; and aesthete is one who lives by the eye. The Egyptians had "taste." Taste is Apollonian discrimination, judgment, connoisseurship; taste is the visible logic of objects. . . Jewelry, makeup, costume, chairs, tables, cabinets: from the moment Egyptian style was rediscovered by Napoleon's invaders, it has been the rage in Europe and America, influencing fashion, furniture, and tombstones and even producing the Washington Monument.
And here, page 59:
Pharoah, elevated and sublime, contemplated life's panorama. His eye was the sun disk at the apex of the social pyramid. He had point of view, an Apollonian sightline. Egypt invented the magic of image. The mystique of kingship had to be projected over thousands of miles to keep the nation together. Conceptualization and projection: in Egypt is forged the formalistic Apollonian line that will end in modern cinema, master genre of our century.
Anybody out there is welcome to pursue this theme. I just wanted to give some hint at the richness that could be dug out of even this shallow grave.
Posted by Jerome at September 21, 2004 04:14 PM | TrackBack