Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being I

Conclusion: In Closing/Close Clothing

C O N C L U S I O N IN CLOSING/CLOSE CLOTHING Paula Rabinowitz On December 14, 2008, Muntader al-Zaidi, a twenty-eight-year-old Iraqi journalist in attendance at then president George W. Bush’s “farewell” visit to the nation he had invaded five years before, hurled first one then the other of his shoes—black leather oxfords, to be exact—almost hitting his target both times. In stocking feet, he was wrestled to the ground, arrested, and tortured, he claims, for the subsequent year of his imprisonment. His act, a direct refutation of the images broadcast at the war’s beginning of Iraqis brandishing their shoes against the downed statue of Saddam Hussein, spurred numerous “shoe demonstrations” since—including thousands of shoes left lying on the street before 10 Downing Street to protest Israel’s war in Gaza on January 3, 2009; a Mexican student setting fire to his shoe at a demonstration in front of the United States Embassy in Mexico City protesting Israel’s war on January 11, 2009 (this burning shoe packed a double wallop linking Muntader al-Zaidi’s act to Richard Reid, the “shoe-bomber”); and another student, Selcuk Ozbek of Anadolu University, flinging his shoe, a Nike sneaker this time, at Dominique Strauss-Kahn, director of the International Monetary Fund at a speech at Bilgi University in Turkey. In the meantime, the Turkish shoe company that claimed to have made Muntader al-Zaidi’s shoes saw a worldwide spike in its sales after his act.1 Thus consumer capitalism rides on the heels of political activism; visibility be- comes a marketing tool. This inevitability—from political act to marketing tool—has been at the heart of modern fashion.2 That shoes—at once the most fetishized and most useful of accessories, as I argue in my survey, “Barbara Stanwyck’s Anklet: The Other Shoe”—have entered political theater speaks to the essence of what many of the essays in this collection on “Accessorizing the Body” intimate: that the body is no-body without its dressings; and so its presence as a political actor requires that the accessories of dress, close clothes, become the means through which the body speaks. Manuela Fraire, in her meditation, “No Frills, NoBody , Nobody,” Cristina Giorcelli in “Wearing the Body over the Dress: Sonia Delaunay’s Fashionable Clothes,” and Paola Colaiacomo in “Fashion’s Model Bodies: A Genealogy” explain in various ways—through Lacanian analysis, art and literary history, and semiotics —how the model body/the modern body is a clothed body, an accessorized body. Without the adornment of cloth, leather, metal, string, plastic, and everything else draped over, wrapped around, hung upon, tied to, and on and on, the body, its presence is never fully legible. Being seen, the first of any political acts, requires attention to what is on the body—and what gets taken oƒ it. Sonia Delaunay’s patterned dresses, made as potential mass-marketed cutouts, suggest just how strange and ambivalent the modernist body and its accessories are: her bold appliqués, blazoning letters and poems, and iconic names make their way into the tragic and defiant eƒorts of Hungarian tailors to resist Nazism by decorating the horrible yellow stars. As Zsófia Bán makes clear in “The Yellow Star Accessorized: Ironic Discourse in Fatelessness by Imre Kertész,” this gesture, remarkably described, harks back to that urtale of American resistance, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a novel, as text/ile artist Maria Damon reminds us in her statement accompanying Terra Divisa/Terra Divina : (T/E/A/R), in which Hawthorne is reworking the story of his family’s own haunting history in the form of his ancestor Judge John Hathorne who presided over the Salem witch trials. Thus the working by hand over a mark of shame (Hester’s “A”) and murderous humiliation (the canary-yellow Star of David) becomes a means of transvaluation, as pride of workmanship and even beauty insist on an “appeal,” as Bán notes, for and of P A U L A R A B I N O W I T Z / 2 3 8 the individual, whose decorated body, whose accessorized body, insists on being seen and being read. Modernist clothing—as the essays in this first volume of Habits of Being show— diƒers from ideas of dress and its accessories from earlier periods. In the...