If you know your fashion history, you will know that lipstick patterns and prints of lips have always been in fashion (remember for example Saint Laurent's A/W 2015 lipstick printed shirts, dresses, bags and stilettos?).
Yet our lips were largely forgotten in the last year as we have all been wearing face masks because of Coronavirus. While we have learnt to smile with our eyes (definitely no mean feat and easier said than done, but something that pushed the sales of eye makeup…), our lips were neglected and the routine of wearing lipstick was largely forgotten.
But maybe we should remember a bit the virtues of lipstick in times of crisis. There are fascinating facts about lipstick and the Second World War (and for a few years now I've been taking notes of them for a personal project entitled "Lipstick in the Blitz").
For example, in the early '40s and for the duration of the war, red lipstick was mandatory for women who joined the US Army. During the Second World War, lipstick was a "red badge of courage" and an act of defiance (Hitler hated lipstick, so wearing it in Allied countries was a statement), but also a symbol of self-esteem.
As you may remember from a previous post, there is an entry in the diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, one of the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen, that mentions the power of lipstick.
"I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives," Gonin wrote. "It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men, women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect (…)"
"It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity."
Gonin's shocking description of life in the camp and the conditions of the prisoners, suddenly changes tones when he tells us about the lipstick shipment. This simple accessory ends up marking for the female prisoners, a slow return to a life that the Nazis had denied them by considering them "things" or "pieces" ("Stücke").
Vaccinations are helping us to going back to our ordinary lives, so maybe lipsticks will again become the protagonist of our daily routines and will not be appearing in our lives as a fun print of a nostalgic gesture replicated on garments and accessories.
For some, though, old habits never change: my mum is in her 80s and she still insists on carrying her fiercely red lipstick in her bag everywhere she goes and on wearing it under her face mask. That she was a child during the Second World War tells a lot about resilience, fighting and a simple gesture that we have largely forgotten but that can still put that proverbial (and much needed) smile on our faces.
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