More from "Sex and Suits"

"Trousers did not require a perfect body, and they had a nicely daring, casual look in themselves. They were instantly modified from their working-class simplicity and assimilated into the subtle tailoring scheme already developed for the elegant male coat of the nineteenth century. The tube-like coverings for the legs answered harmoniously to the tube-like sleeves of the coat; and when the coat-skirts began consistently to veil the clearly delineated crotch of earlier days, the brilliantly coloured necktie asserted itself, to add a needed phallic note to the basic ensemble." [my emphases]

Cor blimey.

(The idea that a suit can be casual hadn't really occurred to me - when I first saw the Tenth Doctor in his suit I thought "business attire?!", but that's not at all how he wears it.)

And one more...

... because it's relevant to The Shakespeare Code ( for SPOILERY reasons )

The author, Anne Hollander, is talking about the development of the skirt, which keeps the bottom half of women a mystery, even as fashion changes led to exposed arms, backs, shoulders, and cleavage above completely hidden legs. "It corresponds to one very tenacious myth about women, the same one that gave rise to the image of the mermaid, the perniciously divided female monster, a creature inherited by the gods only down to the girdle. Her voice and face, her bosom and hair, her neck and arms are all entrancing, offering only what is benign among the pleasures afforded by women, all that suggests the unreserved, tender and physically delicious love of mothers even while it seems to promise the rough strife of adult sex. The upper half of a woman offers both keen pleasure and a sort of illusion of sweet safety; but it is a trap. Below, under the foam, the swirling waves of lovely skirt, her hidden body repels, its shapeliness armed in scaly refusal, its oceanic interior stinking of uncleanness."

(She goes on to suggest that women's eventual adoption of trousers conveyed the political message that women's bodies, and therefore their brains, were no different to men's.)

(no subject)

[Poll #963998]

Visiting Mrs Nabokov

*randomly grabs a collection of essays by Martin Amis*

*staggers about under the blow*

omg. Nuclear City (1987) reminded me that school harassment is not the only source of grief and outrage still bubbling under my surface.

More coherent notes on this later.