BOOKS & ARTS
there remains a very keen popular interest in
mapping, coloured by a nostalgic sense of loss
about a world the Ordnance Survey suggest-
ed existed circa 1935: a wholesome-looking
chap with a pipe leans on a five-bar gate con-
sulting a map in front of a thatched cottage
with a picturesque lane leading into a wood.
The best maps are not always objective
and some are useless in practical terms.
Herman Melville said: ‘It is not down in any
map; true places never are.’ At just about
the moment Google Earth removed all top-
ographic secrets from the planet, a surprise
bestseller of 2010 was Judith Schalansky’s
Atlas of Remote Islands — Fifty Islands I
Have Not Visited and Never Will. The subti-
tle is revealing; so, too, is the fact that Scha-
lansky grew up in East Germany when
travel was a fantasy.
And still we come back to psychological
states. I have seen a scary Christian map of
the world with its ‘impenetrable hedge of
sin’ (where Satan installed dancing schools
and delivered Sunday papers). Or think of
Saul Steinberg’s marvellous 1975 New Yor-
ker cover ‘View of the World from 9th Ave-
nue’, with Manhattan at the centre of the
world and insignificant China and trouble-
some Africa consigned to the peripheries.
Meanwhile, Roald Dahl said that the reason
they have blank pages at the back of atlas-
es is ‘for new countries. You’re meant to fill
them in yourself.’
Meanwhile, if not a new country, Europe
is certainly changing shape. Since 2002 the
euro coin has shown a map of the Continent
including only EU members, which at the
time included the British Isles. Of course,
that must soon change to reflect political
reality. And how very odd it will look.
Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing
the Line is at the British Library from 4
November until 1 March 2017.
Fashion
Halloween hire
Nicky Haslam
The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined
Barbican Art Gallery, until 5 February
2017
To use a vulgar phrase, I can’t get my head
around this exhibition. It seems anything but
‘vulgar’. Daintily laid out and dimly lit in the
gloomier cloisters of Fortress Barbican is a
series of dresses — the chaps hardly get a
look-in, save for some of those white-knee-
britched, jaboty, gold-laced-coat get-ups
that people like Philip Green struggle into
for their fancy-dress parties — some ancient,
some modern, a lot very pretty, a few laugh-
ably ludicrous; anyone wanting a frightening
clown costume for Halloween will find inspi-
ration here. The clothes are, for the most
part, exquisitely made. Many are elegant,
and several supremely extravagant; howev-
er, the organisers of the exhibition seem to
be trying to lump them all into the ‘vulgar’
basket. Which seems odd.
The earliest shown, those wide-pan-
niered ‘infanta’ skirts (for keeping one’s
dwarf under?) with bosom-eliminatingbodices, miraculous with their glittering
appliquéd embroidery on wonderfully dull-
coloured silks, are clearly works of art as
much as fashion — as indeed are some of,
say, Galliano’s more extreme confections
— but are they vulgar? There must have
been a reason why they wanted this fan-
tastic extreme silhouette. It could possibly
have been religious. Did the Spanish court,
where they originated, see their monarchs
as being the embracers of their people,
who could metaphorically shelter under
those skirts, the Queen of Heaven protect-Vulgar is a weak current, boring,
even; the shocking knocks your
socks offing her flock? There is almost always a rea-
son why fashions evolve, just as in interior
decoration; if one analyses the early shape
of panelling — a rectangle with the cor-
ners scooped out — one realises that it’s
the shape of the animal hides our ancestors
tacked up in their draughty stone huts. Col-
umns are tree trunks, their capitals foliage,
and so on.
There are a trio, if indeed you can see
them in the murk, of peasant dresses from
the Auvergne, refreshingly simple and
perhaps the nearest thing to vulgar in its
true sense of being ‘echt’, or grass-rooted.
Advance a couple of centuries and Paco
Rabanne’s cream minidress, couture’s
antithesis of vulgar, stripped down much
farther than Chanel ever dreamed of, is
in the same galère, and a bit more shock-
ing in its simplicity than any of the fantasy
frou-frou that the next wave of designers
indulged in. And I was pleased that my dear
friend Rudi Gernreich, astonishingly one of
only two Americans included — the other
being Charles James, whose witty Snow
White-print dress long predates the War-
hol-stolen Campbell’s Soup stuff — is rep-Models wearing
the original topless
bathing suit by
Rudi GernreichBETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES