#the history of the portrait this is based on is so convoluted it’s fascinating

[eyenaku]

portrait of a laughing fool (ref: portrait of a laughing fool c. 1500)

Fool belongs to the super neat @venomous-qwille !!

he coincidentally ended up next to a carrousel horse which amuses me thoroughly

[shprojectphotography]

An academic piece inspired by an exhibition held at Victoria & Albert Museum Shoes:Pain and Pleasure

The Powerful Mistress 

by Stephanie Houghton

Fashion. Let us dwell on this fleeting phenomenon full of ambiguities, impermanence,and mockery. Some argue that fashion is the product and the source of social inequality and elitism, the other, on the contrary, that it is the result and a factor of social equality and democracy. Some insist that its existence is detrimental to art, others proclaim it being a form of art itself. These and many more existing judgments about fashion often not only differ amongst themselves but also directly contradict each other forming a dialectical relationship. Fashion seems to take both sides of the evil and the good, thus remaining a cultural vector of status, spectacle, and beauty. In order for us to understand why does this term exist as a contradiction, we should turn our attention to German Romanticist and a Marxist interpreter and a philosopher, Walter Benjamin. He actuates the concept of the dialectical image in his collection of thoughts in the‘’Arcades Project’’, where we meet with the binaries of fashion and their modus operandi1 in cultural and political spheres.Thoughts devoted to fashion are scattered throughout the volume, hidden away in complex notes on other thinkers, fragmented and inconsistent, reciprocally to fashion itself.Perhaps this deliberate abyss which was created by the absence of concreteness in his writing only achieves a surrealistic effect on the unfinished concept of fashion. In the light of Benjamin, this paper will draw attention to the figure of Madame de Pompadour and the triumph of her seemingly petite, nevertheless revolutionary pair of shoes.

Figure 1. François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour, 1756, Munich, Alte Pinakophek, (photo: Kunstdia- Archive ARTOTHEK, D-Peissenberg), oil on canvas.

Figure 2. Close up of Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour heels

François Boucher, the father of decorative allegories and pastoral paintings, was an artist whom Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson admired and was inspired by. This particular portrait of her displaying the prosperity of her social position acts as what Benjamin defines as ‘’dialectics of a standstill’’. In his Convolute N: On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress, he writes: ‘’It's not what is past casts its light on what is present or what is present casts its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been come together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’’. This painting can be seen as an example of subject and object merging together. Similarly to the function of a photographic image, it preserves the past for the present. In Benjamin’s terms, the image has a role. It acts as a tool of confrontation and its source is history, which crystallizes force that is originally embedded in this painting. For Benjamin, time was a mysterious phenomenon which enclosed the dialectical relationship between the past and present. Walter Benjamin’s concept of time is gifted with autonomy and transitory power. This painting exists as a testimony of past, and its aim is to remind us of it. Fashion operates in the same sphere. Fashion, as we know it, has an ability to enter into any historical epoch and dictate its presence, so is the image. This painting as a historical object in which this act of knowledge, in particular, Pompadour’s shoes, which seem to enter our visionary field deliberately, demonstrates this presence of the past performed in the now. By looking at this painting of the past, Pompadour’s petite feet peek out from her exuberantly decorated dress almost breaking the bindings of time to signal their legibility in the present. This work of art operates as a ‘‘tiger’s leap into the past’’, seemingly bestowed with tranquillity, but at the same time dangerous in action. The tilt of her shoe exists as an open conversation of fashion in the eighteenth century.

The mood and the lighting of the painting appear dimmed, and most importantly of all, private. It seems that in this certain moment Pompadour is having the time away from the formal rituals of the court where she is constantly on display. Her dress and surroundings demonstrate her taste and status. From her writing feather and ink, sketches on paper to a wide collection of books from the ones stored in the cupboard behind and the one in her hand, every detail is considered to indicate her intellectual and artistic achievement. One can say that the appearance of flowers remind us of her fragile femininity which she possesses as a woman. Portraits of Madame de Pompadour by Boucher tend to achieve a celebratory effect on her prestige education and knowledge, proclaiming her as a ‘‘femme savante’’, a woman of Enlightenment era. From the moment she appeared at court, Madame de Pompadour used her wit, intelligence and diplomacy to seduce and captivate King XV.6 From 1756 to this day, this portrait displays women’s capability of knowledge in political and economic spheres, which back in those days were governed by patriarchal male groups. The way Madame de Pompadour positions herself in this portrait signals for her personal achievements as a powerful mistress of King Louis XV. Perhaps her importance in the history of female heel formation begins with this painting.

The act of wearing heels in eighteenth-century France came to signify wealth and status as the term ‘well-heeled’7 indicates. Historically, heels as a formal invention came to reign with King Louis XIV in early 1700’s. It was recorded in historical papers that ‘’rigid court protocol established that only the King and his court could wear red heels in France’’.In this historical light, heels were representatives of status and power of the French Court. The fact that the height of the heel was always changing in order to meet the whims of royal representative’s shows that fashion back in those times was drastically fluctuating and was following the means of economy. In this sense, the operation of eighteenth-century fashion circulates within the ‘’arena where the ruling class gives the commands’’. In Benjamin’s theory, fashion in the leading classes operates by the means of dominating the lower classes. For instance, the upper class will increase the height of their heel once the lower class has adapted it. However, Pompadour did not come from a privileged background, and the possibility of her dictating fashion entirely depended on her gaining a socially respectable position. In this certain moment and year to which this portrait brings us back to, Pompadour possesses a high value in French society. She uses her achievements to manipulate her lover King XV and the laws of fashion. In this light of defining the attitude of fashion, one can see that it operates within the frame of certain class and gender. In Pompadour’s case, it operates within this picture frame, but at the same time within the gulf of time, in which this painting can flash up and disappear without rules.

Relying on the functions of the social classes based on the Marxist theory, Benjamin shows a great concern with Capitalism and its influences on fashion. With the rise of Capitalism and commodity fetishism, ‘’fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between woman and ware-between carnal pleasure and the corpse’’.Capitalism kills, robs, impoverishes and creates colossal richness and beauty. It settles in the people that feeling of longing for that form of life and the opportunities that will forever remain unavailable. It produces not only the objects but the images and dreams of fashion. Within the capitalist world, the victory is achieved by the inorganic over organic. The transformational energy of fashion and its constant craving for recycling of old styles and the rapidity with which fashion comes and goes resembles with death. Fashion changes with such speed that objects lose their significance and forever remain as historical corpses of fashion. They are gifted with life once they are fashionable and when they are devoid of style and no longer fashionable, they remain as reminders of the past. Benjamin’s thought on fashion having a dialectical relationship with the organic and the inorganic, opens up a different perspective on Pompadour’s heels. This particular pair with enhanced oriental decoration raised tips and fastened buckles, has lost its relevance in modern fashion. However, the concept of the heel remains unchanged. Certain heel styles come and go, but the heel is still a heel with an evocative function. It continues to be a tool of height enhancement, professionalism, confidence, sexuality and power.

If wearing Pompadour’s heels today equates to wearing a phantasmagorical dream, what does it mean to be a fashion collector? Eighteen years ago with the rise of Sex and the City series, the New York inhabitants, and perhaps all women representatives in general, began to regard shoes as something holy. Sex and the City series larger contributed to Manolo Blahnik shoes became an iconic phenomenon. Sarah Jessica Parker slumbers in every woman of today. Indeed, there are events in a woman’s life that cannot be possible without heels. It is inconceivable to get married without Manolo Blahnik and walk down the red carpet without wearing Jimmy Choo. It is no mistake that on the shoe Olympus sits Madame de Pompadour’s heels. The act of collecting wearable objects as commodities, in particular, heels, turn shoes into the objects of fetish and desire. Madame de Pompadour’s little shoes have a certain charm to them. Their miniature quality appears desirous for a fashion collector. Only recently, Victoria and Albert Museum has included Madame de Pompadour’s shoes in the exhibition Shoes: Pain and Pleasure as a collectable object. Does heels have a true function or are they bestowed with something more than a desire to own? What is this true fascination with collecting commodities? If we are to turn to Benjamin, he regarded the act of collecting as a wish of the exhibitionist to possess value and at the same time taking away that value from the object as it becomes objectified. He writes: ‘’ And for the true collector, every single thing in this system becomes an encyclopaedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry, and the owner from which it comes. It is the deepest enchantment of the collector to enclose the particular item within a magic circle, where, as the last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquires), it turns to stone.''The more rare and expensive the fashionable object appears, the more collectable and desired it is. This fascination with ownership can be compared to sexual desire, which also demands immediate possession and seeks pleasure in owning the object. To collect is to complete the object’s purpose. But can it be complete if the wearer does not give life to it by wearing? The dialectical tension in collecting commodities is seen in objects becoming the objects of display, but at the same time hidden with a fetish. Collecting Pompadour's shoes as a material thing carry more than the wish to have. It is no accident, that her feet, as the most modest and least favoured part of the human body, are bestowed with a revolutionary spirit. The feet as the opposite pole of the figure evolved much slower than the upper body. Pompadour, back in her days, was breaking the rules of modesty and morality by showing off her feet. As Philippe Perrot wrote: ‘’here we are at the heart of all male fixations, the spark that inflamed their desires, the anchor of all their fantasies: the foot. Ever since it was completely hidden by dresses, it became the object of a universal, ardent, and fanatical cult.’’By performing such immoral act for a woman of good behavior, Pompadour is reaching out to other women who follow fashion. Her provocativeness achieves the power of seduction. She appears dangerous, forbidden and desirous. As a court lady, she has the power to dictate her rules. Regardless of Madame de Pompadour being addressed as a mistress of King Louis XV, she has owned her place in the history of Western dress. And her shoes can claim to be a part of her revolutionary character.

Heel, beside their feminine character, have been adopted by both genders. Even today, they continue to be seen as unisex. However, heels tend to represent femininity more than masculinity, even though historically, heels were a male invention. This dialectical concept between gender specificity in fashion echoes Elizabeth Wilson text on transgender fashion,where she states that: ‘’fashion permits us to flirt with transvestitism, precisely to divest it of all its danger and power.’’In Benjamin’s sense, the so known cross-dressing is a result of modernity. Modern fashion, for Benjamin, ‘’consists only in extremes’’. It perverts nature and morality, it cannot remain neutral, as it to commit to a particular tempo in order to be modern to meet those extremes. Heels, no longer gender-specific, have lost their ‘aura’.Walter Benjamin’s description of the aura surrounding a photograph in his inspirational essay on ‘’The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’’, notes that aura stands for the particular, ‘’the one-of-a-kind value of the ‘genuine’ work of art has its underpinnings in theritual in which it had its original, initial and utility value’’. And Benjamin would agree, that the aura surrounding Pompadour’s shoes in this picture makes this pair of shoes very unique and authentic. However, in the modern world this authenticity in fashion gives way to fleeting tendencies. A modernist has to commit to the ephemeral, to the progressive. In other words, the stiletto heels which we know today would not exist in fashion if they were tied up to a certain historical time, space or the figure of Pompadour. Fashion continues to make copies and reproductions, and their functioning in society makes the existence of the original optional. The dialectical image, thereby, can be described as the image of the past, which translates the desires of the past generations into the present. Can we consider Madame de Pompadour’s heels as the origin of the history of the heel or is it just another replica of the famous heel that we know today?

References:

Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans, Fashion and Modernity, (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

Elise Goodman, The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour: Celebrating the Femme Savante, (California: University of California Press, 2000).

Elizabeth Wilson, “Gender and Identity.” In Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, revised and updated edition, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003),

Katherine Lester and Bess Viola Oerke, Accessories of Dress: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia, (New York: Dover Publications, 2004).

Madeleine Delpierre, Dress in France in the Eighteenth Century, trans., Caroline Beamish, (New Heaven & London: Yale University, 1997).

Margo DeMello, Feet and Footwear: A Cultural Encyclopaedia, (United States of America: Greenwood Press, 2009).

Nancy Milford, Madame de Pompadour, (London: Vintage, 2011). Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth

Century, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Ulrich Lechmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity, (United States of America:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000).

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (United States: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1999).

Walter Benjamin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Selected Writings: 1938-1940, (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2003).

Academic Papers and Dissertations:

Alexia Bretas, “Eternal Return of the New-The Aesthetics of Fashion in Walter Benjamin’’ (PhD diss., Universidade Estadual de Compinas, Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics,vol.5, 2013).

Journal Articles: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, "A Woman’s Worth. Madame de Pompadour and the Arts," In Art in

America, No. 4, )April 2003),100-107. Georg Simmel, ‘’Fashion’’, American Journal of Sociology No. 62 (May, 1957), p. 541-558.

Peter Wollen, ‘’The Concept of Fashion in The Arcades Project’’ In boundary 2, 30, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 131-42.

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Online Journals:

Elise Goodman-Soellner, ‘’Madame de Pompadour at Her Toilette’’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1987), 41-58, accessed December,2015, doi: 10.2307/3780687.

Online Source: ‘’Why did men stop wearing high heels?’’, last modified 25 January 2013,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21151350. Film: Jeanne Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, film, Directed by Robin Davis: (France, 2006).