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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?[Error: unknown template video]
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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 10:37 am (UTC)Warhol, beatiful?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 10:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 10:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 10:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 11:05 am (UTC)I wrote all my Creation Records albums there, basically. And yes, I'd go to the Dome, or the Man in the Moon, or the French Institute, or the coffee shop in the V&A. Dinner was usually chicken kiev at the Chelsea Kitchen. Lunch would be a jar of bockwurst from Safeways. I'd sometimes go into Our Price next door, and they'd put on "Closer To You", thinking it would embarrass me. It didn't, but it summed up the sort of nympholepsy which defined that odd dole life in Chelsea. Desire for the unnattainable, plus a vague sense of ambition, and a sense that it could only be achieved through a corruption which wouldn't be worth the rewards.
Those beastly criminal classes..
Date: 2008-06-02 11:05 am (UTC)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..
Date: 2008-06-02 11:14 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 11:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 11:22 am (UTC)Re: Those beastly criminal classes..
Date: 2008-06-02 11:26 am (UTC)And it's significant, I think, that the dominant images we have of Christ come from homosexual artists of the Renaissance.
Jesus in furs
Date: 2008-06-02 11:30 am (UTC)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
Date: 2008-06-02 11:43 am (UTC)lololol coco schwab
Date: 2008-06-02 11:46 am (UTC)Also, hahaha, Napier Bell is Sylvia's mother.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 11:46 am (UTC)it squirted hot liquid when you put a fork into it
Yes! Hot garlic! It probably still does.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 11:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 11:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 11:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 11:56 am (UTC)"Yves was a designer of genius but let us not forget his prowess as a go-kart driver. I once saw him beat Michael Schumacher while wearing a bespoke jumpsuit done out in his trademark black.
The mechanics nicknamed him the panther but Yves preferred Le Chat."
YSL as Jeremy Clarkson? Do we all have our own personal Yves?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 11:58 am (UTC)“ a little, but are you all right?” John asked as he followed him to the bathroom.
“I’m glad you care.”
Date: 2008-06-02 12:00 pm (UTC)John smiled. “You look good shirtless.”
“Thanks.” he replied, turning slightly red.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 12:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 12:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 12:29 pm (UTC)Cooking!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 12:35 pm (UTC)PRETTY BOY:
Date: 2008-06-02 12:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 12:40 pm (UTC)Robin hood, in the back, of an Opel Corsa.
Date: 2008-06-02 02:11 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 03:47 pm (UTC)Re: lololol coco schwab
Date: 2008-06-02 03:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-02 03:56 pm (UTC)It stunned me to find out Christopher Eccleston could only drive an Automatic.
Re: PRETTY BOY:
Date: 2008-06-02 03:58 pm (UTC)Isn't it odd how dogs and owners look alike?
who had succeeded in business just by making beautiful things.
Date: 2008-06-02 04:32 pm (UTC)“ Pretty boys, witty boys,
You may sneer
At our disintegration.
Haughty boys, naughty boys,
Dear, dear, dear!
Swooning with affectation...
And as we are the reason
For the "Nineties" being gay,
We all wear a green carnation. ”
—Noel Coward, 1929 , Bitter Sweet
Women want brutes
Date: 2008-06-02 04:32 pm (UTC)Re: Women want brutes
Date: 2008-06-02 06:53 pm (UTC)£25 a week dole money, with the government paying my rent. 1985 to 1990
Date: 2008-06-02 06:56 pm (UTC)Re: £25 a week dole money, with the government paying my rent. 1985 to 1990
Date: 2008-06-02 06:58 pm (UTC)Re: Women want brutes
Date: 2008-06-02 07:07 pm (UTC)Re: Women want brutes
Date: 2008-06-02 07:39 pm (UTC)Re: Women want brutes
Date: 2008-06-02 09:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-03 04:07 am (UTC)Also, "where was Christ's father when..." The answer is that Joseph was
surely just as distraught as Christ's mother and siblings apparently were
at the time...
petite men
Date: 2008-06-03 04:08 am (UTC)Also, "where was Christ's father when..." The answer is that Joseph was
surely just as distraught as Christ's mother and siblings apparently were
at the time...
Riddle
Date: 2008-06-03 05:12 am (UTC)Re: Those beastly criminal classes..
Date: 2008-06-03 08:02 am (UTC)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)
Re: who had succeeded in business just by making beautiful things.
Date: 2008-06-03 12:11 pm (UTC)Classe ou casse
Date: 2008-06-03 01:16 pm (UTC)Il y a eu les classes (sociales).
Place aux clashs !
Re: Women want brutes
Date: 2008-06-03 02:31 pm (UTC)Re: Robin hood, in the back, of an Opel Corsa.
Date: 2008-06-03 03:17 pm (UTC)Re: Robin hood, in the back, of an Opel Corsa.
Date: 2008-06-03 05:15 pm (UTC)