Fashion Victims: Mina Loy's Travesties

The word "travesty" derives from the notion of to cross (trans) and to dress (vestir). Cross-dressing in current parlance has been reduced to its associations with wearing the clothing of the opposite sex. Nonetheless, this is only one of the term's many possible crossings associated with fashion. While transvestite refers literally to the practice of cross-dressing, travesty is usually associated with theatrical notions of parody, masquerade, burlesque, and debasement. In addition to this usage, to travesty, or "to dress so as to be made ridiculous" (OED), was first used in English to refer as much to literary parodies as to theatrical burlesque: specifically, to the parodic refashioning of biblical and classical texts. In seventeenth century England, such debasements were, naturally, considered to be primarily French in nature. However, the travesty is used as much to describe a "mock poem" (OED) based on Virgil or the Bible as a theatrical romance in burlesque. Thus, travesty also implies a crossing of genres: through parodic imitation it questions the ways that texts are interpreted, classified and valued.

Figure 1: Man Ray, Mina Loy. 1918. © 1999 Man Ray Trust/Artist's Rights Society, NY/ADAGP, Paris.

All three of the literary genres that travesty developed out of—classical, biblical and romance—were important sources for the work of modernist avant-garde writer, Mina Loy.¹ Her writings, which tended towards fierce parody and biting sarcasm, had their roots as much in seventeenth-century burlesque and eighteenth-century satire as in nineteenth-century symbolism and romanticism. It is not surprising that "travesty" is a recurring term in Loy, given her taste for highly wrought, Latinate constructions, her ironic stance and her constant engagement with the world of fashion.²

Loy felt that fashion was a medium that could be used to cross boundaries, not just of gender but of aesthetics as well. She took the "ready-made" articles of clothing and crossed them in a way that suggested incongruity and parody. Most famously perhaps, this is seen in Man Ray's photograph of her with a ready-made thermometer as an earring [Fig. 1].

Loy understood the resonance of Duchamp's use of the term "ready-made" to mean both a contradiction and a deceit, in its erasure of the agent who made the clothes. No longer "hand-made," not even "machine-made," the object is made seemingly without agent: a miracle of mass-production.³ In this way the ready-made is a travesty of a travesty: a parodic imitation of a disguise.

"Travestied Torsos": Rose and Exodus
In her long poem, Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, (1923-1925) Loy uses fashion in order to explore the ways that subjects can be hemmed in by cultural patterns of femininity, masculinity, and bourgeois gentility that are more than just sartorial. In this modernist Sartor Resartus the "Anglo-Mongrels" of the title refer to the characters "Exodus," the wandering tailor, and his artist daughter "Ova." Exodus marries the "English Rose" whose clothes are emblems of her psychological and sexual repression: Rose is "Albion / in female form... under a pink print / sunbonnet" ( Last Lunar Baedeker 123).⁴ A symbol of femininity "simpering in her / ideological pink" she is Christian, imperialist, and repressed (Last 124). She is a travesty and an emblem of Victorian England.

In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault writes that the body is an "object and target of power" and through "technologies" these "docile bodies" are made to be "useful"; that is, they are placed in service to the state. ⁵ Loy's portrait of Rose illustrates how the fashion industry is one such technology which uses bodies to construct "useful" subject positions. In this way, Rose, with her "impenetrable pink curtain" of fabric represents the crinolined Victorian and bustled Edwardian lady in service to patriarchy (Last 128). As Alison Lurie argues in The Language of Clothes, these layers of fabric on the Edwardian woman's body, increased the bulk and stature of women which better "allowed them to display their father's or husband's wealth."⁶ Furthermore her repression is a cultural condition, a trait passed on socially rather than genetically via "the post-conceptual / virginity of Nature" (Last 128). Inheritance through dead tradition is a "virgin" conception:

Conservative Rose
storage of British Empire-made pot-pourri
of dry dead men       making a sweetened smell
among a shrivelled collectivity. (Last 122)

In this image of embalmed husbandry, conservation of tradition is not one associated with a renewal of life but with the preservation of the dead, leading to a race of hollow men (a classic modernist image that is more familiar to us from T. S. Eliot⁷ ). Rose, who is "self-pruned / of the primordial attributes" (Last 121), is also self-fashioning and in this way an active (if not entirely cognizant) agent of her "pink paralysis" (Last 122). Nonetheless, the poem "English Rose" explores how there are cracks in the armor if not penetrations into the pink curtain. Rose is described as "Trimmed with some travestied flesh" (Last 121), suggesting that the travesty is more than just clothing but includes the body as well. Loy's characteristically-packed levels of modifiers and heavy alliterations assert that the travesty could go both ways, as it were. The body is clothed in such a way as to disguise itself. In addition, the flesh is so travestied that it becomes part of the trimmings. This illustrates another notion of travesty: a mixing and blending to such a point that the separate components become indistinguishable from one another.⁸

If Rose, on the one hand, is Victorian England's emblem, then Exodus, on the other hand, is England's "other." He dresses the part of the bourgeois English gentleman but finds that other roles (his Jewishness, his status as an Eastern European immigrant) have already been inscribed on him by English culture. The tailor is not so easily altered. The figure of Exodus (like Loy's own father) comes from an educated upper middle class Hungarian Jewish lineage. But his class position is unstable. He loses much of his former class superiority as a Jewish immigrant in England. However, he tries to restore some of that lost status by marrying into the English, Protestant middle class. Despite his financial success as a tailor, with a proper English Rose as trophy wife, Exodus is unable to make the proper fit. In the poignant last poem in Anglo-Mongrels, "The Social Status of Exodus," Exodus tries unsuccessfully to escape his past by emulating the class position of the English gentlemen who are his customers, described as:

(Gentlemen
wear clothes
with an easy air of debonair
inevitability). (Last 174)

In this way, Loy shows that the body is part of fashion's constructions. Indeed, as Lurie points out, the design of the "sack suit" seemed designed to flatter the sedentary man but look misshapen on the broader shape of the working man (130-142). John Berger argues that in the nineteenth century, it was the English gentleman who "launched the suit," creating a cultural hegemony in men's fashion with its associations with the sedentary power of bourgeois life (34).⁹ (Interestingly, Loy's preference for the type of man whose suit does not properly fit him—that is, a man who doesn't fit the bourgeois norm—can be seen in the characters of the brutish Colossus and the Chaplinesque Insel. ¹⁰) Exodus' poignant failure to inhabit the role of the English gentleman illustrates Berger's notion of the "cultural hegemony" of the suit. Loy shows how Exodus' class and ethnicity have already been inscribed on his body so that he can never fully alter himself to fit into the middle class English pattern. As both a maker of suits and as an "ostracized / fancier of travestied torsoes," Exodus is both a participant in and a victim of the mechanisms which disseminate the ideology of the bourgeois gentleman (Last 175).

The figure of the English gentleman is dependent upon the myth of Exodus as "essentially" other, just as it is on Rose as "essentially" feminine. Fashion, like romance, is founded on an economy of desire. In Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose Loy shows that for Exodus and Rose this economy of desire is one based on emulation. Just as Loy rewrote the narratives of romance (best seen in her long poem Love Songs [1915-1917]), she challenged the economies of fashion. We can see Exodus and Rose as victims of fashion's regulatory regimes. Nonetheless, this is not an entirely imposed position nor is it the only one in the poem. For example, the bawdily comedic figure of the unruly child Colossus demonstrates one form of "resistance" against norms of masculinity and bourgeois culture:

And who
would care to call at
any house on finding the young master in the hall
pissing into our reverend pastor's hat? ("Enter Colossus" Last 151)

"Gloria Populi": Labor Movements
Loy's concern with the ethnic specificity of

Figure 2: Gloria Populi." Courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Transcribed from a manuscript in the collection. (Mina Loy Papers, Box 5, Folder 149, 'Misc. Fragments" [1925-30, nd.]  See also Folder 102 "Mass Production on 14th Street" [July 27, 1942] and Folder 112 "On Third Avenue" [1942]). Words in brackets I could not discern. Misspellings are Loy's.

urban labor forces and in particular its relation to fashion continues in a group of poems, set in New York City and written in the 1940s, twenty years after she wrote Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose. The two poems "Mass Production on 14th Street" and "On Third Avenue" were originally drafted together as one poem, entitled "Gloria Populi."¹¹ All three were written around 1942, when Loy was living in the Bowery. While this was after her active involvement in major modernist movements such as Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, it is arguably the period of Loy's most radical literary and visual production. "On Third Avenue" explores the laboring underworld of the city. "Mass Production" focuses on products and the shoppers passing by department store windows. Both poems have lines taken from "Gloria Populi" but neither poem maintains the invocations of "O jews O negroes" [Fig. 2].

"Gloria Populi" explicitly draws a connection to production and reproduction by depicting a reanimation of the urban industrial environment through workers sowing the pavement into a garden of flowers. The sowing of the streets plays with the pun of sow and sew in order to transform the urban landscape into an industrial garden. The most striking aspect of this draft are the repeated refrains: "O jew" and "O negro." By the 1940s the garment industry had relied for generations on the sweated labor of Jewish immigrants. Although the labor movements had been fighting for half a century for reforms, this poem emphasizes that the world of sweated labor had not disappeared completely.

Despite the changing economy in the twentieth century the blacks in urban cities were still the bottom of the labor force. By the 1940s the northern migration of African-Americans was bursting the seams of the labor force in northern industrial cities. A century earlier Irish and French immigrants had worked the northern mills producing cloth derived from the labor of southern slaves. Loy's invocation of the "negro," asserts that the productivity of the city's African-American population still "drives" the labor force. This community, described as "loosely knit," perhaps in a stereotypical contrast to the rigid cultural codes of the Jewish community, provides the "tempo" for their relaxation after work, at the "hour of Exodus."

Here, in an image of black culture driving the forces of aesthetic production, Loy employs a common racial stereotype at the same time that she is commenting upon the white appropriation of the black aesthetic, which is arguably one of the definitive aesthetics of modernism. Indeed, white workers with enough earnings for leisure made their way to Harlem at the end of their shifts ("the hour of Exodus"). African-American music, in the form of jazz and blues, was used by both black and white artists to convey the notion of a pulse of renewed creativity which is rooted in a history of suffering.¹²

In considering movements of the avant-garde, "Gloria Populi" imagines a musical invocation drawing together two diasporas into a field of tulip dreams, but the final product was less than a bed of roses. Loy's draft illustrates the difficulty of imagining relationships across ethnicities that are untainted by appropriation and stereotype. Loy cannot conceive of a resolution; she comes up against the utopian vision of the united workers of the world and pulls back. This reticence is not an indication that Loy rejects its goals but that she finds them unconvincing. The unfinished poem, "Gloria Populi," with its stops and stutters, is a larger unfinished piece—still to be completed today.

"Mass Production on 14th Street": Hanging Gardens of Eden
The garden metaphor is part of the imagery of "Gloria Populi" but in "Mass Production on 14th Street" the associations have been changed from the creativity of the laborer to the temptation of the consumer. In "Mass Production" Loy calls clothing "Eros' produce" (Lost 111). At the end of the poem two lovers pass a window and point to the "ecru and ivory / replica of the dress she has on / doused in a reservoir of ruby neon" (Lost 113). The neon lighting turning white dresses red suggests the prostitution of marriage and of women who wear dresses purchased for them by their lovers. In addition, the resemblance between the woman and the mannequin disrupts any notion not only of the original, but also of nature and the real. In this image, who is the mannequin? Who is the model for the "real" version of fashion?

The radical separation between worker and product, nature and produce is developed in the metaphor of the city as a distorted garden of Eden, with products in windows leading women into temptation. Indeed the history of department stores begins with anxiety about their role in the moral corruption of women. In the nineteenth century in Paris, London, and New York there were fears that department stores—or magasins—were places where women could be transformed into prostitutes.¹³ In fact, department stores, which relied heavily on women's cheap labor, were rigidly paternalistic social systems that turned their low-paid working-class clerks into bourgeois gentlewomen through intense "training."¹⁴ By the twentieth century there was a more idealized popular view of these institutions; the stores promoted themselves to female shoppers (who were the target of most advertising by the 1920s) as an "Adamless Eden," a female social world of gentile consumerism, a shopper's paradise.¹⁵

 In Loy's imagery of the "foliage of mass production," nature is replaced by an industrial organicism (Lost 111). The dresses on a rack are "hanging gardens / of the garment worker" ( Lost 111). Flowers and trees are replaced by windows full of replica commodities, as Loy describes window shopping in terms of the precession of simulacra:¹⁶

From the conservatories of commerce'
long glass aisles,
idols of style
project a chic paralysis
through mirrored opals
imaging
the cyclamen and azure
of their mobile simulacra's|
tidal passing. (Lost 112)

"On Third Avenue" is structured as an elegy. First there is the description of the departed. Second, there is the consolation. The second part of "On Third Avenue" begins with a line, repeated later, "Such are the compensations of poverty, / to see————" (Lost 110). Like her art assemblages from the same period, Loy's consolation for the working poor is patched from the fabric of refuse, Eliotic "fragments": the light reflected in oil in the streets, the abandoned chair on the sidewalk, the cinema box office.¹⁷ For those who can't afford the film, the show outside the cinema is free. Once again, Loy's vision is one of window shopping: a description of what you can get without paying the price of the ticket. The poem conjures a vision of enchantment which sees in the box office a princess trapped in her tower; in an abandoned chair, a story of comfort, and of affluence; in an automobile's waste, the shimmering reflection of the stars. The first compensation is the beauty of the detritus left in or on the street and the promised imaginary of the "box office Goddess." If the incognitos of the street are the lost souls, then the box office Goddess is Persephone, mediating the worlds of the dead and the living—that is, of the hell of the street and the promised life existing in the fantasy of the cinema.

The second compensation Loy offers is one of movement, not of those who are "On Third Avenue" but of those who pass by. A moving museum of statues: the outlined figures in a trolley pass by, through, and out of this world:

Transient in the dust,
the brilliancy of a trolley
loaded with luminous busts;

lovely in anonymity
they vanish
with the mirage
of their passage. (Lost 110)

Figure 3: Loy called this invention: "The Corselet (Armour for the Body)".  The three figures have the following captions: "fig I: youthful figure reclining"; "fig II: middle age figure reclining"; "fig III: diagram of corrections achieved by the corselet." Courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Mina Loy Papers, Box 7, Folder 186, "Inventions" [1940-1960]).

Her body actively works against the aging process: reviling, verging, and fleeing death and decay. Loy herself was interested in ways that one could resist what seemed to be the inevitable revolt of the aging body. It is interesting to note that around the time of the writing of this poem, Loy designed a "corselet" for the "alleviation of dowager's hump" illustrating the physical movements of the decaying body [Fig. 3].

Loy's literary and artistic oeuvre traces a fascination with the power of the grotesque body. In "Chiffon Velours," the woman's "web of wrinkles" suggests a new, organic structure for her flesh at the same time that it portrays a body disintegrating. Her flesh is replaced by external props of fashion as "the site of vanished breasts / is marked by a safety pin" (119). The aging female body, with clothing held together by pins, is, for Loy, as much or more a marking of fashionable discourse as the boas of young women shoppers in the Parisian streets described in her poem "Magasins du Louvre." This design of destitution is an economy of production whose consumption is in the gaze of the artist. Of course, Loy risks aestheticizing horror and appropriating suffering.

With the image of the woman resting "against the cornerstone / of a department store," Loy creates a dialogue between the institutions of fashion and the body of the impoverished, aging woman. While her presence does not alleviate her poverty, it does undermine the notion that the woman on the street is a simulacrum of the mannequin in the window. Indeed, this woman models a fashion that, to Loy, is a creative act just as—if not more—interesting than the "idols of style" in "Mass Production." The woman in "Chiffon Velours" does not wear a simulacra of fashion but an "original design":

Hers alone to model
the last creation,

original design of destitution.

Clothed in memorial scraps
skimpy even for a skeleton. (Lost 119)

In "Making Do: Uses and Tactics," Michel de Certeau defines "uses" as fixed practices of consumption in contrast to "tactics" which are indeterminate practices of play. Uses fix objects in a place and time; tactics are rapid movements, contingent upon place and time, that sever the consumer and the object of consumption from their defined positions.¹⁸ In this poem, the woman's use of ready-made objects of fashion in a defamiliarized context demonstrates how for Loy fashion can be a tactical maneuver in the practices of everyday life. The complexity of this art is seen in the combination of hopefulness and despair in the final image of the poem where her skirt "reflects the gutter":

Trimmed with one sudden burst of flowery cotton
half her black skirt
glows as a soiled mirror
reflects the gutter—
a yard of chiffon velours. (Lost 119)

Notes

1  For biographical information on Mina Loy see Carolyn Burke's Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1996).

2 See my "Mina Loy and Fashion" in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet , edited by Maeera Shreiber and Leith Tuma (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1988) 443-455. For an overview of Loy's life-long engagement with fashion and design and the connections between fashion and the avant-garde more generally.

3 Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du sel) eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford UP, 1973).

4 Currently Loy's selected poems are available in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger Conover (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1996). Unfortunately this volume does not contain Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose. This long poem of Loy's was published in the collection, The Last Lunar Baedeker , ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands, NJ: The Jargon Society, 1980), an edition which is now out of print.

5 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1979) 139.

6 The Language of Clothes, (New York: Random House, 1981) 69.

7 T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men was published in 1925. "The English Rose" was published as a separate poem in Loy's 1923 volume, Lunar Baedecker (sic) (Dijon, France: Contact Editions).

8 The OED provides this odd culinary example of the use of the word travesty from 1865 (Felton's Family Letters): "About ten courses of meat, so mixed, blended, and travestied with seasonings and vegetables, that it would puzzle a Philadelphia lawyer to tell what any of them is made of."

9 In "The Suit and the Photograph" John Berger looks at August Sander's 1913 photograph of three German peasants in suits and argues that their class is apparent as their suits do not fit their bodies. The suit was being mass produced for rural and urban markets who accepted this fashion as a signifier of respectability. Hence, the peasants in suits are evidence that they have "succumb[ed] to a cultural hegemony" (in About Looking [New York: Pantheon Books, 1980] 35). On the other hand, in "Popular Fashion and Working Class Affluence" Angela Partington argues that the working class consumer was not "a passive victim of fashion" but able to "actively use fashion and other goods as a means of articulating class identity in new ways" (in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, eds. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson [Berkeley: U of California P, 1993] 146).

10  Excerpts from Colossus , a fictionalized portrait of her second husband, the Dadaist Arthur Cravan, have been published in New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker and Owens, 1986) 104-119, and the novel Insel has been published by Black Sparrow Press (1991).

11 "Gloria Populi" is a draft poem in the Beinecke Manuscript Collection at Yale University. The draft includes imagery of garments as foliage from "Mass Production on 14th Street" as well as "for the alleviation of the loved" and other lines from "On Third Avenue." "Mass Production on 14th Street" was not published until the 1982 posthumous edition of The Last Lunar Baedecker although Loy's manuscripts suggest that the poem was written in July of 1942. "On Third Avenue," also written in 1942, was published in The Last Lunar Baedeker as well as in the 1958 collection Lunar Baedecker and Time-Tables under the title "On Third Avenue: Part 2."

12 As Houston Baker writes in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Afro-American modernism is a sounding and resounding, always moving up from slavery. "Speech, talk, sounds of wage labor and gainful employment were radically modern against a backdrop of exploitative impoverishment and barbarous enslavement" (102).

13 For a discussion of concerns about women and morality in department stores see Bill Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (London: Leicester University Press, 1995) 178 ff; Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) 190-210; and Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986) 134 ff. See also Rachel Bowlby's Just Looking: Consumer Culture and Desire in Dreisser, Gissing, and Zola (London: Methuen, 1985) for an analysis of morality, women and department stores in nineteenth-century novels.

14 See "Made, Not Born: From Shopgirl to the Skilled Saleswoman" in Counter Cultures 124-176.

15 The "Adamless Eden" was first used by Edward Filene to describe his Boston department store (Counter Cultures 176).

16 In Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983) Jean Baudrillard describes the "precession of simulacra," whereby the simulation replaces the real thus breaking down distinctions between "real" and "imaginary" (5).

17 Most of these works were ephemeral, made from found materials that have disintegrated or were never saved. A few photographs have survived and have been reprinted in Carolyn Burke's Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy.

18 The Practice of Everyday Life , trans. Steven Rendall (1974; Berkeley: U California P, 1984) 28-42.

© 1999 Stanford Humanities Review unless otherwise noted.