Last November, after I finished season 4 of The Crown, an article about the implied and retroactive narrative latent in Princess Diana’s (premarital) “black sheep sweater” inspired me to base a PVA elective class on the use of clothing as a narrative device. The latest visual text to tackle Di’s story continues this trend.
But before I get to that, one of the posts inspired by the Clothes Class that remains in Draft form is “The Horror of the Clothes Class” based largely on Stephen King’s narrative use of clothes (which happens to revolve largely around his invocations of working-class chambray shirts); clothing, the focus of my spring ‘21 elective, gave way to horror–via Stephen King’s Carrie–as the focus of my fall ‘21 elective. (Another interesting overlap between the two occurred when former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, founder of the color pink’s association with femininity, became a significant figure in collusion with aliens on the latest season of American Horror Story.)
And then there’s the concept of “the horror” iconically articulated by the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
“‘The horror! The horror!’
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899
This passage in itself is not clothes-related, but its invocation on the eighth season of Seinfeld is. At this point, the character Elaine Benes is working for J. Crew stand-in J. Peterman, writing copy for the company’s clothes catalogue, and Peterman goes off on an obscure pilgrimage, leaving Elaine in charge. One episode, “The Fatigues,” sees Elaine too intimidated to fire a mail clerk due to his intense garb of army fatigues; she promotes him so she doesn’t have to encounter him in this capacity, but then she has to deal with his combat-based clothes copy:
“It’s a hot night. The mind races. You think about your knife; the only friend who hasn’t betrayed you, the only friend who won’t be dead by sun up. Sleep tight, mates, in your quilted Chambray nightshirts.”
Seinfeld 8.6, “The Fatigues,” October 31, 1996
I was reminded of this plot…thread…when I happened upon a men’s magazine from 2003 promoting army-inspired camouflage patterns and cargo pants as the latest menswear fashion trend, and recalled that this particular publication was concurrent with with the US invasion of Iraq. War-inspired fashion, or war-promoting fashion?
The “urban sombrero” is another major component of the arc of Elaine’s ultimate failure to lead the clothing company; when this item appropriated from Mexican culture flops, it endangers Elaine’s position, but it’s a different item of headgear that becomes the final domino in her downfall when she lets George charge a Russian sable hat to her company expense account, not realizing it’s $8000. In order to save her position after she’s unable to justify this as a business expense to the company’s board, she must go find Peterman himself at his remote outpost in Burma, where he’s lying, Kurtz-like, in a cave. It’s when she shows him a picture of the urban sombrero she put on the company’s catalogue cover that he invokes the iconic phrase:
(Fiction writer Lionel Shriver invoked the sombrero in her off-putting 2016 speech about the white right to culturally appropriate, implicitly linking the “horror” of racist imperialism latent in Kurtz’s remark to items of clothing….)
The horror of the clothes class comes back to Princess Diana with the recently released movie Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart in the title role. Initially thinking any treatment of Diana’s story would be redundant after The Crown, I was intrigued by the description in the New Yorker’s recent profile of Stewart that the film:
…has less in common with “The Crown,” the Netflix series about the Royal Family, than it does with “Rosemary’s Baby” or “Gaslight,” films in which the mental breakdown of the female lead is the rational response to conspiracy, and madness looks something like resistance.
That is, Spencer is, in essence, a horror film.
The morning of the day I saw Spencer, I was shopping for Thanksgiving dinner groceries at the “monster Kroger” in my hometown, wearing an Etsy sweatshirt version of Di’s black-sheep sweater I’d asked my mother for the previous Christmas.
At the register, Diana’s relevance remained in evidence: one of the tabloid magazines bore a picture of her on its cover, claiming “bombshell” news that she might have cheated on Prince Charles before he cheated on her. And the girl bagging our extensive haul inquired about the meaning of my sweatshirt, which I duly explained.
Spencer tags itself in its title sequence as “a fable based on a true tragedy,” which cues its fictionalization of “real-life” events. The nature of reality is itself in question within the film itself, which focuses on a specific holiday Diana is spending with the royal family–significantly, what will be her last with them–on an estate that happens to abut the grounds where she grew up on the Spencer estate. Having ditched her security detail, Diana gets lost driving herself to what should be familiar terrain before she recognizes a scarecrow wearing her father’s jacket, which she runs through the mud in her high heels to procure. She tells the “dresser” assigned to her that she wants the jacket patched up; the dresser is a significant element in the film because we see how Diana’s outfits for the holidays have all been pre-assigned and specifically designated for different meals and events; her change-up of the assigned order of garments becomes a marker of her rebellion.
Another item not technically clothes but an accessory to them comes into play: a set of pearls Charles gets her that turns out to be identical to one he gets his mistress. In a silently tense dinner scene, Diana yanks off the pearls and eats one with a spoonful of pea soup. When a followup shot shows the pearls in tact around her neck, the viewer understands her perceptions of what’s “real” are slipping, and we’re placed in a similar position to the one she’s been placed in by the gaslighting royals surrounding her–we can’t necessarily trust the version of events we’re being shown.
The function of the pearls expands when Diana starts reading a book left in her room–Life and Death of a Martyr: Anne Boleyn–calling attention to the potential parallels of these royal figures manifest in their husbands having mistresses. Boleyn’s husband Henry VIII eventually beheads her under the pretext of accusing her of having an affair in order to install his mistress on the throne alongside him. (This creepily recalled the narrative projected on the tabloid cover I’d seen that morning accusing Diana of cheating first; I also recognized the portrait of Henry VIII prominent in several Spencer shots from its prominent placement on a t-shirt for a former publisher of legal code books I once worked for bearing the copy “Family Law Problems? Don’t Lose Your Head!”)
Diana’s other immediate/acute source of tension with Charles in the film is that he’s about to force their son William to shoot live pheasants for the first time. (This would explain the extended opening shot of cars passing over a bird’s carcass.) Someone explains to Diana at one point that the pheasants are bred only to be shot–if not for the gun, they wouldn’t exist at all–elucidating a metaphor for her own royal function, as the pheasants are also aesthetically beautiful birds. At another point, Diana has a conversation with one of the pheasants wandering the grounds, representing both her desire to be free and her larger mental … unraveling. And, once her “dresser” professes her lesbian love for her, Di assures her at their parting that she’ll next see her in London “with a pheasant feather in my hat.”
(The only significant “exchange” Diana has with the queen in the film begins with her complimenting the queen’s dress before the queen tells her that their only function is as currency.)
Before the pheasant thread wraps up in what might be considered an external climax (that is, involving interaction with other characters), there’s the internal climax: after previous attempts are thwarted, Diana finally makes it off the royal estate and into the abandoned house where she grew up on the adjacent grounds. Having done so when she’s supposed to be at a formal function, she’s wearing a wedding-dress-looking ballgown whose abundant tulle skirt cuts a striking silhouette when she dons a straitjacketing overcoat forcing the tulle to bunch at the bottom. Being in her former now crumbling home induces certain memories (per narrative utilization of space); the New Yorker profile on Stewart describes this sequence as:
…the unexpected climax of “Spencer”: a wordless and cathartic dance montage. Diana, caught between the end of her marriage and the life still to come, spins down castle halls and runs through gardens, pivoting and gliding to Greenwood’s surging score, wearing iconic outfits that represent various stages of her life.
As she’s about to hurl herself down a broken staircase, she has an interaction with the figment of Anne Boleyn, who persuades her to run, which the viewer with their historical context knows she will do, and which is cemented as her choice in the film when she rips off the string of pearls and they scatter down the stairs.
But the pearls are only an accessory, and the external climax comes when Diana, wearing her father’s scarecrow coat, interrupts the ceremony of the live shooting of the pheasants and exclaims that she won’t leave without her sons, whom Charles grudgingly acquiesces can go to her. As she drives off the estate with them in tow, we see that she’s put what’s probably objectively and intentionally the ugliest outfit she wears in the film, a yellow skirt suit, on the scarecrow. Hence she’s conclusively exchanged her royal Diana identity for her former nonroyal Spencer one–a transition that’s concretely marked by the clothes.
Kristen Stewart is getting Oscar buzz for her portrayal of the People’s Princess, and with good reason. The New Yorker‘s profile of her, titled “Get Real” in the print version, describes Stewart’s general “naturalism and restraint, qualities of her acting that some find captivating and others inscrutable.” In studying footage of Diana to prepare for the role,
Stewart noticed how uncomfortable Diana could look when she was dressed up, “just jutting out in every way possible,” as Stewart put it, trapped in a tyranny of ridiculous hats.
From here.
Watching the movie with my mother, I learned a fashion term I was previously unfamiliar with when she was describing the decorative and otherwise pointless headgear perhaps most prominently showcased to American audiences during the royal weddings–“fascinators“–and it occurred to me that these nuptial ceremonies enact a miniature version of the patriarchal monarchy itself….
The film’s fictionalization of real-life events (Diana probably never had a one-on-one conversation with a pheasant) seems aligned with Stewart’s naturalistic approach to acting:
Of acting, Stewart said, “It is me, and there’s no separation, and I believe it so fully when it’s good.”
From here.
In addition to noting Stewart’s turn in Personal Shopper (2016), which is another film that crucially and effectively integrates fashion with horror, making it a fitting harbinger of her role in Spencer, the profile also notes:
Stewart, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, describes herself as California to the core—she has “L.A.” tattooed on a wrist—and few people since James Dean have looked better or more at ease in a T-shirt and jeans.
From here.
The James Dean comparison reminded me of a discussion we had in the Clothes Class about his iconic role in the classic Rebel Without a Cause (1955), in which Dean showcases his jeans-and-tee look with a few relevant modifications that become a reflection of the main character’s arc. This character wears a total of three outfits over the course of the film, making his initial (drunken) appearance in a full suit:
His next outfit, in a confrontation at L.A.’s Griffith Observatory, includes most of the suit components, but notably without the necktie:
And his final outfit, the most recognizable one that he wears for most of the film (and featured on the movie’s promotional poster), adds the iconic red jacket over the t-shirt and jeans:
This evolution in outfits marks the development of his “rebel” character, with his red jacket providing a striking contrast to the matching black jackets of the gang that’s harassed him:
Not only that, those (conformist) black jackets, or one of them, comes to play a direct role in the plot when it ends up causing the death of the rival driver in the game of chicken that the gang induces Dean’s character to participate in–when this driver tries to jump out of the car, we see a strap on his jacket’s cuff catch on the door handle, preventing him from opening the car door before his car goes over the cliff:
The real-life Dean, like the real-life Diana, died in a car accident. So if you ever think fashion is frivolous, remember, it can kill you… “the horror,” indeed.
-SCR
the pva creative writing review 