Among the usual bleak reports arriving from all corners of the world, last week there was one piece of news that was instead as sweet as a pile of rainbow-coloured gummy bears. A while back a California girl asked Los Angeles animal control authorities for a license to own a unicorn, obviously if she'd able to find one. The department recently answered young Madeleine and issued a Permanent Unicorn License to her, adding that the animal must be exposed to sunlight, moonbeams and rainbows and have its horn polished at least once a month with a soft cloth; that it can be sprinkled only with nontoxic and biodegradable glitter and should also be fed watermelon at least once a week.
The innocence of the request, accompanied by the sense of responsibility that many of us grown-ups simply don't have (think about the illegal traffic of exotic animals...) and the poetry of believing in a mythical animal while making sure she was complying with the law, was remarkable.
Unicorns nowadays are ubiquitous, almost banal: they are all over social media; they appear on children and grown-ups' clothes and accessories, on toys, and TV series ("My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic", based on the My little Pony franchise, features quite a few irrestistible and colourful unicorns such as Twilight Sparkle, a bookworm with a talent for magic).
Obviously, there's unicorn inspired hairstyles, nails and makeup and chances are that, even if you hate unicorns you may have one in your phone, maybe in the form of a sticker sent to you by a friend, a passionate fan of everything unicorns stand for.
Don't even try looking for unicorns in fashion as you will end up spotting it in too many modern collections, but the mythic animal was always en vogue: there's indeed a Vogue cover from February 1927 that actually looks perfect for the festive season, and features a woman riding an exotic animal that looks like a hybrid unicorn-pink zebra.
In 1953, Andy Warhol created an illustration for an advert for Schiaparelli gloves intended for the American market that featured a pink unicorn.
In more recent years a white lace unicorn led by a model wearing a sheer bubble helmet and a white feathered design closed Thom Browne's S/S 18 show. The designer also created a bag shaped like the head of a unicorn.
The symbolism behind the magic animal - that throughout the centuries was mentioned in The Old Testament, in natural history books by ancient Greek writers and in Chinese mythology - is even more interesting.
Appropriating the unicorn, Christian writings interpreted the animal as a symbol of Christ: in "The Hunt of the Unicorn" series of late Gothic tapestries (South Netherlands, 1495-1505), the death of the unicorn symbolised the Passion of Christ.
In paintings and frescoes (think about the "Virgin with a unicorn" (1604-05) fresco by Domenico Zampieri known as il Domenichino) - it is not rare to spot a unicorn standing next to a woman, a reference to the legend that says a unicorn can only be tamed by a virgin (Christian scholars translated this into an allegory for Christ's relationship with the Virgin Mary and these representations as symbolic views of the Annunciation story).
But maybe, in our complex and often confusing times, we should do like little Madeleine, willingly suspend our disbelief and hope we can befriend at some point in our lives a legendary creature like the unicorn that in Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking-Glass tells Alice, "Now that we have seen each other, if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you."
Till then we should maybe just turn the unicorn into a personal talisman for the values it stands for and be a bit like this mythical animal - strong, fierce, untamable, indomitable and, above all, elusive.
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