Getting out of the shower

If there is something utterly unique about each and every one of us, that is our body. The texture and the tone of our skin, the freckles, the birthmarks, the growth of hair on us, the smell emitted through our pores, our bone structure, our bust-waist-hip ratio, our pimples, our teeth, the scars from our childhood, the way we talk and walk, the color of our eyes.
Therefore everyone is, from birth and without even trying, one of a kind (and that degrades slightly the words of Coco Chanel: ‘’In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different’’, because, frankly, this isn’t a matter of choice or effort.)
That way, in combination with someone’s personality and characteristics, we unequivocally result in a very specific, monadic individual.
All that, keeping in mind that this individual is still naked, stripped of everything extra to how she/he was born.

The person who presented the most valid counter-argument, was Nan Kempner, a New York City socialite, fashion editor and massive couture clothing collector. In 1966, at a time when the perception of women wearing pants was considered off-kilter and inappropriate, Yves Saint Laurent introduced the world to ‘Le Smoking’, a tuxedo-style suit that quickly became the epitome of femininity and power dressing. It was undoubtedly photographer Helmut Newton who made ‘Le Smoking’ iconic; his extraordinary capacity to imbue his subjects with a potent sexuality that was reaching new heights, when married to the enigma of the YSL tuxedo created a new visual stimuli, and Nan was one of the first to sport it. In 1968, when told by the maître de ‘La Côte Basque’ that she couldn’t possibly dine in a pair of trousers (never mind that those trousers were half of YSL’s first le smoking), Kempner promptly dropped them and proceeded to dine solely in the jacket, exemplifying – in the words of Saint Laurent – the true spirit of a modern woman.

An ode to the modern woman is being made by Rebecca Arnold in her book ‘Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century’

Guess the nude

Alexander McQueen, throughout his career, but especially at the 1995 collection ‘’The Birds’’ or the 1997 collection, “It’s a Jungle Out There,” brought a strong case of body modification, by playing with it, stretching and extruding it from its natural form to a un-natural, nonhuman creation. He presented the human body imbued with the power that an armor brings; his clothes protected the wearers, provoked and inspired fear in the inspectors. The nudity was nonchalant to him, but at the same time crucial, because in order for his creations to work as protection and security for women, he had to make sure that the bewilderment caused by nudity was present. There are many ways to celebrate the naked human body, apart from the absence of clothing. Designers tend to use structures, textiles and place garments strategically that contradict the human form, in order to praise it. If we imagine a universe in which the optical stimulus is the first tool that someone possesses for the analysis of his perception of reality, and the viewer has no idea whatsoever what a body looks like, that contradiction created by the garments creates a mystery around the shape of it. In essence, the designer urges the viewer to be suspicious of his primary experience of acquiring knowledge through vision and reinvent the world, beginning with the human form.