A BRAND NEW UGLY

There’s lots of talk about beauty, but what about ugly? That which doesn’t possess beauty can be simply insipid, unimpressive, unimportant, while something truly ugly possesses its own power. It agitates, upsets expectations.

OMA’s new building for luxury retailer Galleria in Seoul is ugly. Popping up in my twitter stream among prettily groomed interiors and houses, the masonry behemoth had a beastly presence. The structure’s dark outer skin is split by a run of faceted glass windows that swells like a cancerous growth at an outer corner. Its facade has no grid, no consistent measure except for its small stone triangular tiles, which blend like pixels into mud-colored strata. Its palette of dark stone and garish sea-green glass is unharmonic. The volume is rich in associations, none particularly flattering, and none architectural. This building reminds one of a geographical specimen, a molten chocolate desert, a subterranean mammal.

But one can’t mistake this for bad architecture. It’s complex, vivid and deliberate. It makes no attempt to look like a building, veering courageously from convention, particularly in the service of a luxury retailer peddling established European brands. This building is admirably ugly; it might even be deeply ugly. Is it arriving ahead of a larger wave, forecasting a new normal? And is it quietly dismantling some flaw in our thinking, pushing us towards a new beauty?

Photograph courtesy of OMA.

April 07, 2020 by Nalina Moses

PEACOCKING

Darwinism is an essentially cruel mechanism. The notion that an animal – that is, each one of us – is handed, at the moment of conception, a random genetic assortment that will determine our fitness and, therefore, survival, doesn’t leave much room for those qualities we understand to be essentially human: perseverance, hope, inspiration, fidelity, industry, creativity, and love. So all the talk surrounding Richard O Prum’s book The Evolution of Beauty, about Darwin’s theory of aesthetic, clears the air.

The book proposes that beauty in animals – a perfectly symmetrical face, a strong musculature, an auspicious coloring – which has typically been thought to be an indicator of fitness, might have nothing to do with fitness at all, but with the mutable tastes of the beholder. And, in nature, as it often is with birds, it is the woman doing the choosing. Taken to its logical conclusion, then, women’s tastes are driving evolution, and male beauty exists simply so that women can have their fancy.

A hopeful corollary, for men, is that male beauty is not always fated genetically, but often performed. So birds sing, fly, dance, and make colorful and shapely nests, all of which are traits that make them beautiful to females. It’s a theory of beauty that’s at once dismal and forgiving. Dismal in that it values appearances (color, profile, proportion, spectacle) above other factors (character, strength), and permits women to choose mates for pleasure. Forgiving in that any male has the opportunity to give it a try, to put on a show, and to succeed beyond what has been coded for him in his genes. (It is also a powerful scientific argument for fashion, for both men and women.)

I had a kooky hippie-ish Health Education teacher in the seventh grade who, when describing puberty, told us that women became wide at the hips so that they could bear children, and men became wide at the shoulders because that made them more attractive to women. And that might be exactly right.

Photograph courtesy of Alexander McQueen. Spring 2008, La Dame Bleue.

October 14, 2017 by Nalina Moses

IN EVERY PHOTO A HEARTACHE

Everything seen through photographer Irving Penn’s eye possesses a hard, polished gloss: still-lifes (of cuts of meats, cigarette butts, naked women), fashion shots (of Dovima, Carmen, Giselle), and portraits (of Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Ingmar Bergman). Penn’s restrospective at The Met, Irving Penn: Centennial, is packed with beauty. At the same time it reveals the kind of beauty these pictures possess - a stilled compositional perfection - leaves something wanting.

Penn did most of his work for fashion magazines, whose task it is to produce distilled, telegraphic, fantasies about clothes. These photos are often remarkably straightforward, showing a single mannequin posing in front of a building, a sleeve ballooning like a melon around a slender arm, a hooded face set against a blank backdrop. These images don’t require contemplation. They are not about character, story, or even clothing; they are instantaneously-appraised emblems of elegance.

But Penn’s still-lives, also commissioned for fashion magazines, often carry rich, complex narratives. One, Theatre Accident, New York, shows a gold clutch that’s been dropped at a woman’s feet, its contents spilling out across the carpet: opera glasses, pen, pocket watch, cigarette lighter, hairpin, earring, room key. Thought we see no more of this woman than her stockinged foot in a patent leather flat, we know all about her: her simple but rigorous toilette, her dark cluttered Manhattan apartment, her stable of gentleman friends. We also know that, tonight, she’s alone, she’s running late, she forgot to drop her lipstick in her purse, she lost her other earring in the cab. The composition is suggestive, it beckons; the objects roll off the bottom off the page into the world.

There’s only one fashion photograph in the show that supports this kind of narrative, Man Lighting Girl’s Cigarette (Jean Patchett). Here a chicly-attired young woman – seen in profile – sits beside a glass of red wine, holding out her cigarette to a man – seen only as a tuxedoed arm – to light for her. This scene is witnessed from a distance, through a half-empty wine bottle that’s tilting precariously in the foreground. The scenario sets off a string of questions: Has this young woman had too much to drink? Will she leave the room with this man? Will the other man, the man who opened the bottle for her, reappear? It’s these stories, in the end, that sear the image in the heart. Its formal beauty is, simply, appraised, and forgotten.

Man Lighting Girl’s Cigarette (Jean Patchett), New York, 1949. Image courtesy of The Irving Penn Foundation.

July 31, 2017 by Nalina Moses

AND VENUS WAS HER NAME

In a 2012 Times Magazine profile of Venus and Serena Williams, acclaimed essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote this about meeting Venus for the first time: “it’s easy to find yourself unprepared for her sheer prettiness." Reading that made me want to scream. Grown men have never been shy about admiring the looks of female tennis professionals. Virtually all of the women on the WTA tour acquire sex symbol status, and for some it even eclipses their game. So why the surprise that Venus is pretty? Is it her ferocious, unfeminine sportsmanship? Our narrow ideals of beauty? Or that she’s rarely photographed with the intention of making her pretty?

Right now Venus is on the cover of ESPN Magazine’s Body Issue, naked, perched tastefully and somewhat ridiculously against chalky white hills and a cloudy blue sky. The photos show off her enviable, classical proportions; she’s long and lean, almost like a Botticelli figure. Her body is lithe, curvy and muscular all at once. She’s smiling easily, entirely comfortable in herself. Typically when we see her she’s sporting a warrior-like grimace, on court, or extravagant hair and makeup, at public appearances. Here she’s flat-out pretty.

Photograph by Williams+Hirakawa, courtesy of ESPN.

July 11, 2014 by Nalina Moses