Words by Joan Juliet Buck
Back from the ball, her long dress wet from too much dancing, hair askew, mascara smudged, the 17-year-old stands at her sink an hour before dawn, tugging her long white kid gloves back on because they will shrivel and harden like dead petals unless she washes them right now, before she goes to bed, with her hands inside them. The soap suds feel oddly wrong through the wet white leather, like swimming fully dressed. The gloves will dry on the towel rack for a day or two, and before she puts them away, she will blow into each palm to inflate the fingers, but the thumb will always resist. The clean but no-longer-perfect gloves will be good enough for second-best galas. For best, there will be a new pair of long white kid gloves with three pearl buttons at the wrist. And a new long dress to ruin on the dance floor.
That was me at 17, maintaining the accessories of privilege according to my mother’s rules. I had to be responsible for the fine things I was given, keep them in good shape, make them last. Money, time, and endless care went into dressing for show to exude an aura of dignified elegance that I could then demolish on the dance floor. Hours at the hairdresser, blasts of hairspray, a scented bath, diligent shaving of the legs and the armpits, the slow, precise application of makeup, the careful pulling on of those new kid gloves, and out the door, a borrowed fur on the shoulders.
I want to say to my 17-year-old self: By the time you write this, fur will be illegal, the chore of shaving will be nothing compared to the pain of having all your pubic hair ripped out with hot wax, makeup will be done by professionals, and not one woman will have washed a kid glove in 40 years. The clothes to show off in will be swimsuits, tubes of netting, fringes of beads or scatters of sand worn over nothing but some glue and maybe a thong, a ribbon, a diaper.
I want to say to the 17-year-old-me that Taylor Swift, the biggest pop star in the world, will wear glitter-studded bathing suits for her sold-out stadium shows. Millions of young girls will worship her as a blonde Wonder Woman. They will want party swimsuits; they will go online to buy tiny nylon dresses as tight as sausage casings and just as flattering, often for no more than the price of a 12-pack of chorizo – but it’s too exhausting to explain online shopping for cheap fashion to a mere construct inside my head, so I will turn my attention back to the reader.
“Is this a way of accepting global warming?”
Why has the bathing suit replaced the dress?
Why is nylon mesh dotted with haphazard clumps of fabric petals suddenly considered attractive for anything other than bedroom curtains?
Is this a way of accepting global warming?
Is this because we are running out of actual fabric?
I do not think that this is sexual provocation, despite how much skin is on show. Taylor Swift’s costumes have the innocent sparkle of the bathing suits on traditional pinups from fourth-century Roman mosaics to World War II calendar girls and Marilyn Monroe on the poster for Love Nest. No one wore swimsuits anywhere but the beach unless there was money involved – money from sponsors, pornographers, peep show producers, makers of lingerie or swimwear.
Money, as so often, is the answer.
The most expensive thing you can wear today is nothing.
It used to be a color, the color purple. The Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans used purple dye from the Murex sea snail as the ultimate sign of wealth and restricted its use to the nobility and priests.
Then it was clothes and jewels. From the Renaissance onward, men commissioned portraits of their wives and daughters wearing layers of brocade, taffeta, and satin decorated with gold and lace. The dresses were cut to enhance their best features: shoulders, breasts, and, if they were narrow, waists. Women were chattel; their necks were useful for displaying the jewelry that proved their husbands’ wealth. The more flesh on view, the more room there was for pearls, rubies, diamonds.
With the breasts and neck so exposed, the skirts functioned as ballast and security detail, barring access to the lower part of the woman’s body. The stiff brocade triangles of the Tudors grew flat in front and wide at the sides in the 18th century, and for the rest of the 19th century – after a brief post-revolutionary period of diaphanous white dresses that the bold wore soaking wet to reveal their shapes – skirts were huge circular tents over stiffened horsehair hoops, and then came ruffled rear-end bustles. Skirts grew shorter in the 20th century, but ball gowns still frothed up into generous crinolines.
Big, long skirts hid the part of their anatomy that women most hate about themselves: the underside of the buttocks, known to science as the subgluteal region, the most unruly, disobedient part of the female body, the seat of shame. The forgotten workhorse of the anatomy hides so well from its owner that two mirrors are needed to trap it. Consciously or not, unless she is wearing a big long skirt, every woman brushes her hand against the subgluteal region as she enters or exits a room.
This unreliable autonomous region is resistant to normal exercise routines; it can be soft, flapping, bumpy, or distended, and sometimes it races away down the backs of the thighs in waterfall cascades of skin.
And yet that swampy portion of the limbs has taken the place of the decolleté. On proud display, it goes to the Met Gala. It travels with Kristen Stewart’s wardrobe of underpants. Encased in tights, it is part of Taylor Swift’s stage persona.
The backs of perfect thighs are the most expensive thing you could wear.
Madonna made it all possible. Her influence on taste, performance and self-presentation turned out to be pervasive, and absolute.
Madonna’s video for “Like a Virgin” came out in1984, at about the same time women stopped washing their kid gloves. Its brilliant director Mary Lambert gave equal time to the gyrations of the 24-year-old dancer bucking through the canals of Venice on a gondola, her muscled calves in electric blue leggings, as to her surrender to a lion-headed beast in a palazzo, a virgin bride being unwrapped.
“All these naked women are rising to the challenge posed by Madonna”
Object and subject. She wanted, she craved, she lusted. Onstage she pioneered torn lace, distressed underwear, lingerie, leotards, bathing suits, conical bras, dominatrix leathers, and most of all, her thighs. She was never tall, her limbs were never long, but her thighs have won.
All these naked women wearing netting on red carpets are rising to the challenge posed by Madonna. At first you think they look exposed, awkward, vulnerable to the predatory male gaze. You think they look like victims, like chattel (again) for sale in a public market.
But they’re competing with Madonna for who has the best thighs.
Madonna is now 65 years old, still touring, her once-chubby face sculpted into something entirely other. Her aura no longer galvanizes or shocks, she is being slowed down, but her victorious thighs are as present as ever. She uses every platform to prove how perfectly muscled they are, if sometimes bruised from multiple cuppings or battered from a fall.
Owning such thighs is like owning the finest racehorse, the sleekest car, a rocket to the moon. Those thighs cost more than all the brocade in the Tudor court, than all the Murex in the Mediterranean.
They represent more woman-hours than the most fanatically beaded couture extravaganza. Madonna has tamed that autonomous region of the body.
She works out for those thighs, apparently for five hours a day. Say she started at 15, that’s 50 years of five hours a day for 365 days, that’s 91,250 hours, without counting performances and rehearsal. Let’s say a minimum of half a million hours for those thighs.
That is conspicuous consumption of time. No one except a star whose job it is to have such thighs has the time to work so hard and so long on taut, perfect muscles. Madonna is paid to be Madonna; the red-carpet nude mesh women are paid, one hopes, to wear the nude mesh.
They have spent days, months, years, to have thighs good enough to go naked to a party. There is no dress to ruin on a dance floor, because the concoctions of tulle, net, mesh, sand, petals, and glittery stones will have fallen apart long before they left the party. There is only a body for time to ruin.
