Fashion has strong links with cinema but also with literature.
Some novels feature beautifully evocative descriptions of clothes and accessories and there are particular authors, like Gabriele D’Annunzio, who also designed clothes, had an impact on fashion trends and on society’s style.
Among my favourite books with a strong connection with fashion and, as we are going to see in this post, with cinema, there is André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s La Motocyclette (The Girl on the Motorcycle, 1963).
I have two very strong memories connected with this book: the first is linked with finding quite a few years ago in a Notting Hill Book Exchange a rare edition of the novel.
I remember I was a student and therefore perennially skint, but I decided to sacrifice all I had in my pockets to buy the book.
At the time I was also carrying out a research on Alexander Trocchi and the book was translated by the Scottish writer, so finding the book was a sign of destiny, I just HAD to buy it.
Years passed, but The Girl on the Motorcycle came back haunting me again while interviewing Tom McGrath.
A few years ago I was extremely lucky to spend an entire afternoon with the late Scottish writer and his partner, translator Ella Wildridge, and, in that occasion, Tom shared with me some wonderfully crazy memories of his friendship with Trocchi.
One of his stories was about going to visit him in London in the 60s.
At the time Trocchi was staying temporarily with Michael de Freitas in a house that looked like a typical location from a Trocchi novel, that is near a canal and a dock. It was de Freitas’ beautiful wife who opened the door to McGrath and accompanied him to Trocchi’s room.
Here’s the story in McGrath’s words: “Alex was sitting at a typewriter translating The Girl on the Motorcycle.
He was doing the job for John Calder, and every now and then - and when I say every now and then I mean every 5 minutes - he would take a fix very quickly using a little tube with an eye drop at one end. In between shooting and translating he would eat yoghurt.
He had to work, but also wanted to talk to me, so he would type a bit, then he would stop and shoot up again.
When Alex took a fix with a syringe, he took his time since that was more of a serious thing. But what I witnessed that day was different since it looked as if he was priming an engine.
Every time I was with him it was always as if I was examining the habits of a rare bird.
This was the first image of him in London and there were various things he did that day I never saw him doing before, from shooting so fast to eating yoghurt – since, as though this may sound strange, at that time I had never seen a carton of yoghurt.
Eventually one day he came to me with The Girl on the Motorcycle saying that he couldn’t be bothered translating it and told me that if I had done it, he would have paid me.
I spent an entire weekend translating the novel with a friend who had lived in Paris, but, after we delivered the translation, we got a phone call from Trocchi saying ‘This is no good, you’re just translating too many words!’ which was the opposite of his translation since he had done it in a hurry!
So he said there was no money for us. I got annoyed with him at the time, but it didn’t really bothered me too much, because he gave you so much as a person and, if you knew Alex, you had to accept these things, since he could be very selfish and bullying.”
This is a very interesting story connecting Trocchi "the translator" to the French novel, and Scottish writer Edwin Morgan found a different connection between Trocchi and André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s book.
According to him the barge in Young Adam and Cain’s Book, like the motorcycle in La Motocyclette are literary expedients that have got something in common.
They are indeed almost "psychogeographical" elements and have one specific function, that of moving the characters in space or moving them through past memories, present impressions and future intuitions.
In the case of André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s novel, that follows newly-married Rebecca leaving her husband Raymond sleeping in bed in their house to visit her lover on her motorbike, there is one complementary element to the motorcycle, Rebecca’s motorcyclist outfit.
The suit already appears in the first pages of the novel:
One wardrobe contained coats and waterproofs, fewer male garments than female as is normal, and Rebecca had pushed aside the rest of the clothes to lift from a corner the only piece of clothing which could make her heart beat and inspire thoughts of pride, a garment which she never put on without a feeling of exaltation and which Raymond always looked at with a mixture of sadness and mistrust.
It was a combination suit of black leather, all very shiny and lined with white fur, which closed right up to the neck and fastened there and at the wrists and ankles with straps and buckles.
Rebecca had opened it wide (which made it look like the hide of some huge beast newly flayed), then, legs first, she had climbed into it completely naked save for the little codpiece of transparent nylon over the triangle of her short hairs, and pulling upwards on the little tongue of the zip-fastener she had closed this dark sheath over her naturally brown body.
Rebecca’s outfit is completed by black fur-lined bootees, motoring goggles and a cowl.
In a way the book already had a strong erotic value in its main title since the powerful rhythms of cars and motorcycles are conventionally equated in literature with sexual excitement.
Yet it's actually the suit that assumes throughout the pages of the book a rebelliously erotic value.
Rebecca, who looks like a young devil to the other drivers she meets on the road, wears it with nothing underneath and her attention for the external world and the road is often distracted by a certain awareness of her nakedness and by constant fantasies about her lover undressing her and the sound of the zip-fastener sliding.
The novel is almost cyclical since, while at the beginning we see Rebecca wearing the suit, towards the end we follow her fantasising about finally reaching Daniel, who, in her imagination, will remove her cowl, goggles, and boots and unfasten her leather suit as if it were a discarded skin.
So the suit is an interesting link connecting the book with eroticism and fashion, but when the controversial novel was turned into an even more controversial film directed by Jack Cardiff (entitled The Girl on a Motorcycle or Naked Under Leather) and starring Marianne Faithfull as Rebecca and Alain Delon as Daniel, the fashion connection was strengthened since it was French fashion house Lanvin that provided Rebecca's wardrobe.
In the film the black and white motorcyclist outfit is transformed into a black leather catsuit that dramatically highlights Faithfull’s thin body, while the zip is decorated with a rhinestone ring that allows Daniel to unzip it quickly by locking his finger into it.
Lanvin also supplied other garments for Faithfull's character, from white dresses in typical 60s styles to chic blouses matched with leather skirts and a glamorous sequinned top Rebecca wears during a skiing trip to the mountains with Raymond.
It's interesting to note that Lanvin hasn't produced catsuits for quite a while now.
In his collections for Lanvin, Creative Director Alber Elbaz is firmly keeping in mind strong women (see for example his barbarian princesses from the Autumn/Winter 2010 collection) and is mainly focusing on practical yet extremely luxurious and chic black dresses (or jumpsuits) in sensual fabrics and materials such as leather (see for example the Autumn/Winter 2008 or Spring/Summer 2010 collections).
In a way it looks as if Elbaz were focusing on Rebecca's chic wardrobe before she meets Daniel and develops a passion for motorcycles.
Yet the leather catsuit is not entirely unfashionable at the moment: we have seen this garment reappearing in a very stylish and cinematic version on the Hermès’ A/W 2010 runway (see previous post to know more about it), but also on Joseph Altuzarra’s.
The Autumn/Winter 2010 collection by Altuzarra features indeed quite a few slightly aggressive looks for modern Amazons, including black goat fur coats, fetishist dresses, S&M skirts and leather catsuits that, stitched and sewn together, look like crossovers between Rebecca’s outfit and Edward Scissorhands’s attire and hint at the themes of strength and fragility.
Designer Gemma Slack reinterpreted instead the catsuit transforming it into a leather mini-dress inspired by armours and ideas of protection, creating a dress characterised by an anatomical hand-moulded spine on the back decorated with metal studs.
Talking about motorcycles and armours it's obviously impossible not to mention the most perfect synthesis between a motorbike and the female body, Thierry Mugler’s 1992 motorcycle corset.
The latter - also appearing in George Michael's video for his single 'Too Funky' (directed by Mugler himself) and worn by Beyoncé Knowles - is the ultimate embodiment of the motorcycle look and the incarnation of male fantasies, a design that for decades sparked debates and made critics wonder if it represented a motorcycle swallowing a woman or a woman metamorphosing into a motorcycle.
If you're after less extreme looks inspired by Rebecca, urban wear brands like Evil Twin recently paid homage in its Spring/Summer 2010 collection to The Girl on the Motorcycle, with a "Naked Under Leather" T-shirt.
If after reading this post you would like to watch again Cardiff's film or if you've never seen it, The Girl on a Motorcycle is available on The Auteurs site (you can watch it for €3). Hopefully the film will inspire you further fashionable designs and not just leather catsuits (think for example about the "road" inspirations in Hussein Chalayan's A/W 2010 collection). In the meantime, enjoy the film trailer!
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Wow fantastic and good eyes....
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Posted by: Motor girls | July 08, 2010 at 09:54 AM