Ecstasy, transfiguration and death of the hyperaesthetic ectomorph

[imomus]

I first developed a fascination with the persona -- not the clothes -- of Yves Saint Laurent (who's died, aged 71) in the mid-1980s, when I was living in Chelsea. I was a poor man in a rich area, but I was ambitious, and curious to know whether people like me -- fine-boned, effete aesthetes, "homosexuals", whatever our actual sexual orientation -- could succeed in capitalism.

One answer to that question lay in Knightsbridge, where the Yves Saint Laurent shop was a kind of shrine to the most effete, most fine-boned, most aesthetic homosexual of them all, YSL himself. A huge black and white photograph of him -- naked but for his trademark spectacles -- loomed over the Rive Gauche boutique. In this 1971 image by Jeanloup Sieff, YSL seemed to radiate a Christlike spiritual glow. He was both immensely delicate and immensely successful, a sort of Christ who had succeeded in business just by making beautiful things.

YSL joined my list of hyperaesthetic ectomorphs -- Christ, Warhol, Bowie, Sylvian -- whose beauty and talent had allowed them to break through endemic prejudice against their over-refinement to a wild success which would turn even their failings into admirable qualities. Their delicacy, childishness, protectedness, indulgence and narcissism would be encouraged, and mothers, managers and assistants (Saint Peter, Coco Schwab, Pierre Bergé) would protect them from the tough buffetings of the business world, or from petty jealousy. (It didn't always work, of course: Warhol's mother was nowhere to be seen when Valerie Solanas burst into the Factory with a gun. And where was Christ's father when...)

While the art and fashion worlds were the natural habitat of these bespectacled sissies, it was possible to be like that in the music industry too; the New Romantic 80s had thrown up one or two examples. What's more, I was signed to a label, él Records, run by a man who fitted the type to a T: Mike Alway. Mike and I would sit in L'Etoile patisserie on Westbourne Grove debating "semi-ecclesiastical Op Art lime green lanterns" and other abstract absurdities which seemed to us, at the time, to be solid steps on a sparkling, illuminated stairway to glory, albeit in some parallel universe (which turned out, in fact, to be Japan).

One of the ideas I remember discussing with Mike as we sat in L'Etoile, spectacle-to-spectacle and cheekbone-to-cheekbone, was a Momus album themed around Yves Saint Laurent's autumn 1968 Protest Collection, in which -- in a piece of homosexual chutzpah both admirable and derisory -- the designer had sent gold-toggled duffle coats onto the catwalks. What was he thinking? That the rich have the right to protest too? That protest is a fashion statement? That protest is golden? That anything can be recuperated by fashion? That having a cause you'd be willing to risk arrest and even death for is hopelessly rockist and hetero? That paying mocking tribute to such a cause is daringly anti-rockist and gay?

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The Protest Collection album by Momus would have featured songs on precisely this issue -- the question of whether chic should or shouldn't be radicalised, and therefore whether the aesthetic and the political have any business with each other (it's a question I still haven't resolved). The cover shot would have doubled as our marketing campaign: it would have featured an image of me, looking as much like YSL as I could in my Ray Ban Wayfarers, double-breasted Jaeger suit and sandals, running into the YSL shop in Knighsbridge and spraying the word PROTEST across the Jeanloup Sieff image of Saint Laurent. I would, of course, have been arrested and sentenced to serve in a prison where I would have been brutalised horribly by thickset bricklayers and swarthy car thieves.

In the end, I bottled the spray can protest and moved on to albums pastiching Mishima and Derek Jarman. But I retain some perplexed, complex affection for YSL, and would like to picture him, today, in heaven, sporting a shy grin, running up some swishy robes for his gorgeously prissy, sissy perfumed peers, too talented to fail, too gifted to live: Jesus Christ and Andy Warhol.

Comments

Those beastly criminal classes..

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Aside from Warhol's questionable beauty, the Christian church's depictions of Christ are purely speculative.

I'm also intrigued by your assumption that the U.K.'s prisons are populated by 'thickset bricklayers'.
Most of the bricklayers I have met display fairly conventional physiognomy, some have even looked quite effete and most are about the last people one would expect to find in Her Majesty's prisons - curiously ivory-tower Victorian sentiments considering your pretended Marxism.

Re: Those beastly criminal classes..

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Myth, in this kind of sketch, is much more important than reality. Who cares what Christ really looked like? It's how he's been mediated that matters, here in Plato's Cave.

As for British prisons, they're no doubt really full of poets, and "ivory tower Victorian" turns out to describe them better than it does me.

Re: Those beastly criminal classes..

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's how he's been mediated that matters, here in Plato's Cave.

And it's significant, I think, that the dominant images we have of Christ come from homosexual artists of the Renaissance.

Re: Those beastly criminal classes..

[bugpowered.livejournal.com]

For you, maybe.

For us it's byzantine and early-roman iconography.

Renaissance sucks the donkey's balls. Such naivety and lack of substance.

(At least, modern art tried to do a u-turn away from Renaissance idioms)

Jesus in furs

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

OK, but I think the Christ myth here was constructed by Nick Currie sometime earlier this morning! ;)

As regards British prisons the sarcasm is not really necessary, it is disingenuous in the extreme to equate bricklayers with car thieves.
The comment does smack of that Victorian assumption that criminality and working-class status were inexorably intertwined.

Re: Jesus in furs

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Of course they're intertwined: in situations where being working class equates to inequality and poverty, theft is how property gets more equally distributed!

Robin hood, in the back, of an Opel Corsa.

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

But not implicitly or invariably; which emphasises the need to maintain the distinction between working class people who actually work and provide service to society - be they bricklayers, mechanics, machine operators, clerks - and those who resort to criminal activity - car thieves, house-burglars and petty thugs.
The crimes carried out by the latter usually are perpetrated on the former so in consideration of property distribution it is hardly a shining, virtuous paradigm.

Re: Robin hood, in the back, of an Opel Corsa.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

...and the generations of accumulated first-hand experience might suggest that these "benighted" working class souls may actually have a tad more insight into the nature of petty crime than their "betters". After all, this is a social class in which both perpetrator and victim can grow up in the same household.

Re: Robin hood, in the back, of an Opel Corsa.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't know, this view just smacks of precisely the kind of Victorian paternalism I'm being accused of here -- it's a worldview in which property is unquestionably property, and theft is theft, and there are good eggs and bad eggs, and everybody knows their place (except the bad eggs) and doesn't rock the boat (except the bad eggs), and there's a sort of odd collusion between the good eggs and their "betters", the property owners, in which they commiserate heartily with each other when theft (or a revolution, seen as theft writ large) occurs: "If you think being robbed by the bad eggs is bad, Your Lordship, think how it must feel for us good eggs, who have so little! We know you're inclined to be lenient, but we grew up with those bad eggs -- we were the Abel to their Cain, as it were -- and we say GIVE THEM THE ROPE! It's all they're good for, what with their lack of respect for your PROPERTY, milord, and ours -- what little we have, any rate."