June, 17th, 2015

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LE SOIR CHARMANT

#PensaoAmor is an 18th-century building that was once a brothel with rooms rented by the hour to prostitutes and their clients that had become trendiest a red-hot café-cabaret. Other rooms are also occupied by an only erotica library, a tarot reader booth, a burlesque effeuillage scène and a hair salon. While I w andered about these odalisques de joie (framed in old vintaged pho tographies), I realized the shifting fashions of their styles ( and morphology) from the early nineteenth century to this decade. I might have Freudian interpretations of female fashion and their erogenous zones. Truth is the changing technologies, political events, moralities, and other issues have indeed impacted women’s fashion. There is an abundance of collections on the tension between modesty and eroticism in female dress. James Laver suggested that one reason for changing trends was to shift the emphasis to different areas of the body, or erogenous zones. Performativity, as conceived by Judith Butler, refers not to the way that dress expresses our social role—which she would call simply “performance”—but to the process by which our interactions with societal norms produce our gender as we experience it. For example, a girl paying dress-up may be playing the imaginary role of a princess (or a fille de joie), but that activity is also a way for her to look “feminine” and “pretty” and to experience internal and external reactions to her appearance. Those experiences help shape her gender identity and the way she interacts with other adults, even when she is not dressed as a princess. She draws on her feminité-en-devenir to tease out the eroticism in her style. She might recall that the great Charles #Worth of the #Paris fashion house instinctively unders tood that women liked feeling sexually attractive and therefore created dresses that accommodated their body desires. Above all, she reminds us that the desire to be beautiful, elegant and well-turned out, is a timeless cultural concern for femininity, whether as a #PensaoAmor social hostess or as a #Millennial.ista professional ..
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#ALESSANDROBERGA | L’ÉDITOR
#LISBOA #LISBON #MODEDIPLOMATIQUE (at Pensao Amor)