(b)Last from the Past

It is truly serendipitous that Michelle Miles wrote of yet another incarnation of the "Shoe Hat" in her blog this week. I had planned on discussing the use of the historical as inspiration for contemporary designers this week but Michelle provided us with such an excellent illustration of the tenuous relationship between pastiche and quotation in fashion that I couldn’t resist building my blog around it. So onto Elsa Schiaparelli's and Salvador Dali's most famous collaboration – the Shoe Hat

Designed around 1937, it is one of the purest expressions of the surreal in fashion. The "Shoe Hat" was born out of a whimsical moment - Dali posing for a photo wearing one of his wife Gala's shoes on his head (and one on his shoulder as well, a kind of lop-sided epaulette effect being achieved). A number of sketches of early considerations of the "heel-over-head" construction exist, including one in the Doris Stein Research Center at LACMA - each reworking the idea of supplanting one accessory with the silhouette or form of the other. The shoe hat re-entered the contemporary imagination when James Acheson drew on the work of Schiaparelli and other WW II-era designers for 'Brazil' (if you haven't seen this film recently, I highly recommend re-viewing it - keep an eye out for the lambchop hat in the restaurant scene - another citation of the work of Schiaparelli and the Surrealists). Since then, numerous designers have looked to Schiap for inspiration, Kazuo Takashima being the latest. Which leads me to the point of this week's blog – fashion is inherently self-referential. I wish I could take credit for this pithy observation, but alas no. The honor goes to fashion theoretician, Ulrich Lehmann whose work Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity presents fashion as a phenomenon which is simultaneously in the past and in the present, both ancient and contemporary.

Illustration of this could be seen in numerous shows at New York Fashion Week. For the sake of brevity, I’ve chosen one example of similar (but different) quotations which shoe lovers were witness to this past week.

Winkle Picker, Anyone?

That fashion is more of a mobius strip than a cyclical system is no more clearly demonstrated than in the shoes shown in the collections of Luella and Alexandre Herchcovitz this week in New York. Each chose the favored long pointy toe of the Teddy Boys, the silhouette referred to as a Winkle Picker, which in and of itself is a quotation of the medieval poulaine. But each interpreted this idea in a different way. For Luella, the shoe was mixed with the Mod style of the sixties – a trend that emerged after the Teddy Boys had succumbed to the leather and torn jeans of the Rocker movement. If only there could have been a little disco thrown in, we would have witnessed a triumvirate of teen cultures converge on one runway. Herchcovitz's interpretation was paired with a more free-wheeling romp through South American and African cultures – namely Bolivian folk dress and the Kente cloth native to Ghana.

I’ll leave the fashion theory to Ulrich for the moment and close by saying that if fashion be inherently self-referential, then refer on…