When a Lovely Flame Dies
“He did attempt to test every person in terms of their capacity for love.” Irm Hermann
The body as altar, cocoon, sepulchre, incorrigible boundary. "'Silhouette' as we've known it, as something imposed by fashion, is finished. The only silhouette for 1971 is the body." Giorgio di Sant’Angelo had been draping, knotting and tying fabric to the body in search of liberation, a talent unleashed initially on a series of photoshoots with Franco Rubartelli for Vogue in 1968, where he transformed Veruschka with yards of moiré velvet, razored silk, gold braid, and raw stones. His approach was intimate and his rapport with the body a sensual contrast to the boxy, androgynous space-age fashion dominating the late 1960s. He brought no actual clothing, instead in the heat of the Painted Desert in Arizona he swaddled the German model in mink-lined cream jersey and criss-crossed strips of chocolate leather around her torso and legs, bounding her into an adult papoose. She fainted.
Sant’Angelo could translate these freeform experiments into garments that were if not more commercially viable then certainly more readily wearable, like a pair of cherry red spandex trousers and matching bra with detachable ties that can be customized to create soft tumours of undulating jersey. He wrapped, hugged, and caressed his way into the wardrobes of Cher, Bianca (and Mick) Jagger, and Isabella Rossellini, amongst countless fashion industry adherents, all enamoured with his insistence on the body and its path towards deliverance. Drawing from traditional Inca, Navajo, and Roma dress, he created Tamara Dobson’s wardrobe for the 1973 Blacksploitation classic Cleopatra Jones; further appropriative cherry-picking rendered a series of Klimt-inspired kaleidoscopic gowns pieced together with found fabric scraps and edged in silver and gold, each version a unique pastiche. As curator Harold Koda said in 2002 “His clothing raised the idea that getting dressed is a social act but doesn't have to a be conforming one.”
While his reputation for revolutionary clothing was building, his somewhat mercurial temper was darkening the frame; Women’s Wear Daily editor Bobbi Queen noted “One bad review and he would brutalize whoever wrote it.” As the post-hippie bricolage look Sant’Angelo championed transitioned into the glamorous, sexually liberated mid 1970s he was ready with plunging surplice bodysuits and pareos; this however gave way to the conservative 1980s and he floundered. A series of disastrous licensing deals and attempts at corporate dressing nearly destroyed his business and his friendships. "He could get and stay very angry when he felt unappreciated.” Just before his untimely death1 in 1989 his career-starting wrapped and tied jersey pieces, now made ultra body conscious, lean and black, found a new fanbase with Cindy Crawford and Farrah Fawcett. Vogue fashion editor Polly Mellen always knew “his knowledge of and caring for the body was something very different," even if his at times capricious personality obscured his true nature. The crucial aspect is that the wearer gets exactly what she wants.
The sensitive and volatile fashion empresario, surrounded by beauty and wealth that never manages to overcome internal strife is an under-explored if somewhat familiar character. One of the first2 to acknowledge the figure was German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder in his claustrophobic 1972 gem The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Margit Carstensen plays the titular Petra, a successful yet temperamental and abusive Bremen-based designer, whose public profile continues its ascendance as her own private life fractures. Based on an earlier stage production, the entire film is contained to Petra’s bedroom and adjoining open studio, with all too brief shots of the nearby stairway and presumed exit beyond, foreboding as eventually all but Petra will make their escape. Lacking significant mise-en-scène changes the film relies on Maja Lemcke’s startling and imposing costumes3 to highlight mood and tension as Petra’s interior desires are drawn out and smashed.
Timorous assistant Marlene opens the film by spilling light onto a late-sleeping Petra, her face clammy and slick, before departing to retrieve fresh orange juice as the designer calls her mother. After lying and then placating her mother with money she ends the call and spins Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, The Platters' 1956 enchanting hit on her turntable as she dresses in the asymmetric, fringed, and fur-trimmed gown thrown over the bed frame presumably the night before. Donning her first of many wigs, Petra pulls a returned Marlene into a brief but tender dance before regaining her compose and ordering the assistant to return to her design duties, a brutal push-and-pull that comes to define their private interactions. A letter from prestigious German department store Karstadt arrives. They want her.
Society friend Sidonie joins, just in from Frankfurt and the two women share coffee and sisterly relationship advice, the anachronistic and demure Sidonie insisting that her humility has saved her marriage; contrasting with the acidic bile rising in Petra’s throat as she recalls her last husband Frank, his boorish and abusive behaviour. The two woman writhe in bed together, almost flirtatious and coy as they argue the finer points of domination and this allows the frisson in their respective outfits full relief. As Petra rests her head on her confidante’s back the dingy acrylic fur of her collar, and glitter accents appear gaudy and confused against Sidonie’s tasteful mushroom-hued separates and silky fox stole. No matter the resolution, just as Petra admits that “people are made to need each other” the doorbell signals the arrival of cherub-faced Karin, downy feathers encircling her neck as horizontal blinds cast femme fatale shadows across her face. What does Petra want?
Love as an idol. Against a backdrop of Midas and Bacchus painted by Nicolas Poussin, Karin returns the next evening primed for seduction, draped in a taupe jersey gown accented with burnished sequin bra appliqué; her neck and arm bound with hard gold, her body soon to be further calcified by Petra’s touch. Seeing her opportunity, the designer attempts to convince Karin on the virtues of humility, spurred no doubt by Sidonie’s earlier admissions which she scoffed at. “I believe you have to have humility to be able to bear what you know.” Then her chance to strike. “Do you think you'd enjoy working as a model?” questions Petra, as she offers to train the impressionable, somewhat dim young woman in the art of the runway, while supporting her financially of course. Love as control.
If Karin’s body is a statue, soon to be solidified in gold, Petra’s is a snake uncoiling: encased in a gemmed bustier with glittering pupils, dripping pearls as fangs and a blood red crystal teardrop the flickering tongue of her grotesque, distorted visage. Referencing the jewelled bras worn by exotic dancers and courtesans like Mata Hari4 at the end of the 19th-century and into the 20th, as Orientalism continued to grip Parisian theatre productions, Petra’s attempt at exotic magnetism is successful even if in her response Karin remains slightly reserved and cold. “I like you too, Petra. Very much. But give me time. Please.”
The embroidered trim holding Petra’s bustier in place loops and spirals around her torso and legs, tying the smokey blue tulle skirt to her frame in a not dissimilar way to the work of Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, yet while his ideology was emancipatory, engendering freedom, Petra is bound.5 Taken as a whole, the outfit is irreconcilable with itself, the come-hither top, begging for relief, and the constricting skirt with pentimento roses, forcing the designer into a submissive clipped step. As we learn throughout the film, the real creative work seems to come from Marlene, permanently enrobed in black lace, sketching and draping in the background. Perhaps desperate to sabotage Petra’s ability to advance on another woman she has attempted to sartorially restrict her. “People are hard and brutal. Everyone is replaceable.”
Months pass and in the harsh light of day tensions arise as Karin, now all too comfortable with her role as Petra’s inamorata, has taken the upper hand via faux humility before assuming command of the situation, and control of her adoring benefactor. Petra is dressed in a soft pink tiered dress, with black-and-white vertical inset floral panels - again calling to mind a distraught version of a Sant’Angelo patchworked dress, but faded, brittle, and ready to disintegrate, much like Petra herself - and she self-regulates by lashing out at Marlene. As Karin slowly teases out her infidelity to torture, Petra begs for it to end, a lone glossy crystalline tear suspended on her cheek. “Please. Lie to me.” A rave review for the designer, accompanied by a star-making portrait of Karin, appears in the paper and just as it began, the façade ends, with Petra bound. Karin will return to her husband, and eventually go on to model for Emilio Pucci, richer for the experience.
Petra celebrates her birthday, despondent in a blonde wig and deep teal gown, her bust encircled with dense ruffles, and a jubilant poppy-red flower corsage at her neck; the bedroom now empty, the furniture vacated, both her and her environs poised for dancing that will never occur. Her mother and daughter join, along with Sidonie, and it’s in this moment, surrounded by “a pack of parasites” that Petra is finally undone, crushing a china tea set underneath her metallic silver heels and whipping cups at her “miserable little whore” of a mother. Never has she appeared more resplendent, more elegant.
“The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is a very important film because the viewer is bound to realize very quickly that it’s a camouflage” said longtime Fassbinder collaborator Harry Baer, claiming that the role of Petra is in fact a glamorous construction of the director himself, and the desperation for Karin a stand-in for his tumultuous relationship with actor Günther Kaufmann. While Baer would claim that silent assistant Marlene was a double for composer Peer Raben, who also had a romantic relationship with Fassbinder, it may actually be the actress who played her, Irm Hermann, that she represents - she was also involved romantically with Fassbinder and for a time shared an apartment with him and Raben. A decade after Fassbinder’s death, Hermann would state that his notoriously harsh directing would “provoke” her “publicly, to the core” and that she “had no choice but to let out a silent scream.”
Fassbinder was emotionally and physically abusive to Hermann (amongst many others) and left a trail of bodies, broken hearts, and destroyed psyches along his career path, before dying via accidental overdose in 1982. That he would imagine himself an alluring and powerful designer, both maudlin and intensely cruel, is a beautiful admission, the sadism of fashion laid bare. At the mid-point in the film while his surrogate is still hungry, thriving, luring Karin in, Petra shocks open the umbered velvet drapes and gazes upon nothing, the black night of Bremen enclosing around both woman. “Someone once said beautiful things don't last long. And, you know, there's some truth in that.”
Widely reported as lung cancer, Sant’Angelo actually passed from AIDS-related complications. Perhaps he also wasn’t as universally quick-to-anger as originally reported either.
Earlier depictions of fashion designers in film like Fashions of 1934 (1934) with Bette Davis focus more on the drama of fashion thievery. Designing Women (1957) with Lauren Bacall finds plot in the explosive marriage between Bacall and Gregory Peck and the former’s mob connections. In 1975 Diana Ross would play Tracy Chambers in Mahogany, an upstart designer who eventually loses patience with her employees, undone by the immense pressure, she remains sympathetic.
They would inspire Prada’s Fall-Winter 2014 women’s collection and Roksanda’s Fall-Winter 2015 collection.
Mata Hari, and her faux-Javanese princess act, was one of many to don the jewelled breastplate. Lillie Langtry wore one playing Cleopatra in several stage productions in the 1890s. Additionally worn by La Belle Otéro at the turn of the century. Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos and various other dancers known as ‘Little Egypt’. Maud Allan dancing topless covered only in strung pearls in The Vision of Salome beginning in 1906, and her ‘imitator’ Gertrude Hoffman amongst others, triggering Salomania. These costumes would be referenced by John Galliano for both his eponymous Fall-Winter 1997 collection, and Dior’s Haute Couture collection for Fall-Winter 1997. The former worn by Milla Jovovich at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.
The hobble skirt became a very brief fashion trend during the early part of the 1910s in Edwardian Britain, as long skirts had continually narrowed as the 19th-century came to a close. Designers like Paul Poiret toyed with ankle length tubular skirts that effectively hobbled the wearer, forcing her to take short steps, and some offered special garters that fastened just below the knee, to bind the legs together and avoid accidental tearing of the fabric. Other designers like Jeanne Paquin added concealed pleating to their versions allowing more range of motion. The trend lasted under 5 years and seems to have been spoken about and mocked in political cartoons and newspaper articles more than actually worn by a significant percentage of the population. After the rise in hemlines in the 1920s, then a drop again to the high-ankle in the 1930s, the hobble skirt returned as the pencil skirt in the 1940s, rechristened and reimagined. For more see - Daniel Milford-Cottam, Edwardian Fashion (Oxford, Shire, 2014)