Coco Chanel at the V&A

Unlike the Diva exhibition, which I'm keen to see at some point if only because it includes PJ Harvey memorabilia and Theda Bara's spangly Cleopatra bra from 1917, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the V&A's show about Coco Chanel (who they insist on calling Gabrielle) had I been paying to get in. As it was, I went with Ms Mauritia and the Snappers (that's not a band, the Snappers are a couple) and because they have two Museum memberships between them that was four of us admitted for nothing. 

If nothing else, Chanel has to be celebrated for her colossal success in building a business that survived so long, and remaining actively designing clothes into her 80s. But it's that very commercial success which I think is possibly the more interesting story to be told, as opposed to the nature of her clothes as design artefacts, and of course it's that which the V&A necessarily focuses on: get a group of social history curators to plan the same show and they'd come up with something completely different. At first it seemed this exhibition didn't have much of a 'story' at all: it was only when we emerged from the War and dealt with Chanel's counterattack on the Dior style that things seemed to move forward at all, even in terms of design. But the show has a couple of dramatic visual set-pieces which will linger in my memory a long while. A turn from a dark corridor of jewellery leads to a vast space lined with a parade of airborne dresses which are slightly intimidating - haute couture doesn't get much higher than that - and the exhibition culminates in a mirrored staircase which recalls Chanel's final show in 1970 (I think). Rather a triumph of the curator's art, that.

Renewing the Kit

Essentially derived from the winter gown most medieval people might have worn from time to time, a cassock is the most basic item of the clergyperson’s kit. No matter what liturgical setting I’m functioning in, the cassock is the level below which I will not descend. Take from me my cotta, my chasuble and alb, but leave me my plain black! 

Ever since I was at theological college, I have had two cassocks. They were made by lovely Mr Taylor (a man captured by nominative determinism if ever anyone was) at his shop along the Cowley Road in Oxford, and have done sterling service for nearly twenty years. Thankfully my dimensions haven’t altered very much over that time! It was Mr Taylor who first alerted me to the fact that I am a bit wonky, my left shoulder being higher than my right.

The first warning I had that my cassocks were not immortal came quite some time ago when I tore the lining in first one and then the other while putting them on. Gradually the damage extended and this became more and more irritating as it was progressively harder to get my arms where they should be. Then I began to notice that the cuffs were wearing at the folds. There was no alternative but to replace them.

Sadly Mr Taylor, who has for all this time kept me supplied with ecclesiastical gear even after he’d decamped from the Cowley Road and set up shop in an industrial unit in rural Oxfordshire, had given up making cassocks. I turned to a well-known firm of clergy outfitters who I’ve dealt with very satisfactorily in the past, and tackled the options on their website – fabric, buttons, cuffs, number of back pleats. The company is based some distance away and unless I wanted to catch up with them at a church resources conference or something my measurements would have to be sent on. Helpfully the website gives a comprehensive list of what’s required and my sister was willing to wield a tape measure. There was a bit of a delay after the fabric I’d requested turned out to be ‘unsatisfactory’ to the company and had to be replaced with something similar: ‘only the weave is different’, they assured me.

But there are risks involved, especially when you’re spending something like £400 on a single garment. Medium barathea turns out to be quite heavy (about a third as weighty again as my old cassock) and I think the second cassock I order will be in a lighter fabric. We’ve also been a bit generous in measurements and the new cassock pokes out about an inch below the hem of my alb which looks ungracious. I’ve discussed this with the makers, and as they didn’t offer to alter it for me it looks like that job falls to me!

Goth Old, Goth New

The display about the foundational Goth club, the Batcave, at the Museum of Youth Culture in Soho, is only open for a few days. Madame Morbidfrog and others were there for the private view during the week, but I could only get along today with Ms Mauritia after celebrating Mass for the Annunciation this morning - a case of from blue to black. Lots of monochrome photos of young people in the particular style of that moment (spiky hair, studded collars and fishnets all derived from punk), posters and flyers covered a wall, introduced by a very helpful big map showing the Batcave's various venues during the years of its existence. There was also a little display case of objects, again mainly paper, but also including a club t-shirt and what looked like a teddy bear in a gimp suit: without a caption its significance was unclear. Between the map and the display were a set of information captions which for inaccessibility in size or type rivalled any I have seen in my career in or out of museums. We eventually realised, from the page numbers, that they were taken from a book. Now, I would have been prepared to pay and even pay through the nose for a nice glossy history of the Batcave, but it turned out that the book accompanied a compendium of music which amounted to a do-it-yourself guide to '80s Goth, and even if it has a few unfamiliar gems in it I could live without that. The show, essentially, was promotion for the product. We were not delayed long, therefore, and set off in search of free art galleries and afternoon tea.

Tea gave us a chance to complain about the current domination of the Goth world by nostalgia, or at least the sense of retrospect. I know it's a bit rich for me to moan about this as I've been banging on about its history for ages, but nobody now seems to produce anything else. As real Goth clubs go under, we celebrate one of the places where it all started; as fewer Goths seem to appear in public, we analyse where those that remain have come from. There are two major books coming up in a month or two examining the history of Gothic, John Robb's The Art of Darkness and Cathi Unsworth's The Season of the Witch - I wonder how they will each justify their space in an increasingly crowded field? The bands our friends occasionally rave about, even when they're newcomers, don't seem to bring anything very fresh to the table. On LiberFaciorum at the moment I seem to be bombarded with adverts for Goth-friendly clothing retailers - Disturbia, EMP, Killstar - and under the televisual influence of Wednesday Addams big white collars in various styles seem to be in for women, but, most of the fashion seems to be, in Ms Mauritia's words,  'Goth as Shein imagines it'. (Mind you, Stylesock seems to be doing interesting things, not all of them Gothic by any means, if you're a young person with enough money to spend on them, even with much-neglected men's clothing, which most of the time boils down to t-shirts and little else). Ah, age does terrible things to us, friends, and not even just physically.

If You Want to Get Ahead

It’s taken ages to get my new hat from Mad Hatters in Brighton, where I purchased my last couple. Previously I went to a Leading High Street Retailer but over the years they began to prove erratic and I do like a snap brim, which Mad Hatters seemed able to supply reliably. The hat I’ve had since before the pandemic has become increasingly battered and a replacement was desirable, but between July and November I just got regular apologetic emails saying the requested headgear hadn’t arrived. Finally the suppliers came up with the goods. In the end I also got a panama (those never last more than a couple of seasons before the straw begins to fray).

I was never a hat-wearer before theological college, when a group of Staggers students quite self-consciously adopted black fedoras which gave them something of the air of Foxy-Faced Charles and Chubby Joe from The Box of Delights. I wasn’t part of that cadre but found a similar hat at Tumi in Little Clarendon Street and thought it was quite smart. Panamas I started on because I decided it was inappropriate to carry on wearing a black fedora in the summer. I now have a carefully-devised schedule to work out what time of the year I should wear which hat!

This dress element has become almost second nature to me, but it remains relatively unusual in society at large, and in fact my impression is that there are in fact slightly fewer hat-wearers even than there were a few years ago. I blame George Galloway, although Vince Cable’s fedora could almost have come from Mad Hatter’s too. Anyway, this means I stick out a bit in Swanvale Halt and I feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that the hats have become publicly associated with me; I have a feeling clergy ought not to be so individual.

The clerical uniform is intended to act in the other direction, eroding the distinctiveness and inviduality its wearers exhibit, but some clergy spurn it. It is a rare day when, for instance, you can catch Dr Bones’s father wearing clericals in his Cambridgeshire village: there is little point there, because everybody knows him anyway. Others think the uniform is off-putting, and perhaps they are right. I can only hope that my demeanour offsets it, and probably those who would be put off would still be put off by a pastel pullover and tan chinos. Were I to try to go down that route, I know I would not only be put off but feel my soul withering inside.

The Tale of The Trousers

It would be good to have a new pair of trousers. Marks and Spencer usually provide me with mine. This is what happened.

I go to M&S in Guildford (via a bus, I don't want to drive and the trains are cancelled) and find a pair which fit. I get them home and realise they are polyester and within a year will be as shiny as the plastic bags they spiritually are.

I return to the store. I'm on my way to see a friend and am in an awful hurry as I am trying to fit too much in. I find a pair of wool trousers in the right size and, at the till, hand over the polyester ones and pay the difference. 

Later, at home, I find that what I haven't noticed is that the new trousers are 'slim fit'. This means they are designed for the kind of young fellow who wants their legwear to look as close as it can to a pair of skinny jeans. If you wear them at my age you look like John Cooper Clarke or, worse now I think of it, Max Wall.

I return to M&S a second time. They don't have a pair of black, wool-rich, regular-fit trousers in the store in my size. I go to the Orders desk who tell me to go to the Sales desk. At the Sales Desk the child who serves me says they don't do black, wool-rich, regular-fit trousers at all, but they might have something called Tailored Fit. I don't know what that is, so I go to try and find a pair. There are none, but finding and trying on a pair of offensive blue checked trousers I discover that Tailored Fit is marginally less ludicrous than Slim Fit (there is also Skinny Fit which defies belief) so I return to the desk.

There is a long, snaky queue. I don't want to have to explain all this again, and so wait for the child I've spoken to before to be free. I wave a succession of customers past me, and one middle-aged lady simply stands in front of me and goes to speak to the child herself. Finally I can gain access.

'Tailored Fit seems OK, but you don't have any in this style,' I explain. 'Can you order a pair?' 

The child checks on her phone (I do hope it belongs to the store). 'You won't believe this, but they're out of stock.'

'Oh yes', I reply. 'I not only believe it, I was waiting for you to say it.'

Somehow my receipt had disappeared, and the best I could get was a credit voucher to the sum I'd spent on the unwanted trousers. I returned home, via the train, with nothing more to show for my efforts than a small bit of shiny paper which had cost me £54.

Mutual Recognition

Having visited the office of the local undertakers who I have less to do with, I was convinced the young woman funeral arranger there had some alternative vibe about her, even if she was wearing grey rather than black. I called back and told her the story of the Goth lady at the burial of ashes last year and discovered that, as I suspected, she's a Goth too, toning it down so as not to discomfit the clientele too much. 

We have already mentioned the disparate associations people make with my headgear. For this acquaintance they were different: 'Your hat always reminds me of the priest in The Exorcist. I find it quite comforting, to think there's somebody going out to tackle the demons.'

(I will not discuss this with Trevor.)

Best Dressed Ghost

All sorts of things end up in museum collections, but until very recently I had no idea that Bridport Museum contained a haunted dress. On her lovely blog DownbytheseaDorset Sarah mentioned it in her account of the recent show at the Museum, 'A Change of Clothes' in which the dress in question came out of storage. The story goes that it was pushed through the bars in front of the main door of the museum one night some years ago with no explanation, and no provenance. It's a nice piece - claimed in some places to be 17th-century, though it's not that - and perhaps it's speculating why such a fine item should have been anonymously dumped on a museum doorstep under cover of darkness which has led to the conviction that there is something wrong with it. 'A young woman is frequently seen guarding' the garment, and supposedly a former curator tried to have it exorcised. 

It reminded me that a former curator of the same establishment once told me that they'd been told a doll in the collection was also possessed of a presence. They tried to alert the Anglican authorities who 'treated me as though I needed psychiatric help' and in the end decided the safest thing to do with the object was burn it. I wonder how that fits under the Museums Association's model disposals policy. Did this same person also spread the tale about the haunted dress? For my part, speaking professionally, I think if an object does shelter a malign presence in it you may as well leave it there. At least you know where it is. 

Photo: The Bridport News

Blacker Than Most

A large and emotion-heavy funeral at the start of the week was held for a young man who despite disabilities had achieved a lot with his short life. Many of his friends came from the deaf community and the service was simultaneously translated into British Sign Language. One of the two Sign interpreters was a woman with a coloured stripe in her hair, pierced upper lip and big boots and clearly belonging to some Alternative community, so that was nice (though you can argue that the Deaf world is alternative enough).

Then today I was carrying out the interment of the ashes of a lady who'd lived in Swanvale Halt most of her life though died elsewhere. It wasn't done through the local undertakers so I had to prepare the plot myself, jabbing my spade into hard, dry ground in the June heat. Four inches down in this bit of the churchyard seems to be mostly stone.

The family group consisted of the deceased lady's two daughters and the husband of one, and four grandchildren. The eldest came in full Goth rigout: makeup, shoes with skeleton-hand fastenings,  parasol, the lot. She looked at me in my waistcoat and jacket.

Her: Do you not get hot dressed like that?
Me: Well, at least you can't ask me whether it's tough wearing black all the time.
Her (trying very hard not to laugh): That is true.

I strove to be as professional as I could but had to bite my lower lip a couple of times. 

Dublin 2018

'Well, you're barely up before you're down again', the taxi driver who took us from Dublin airport to our rented apartment on Monday commented about the flight we'd had from Gatwick, which was true. Flying still seems an entirely unreal and hallucinatory thing to me, and I am glad when it stops!

I enjoyed Dublin. I found the city centre has an exciting mixture of building styles, mainly on a fairly small scale apart from the grand civic buildings, which are mainly Georgian. Modernism is done very well and on Rathmines Road (where I found myself wandering) I found the only bit of Art Deco I saw:

Christ Church Cathedral is rather a High Victorian jewel with the added benefit of some gloomy monuments in the crypt. Charles I and II are frankly zombified here:

The National Gallery has a dark room full of the painted glass work of Poe illustrator Harry Clarke, sumptuous and charismatic:

The sun shone for our walk around the cliff path on the Howth headland and on the heron I saw on the Dodder River near our flat:

At Dublin Castle I learned that the Order of St Patrick was founded in 1783 by George III at the request of the Earl of Buckingham, the Viceroy, so he could dress up in blue satin and a cocked hat with massive plumes. 

On our last evening we ate at L Mulligan Grocer in Stoneybatter, and persuaded by the ethical and local sourcing of the meat I had a slice of ham cooked so spectacularly I am tempted never to eat animal flesh again. And the sun set along the Liffey as we made our way back.

A Challenge

The small girl with her mum and little sister accosted me while we were waiting to cross the road. 

"Why do you always dress so smart?" she said. I overlooked the adverbial use of an adjective, taking the view that grammar was beside the point of this encounter. "Why", she went on, "don't you dress like me?"

I considered her spotty t-shirt and leggings. "Well", I offered, "I like the clothes I wear, just as you probably like the clothes you wear." I did think that communication might be opened up with the bishop were I to start dressing like her, but I didn't say that.

Another Sort of Devotion

As well as Thursday being the day of the Infants Palm Service, it also marked another commemoration: the 25th anniversary of the release of PJ Harvey's first album, Dry. Twenty-five years, brothers and sisters, imagine that. It hardly bears thinking about.

I have never been one to buy memorabilia (apart from the music itself) and Ms H has never been one to produce much, but Hope Six seems to have marked a shift in policy and a reflection of that is the little monkey badge designed by Michelle Henning, who's married to Polly's long-term collaborator John Parish. The band have been wearing them on the tour, lined up like members of some obscure and slightly ominous political party, which seems no more than appropriate. I have no idea what the monkey is supposed to signify, but I thought it was quite fun, and not expensive, so I bought one.

The question then arises of when one might wear it. After a bit of consideration I settled on the release dates of PJH's albums, although this means some bunching at certain times of the year and stretches of time when the badge will not appear (most of the dates are Spring or Autumn). A small amusement.

'It's much better than a band t-shirt,' commented Ms Formerly Aldgate. 'Nobody should wear those after a certain age.' I haven't worn a t-shirt since I was 14, but that may not be the age she meant.

Suits You, Father

The other Pope caused some discussion among people I know recently by preaching about clerical attire. This puts one in mind of the vicar who angrily denied Bishop Mervyn Stockwood’s accusation that he’d preached a series of sermons in Lent about Georgian architecture with the words ‘It was Advent’, but Papa Francesco was focusing more on the moral implications of what priests choose to wear. As we know, he has a rather different sartorial style from his predecessor who favoured things like fanons and fiddlebacks and anything that might hark back to the days before Vatican 2, and he probably checks the tag on his chasuble to make sure it is genuine polyester.

Speaking at mass in his private chapel in December, Pope Francis described how an elderly priest colleague had been in Euroclero, the big clerical outfitters, and spotted a young chap trying on a saturno hat and an unnecessarily fancy cape and checking himself out in a mirror. The old monsignor had, said the Pope, ‘conquered his pain with humour’ and said to his preening colleague ‘and they say that the Church does not allow women priests!’

If that rather disagreeably misogynist remark, and the fact that the Pope sees nothing amiss with it, doesn’t make you feel too sick to continue reading, you might take on board the rest of his argument, that once a priest ceases to see themselves as a mediator of God to his people (that is, someone who in loving and sacrificial words and deeds does for them what God does), and instead becomes merely a functional intermediary (someone who occupies a position of bargaining between God and human beings), they will give in to rigidity and worldliness. They will, bizarrely, look ‘sad and serious’ and have ‘dark, dark eyes’ – and, presumably, shop about for elaborate churchy gear to emphasise their status.

One of my friend’s online interlocutors groused ‘Has the Holy Father nothing better to do than gossip about young priests in tat shops?’ ‘In my experience, it's the traditionalist priests with conservative sartorial taste who are often ministering in the places others shun. A bit like the Incarnation really - beauty among the dirt and grit’, commented another. ‘Some of the best priests I have known wore yards of lace and brocade in church and jeans and tee shirt in the pub in the evening’. Another friend of mine said ‘Perhaps the Msgr in the article would have much preferred it if he'd gone into Euroclero and spotted a nun playing a guitar badly. Because that (very 1960s) kind of Catholicism really got people flocking back to church didn't it. Perhaps we should be grateful to the Msgr for inspiring the Holy Father to teach us that dressing up is not consistent with humility and genuine mission. If only I'd known that when I was a parish priest in inner city Bristol working amidst the homeless and drug addicts - and when I increased my congregation from 30 elderly people to double that with lots of young families.’

You can see ideas eliding into one another here. Church is about the sacraments of Christ’s Kingdom and so churchy things should definitely declare the beauty of God, even if what we might consider to be beautiful will vary from setting to setting and arguably, though if we’re honest not wildly, from person to person. Francis isn’t explicitly taking a pop at that: saturnos and velvet capes do seem rather more about adorning a human individual rather than the God they serve. You know where he’s coming from, about that as well as the strained mediator-intermediary dichotomy, even if this isn’t a particularly edifying way of talking about it. However, you might be forgiven for suspecting that lurking behind his irritation at fancy clerical street-dress is also a scorn of fanons and fiddlebacks, his rolling-back his predecessor’s rolling-back the 1960s; so perhaps the clergy comments above aren’t that far of the mark. If that is what he thinks, it’s drawing an analogy too far.  I for one hadn’t considered that having dark eyes might be a sign of spiritual disorder: if so, I got it from my Mum along with that particular dominant gene. Well: not all my weekday-mass homilies have been impeccably thought-out theological masterpieces, either.

My church gear is a sort of battledress, it seems to me. The fallen world militates against beauty and hope, denies the reality of heaven and the true nature of human beings: the Church insists on the presence of the Kingdom, and even my biretta, which is both smart and ludicrous at the same time, is a little pom-pommed declaration that I’m not going to compromise about this stuff. Of course if that’s where your religion stops, it’s a bit catastrophic, but it very rarely is.

Outside church, priests should not be scruffy unless they are seriously unworldly (and very few of us are), and never dirty. Off duty entirely, I quite like the fun of conservative male dress, the selection of ties and shirts and hats and shoes according to occasion and circumstance: but I never think that it’s anything other than a game, an amusement which I trust causes no harm and may even bring a little delight to the world. I hope I’m right, anyway.

Black, Black, Black

"Aren't you hot, wearing all black?" people say to me in the summer. Depending on the mood I'm in, I will say either "Oh, yes" in a cheerfully disarming way, as though it was absurd to imagine any differently, or conversely claim that I'm impervious to heat. I think my interlocutors sometimes imagine I am obliged to wear black, which is of course not the case. Marion our curate will wear a black shirt a lot of the time, although for Toddler Group and other such occasions she adopts a variety of amiable sweaters which are doubtless supposed to suggest warmth and approachability but some of which I find a bit challenging. Dr Bones's father, the estimable vicar of Oakington, hardly ever wears clerical gear of any kind, as he says everyone in the village knows him anyway; evangelical clergy like him are much more likely than Anglo-Catholics to adopt a less monochrome dress code, although the great Fr Maurice Child of Cranford scorned clerical dress too. Most of his parish is now under Heathrow Airport (I'm not claiming there's a causal connection). 

In my Lamford days Il Rettore once shared with me SJ Forrest's rhyme 'A Clergyman in Black':

I never, never like to see

A clergyman in black.
It speaks of dark disloyalty,
And clandestine attack;
Of sabotage, conspiracy,
And stabbings in the back.

This black fanaticism bears
The label of the Beast;
An aping of the Romanists,
A masquerade at least,
That makes a clergyman appear
A veritable priest.

Though ministers are difficult
To sift and classify,
I find the deeds of darkness
In the men of deepest dye;
And those in black are normally
So very, very High.

Although I do not like High Church
I'd stomach one or two
(The Church of England's big enough
To tolerate a few).
If only they would not behave
As if their faith were true.

A clergyman in corduroys
Or dressed in Harris tweed,
Will generally compromise,
And readily accede;
His safety and his sympathy,
Are wholly guaranteed.

So let us warn our ordinands

Of folly and excess,
And only pass the ministers
Who honestly profess
A variegated churchmanship,
In varicoloured dress.

I have worn uniform black since the age of 18 or thereabouts and wouldn't feel very comfortable in anything else, although in my middle age I have become quite enamoured of striped shirts and ties in a variety of hues. It is of course the case that black garb speaks of the otherness of the ordained life, which is a point worth making even in an orderly village, but I probably would have chosen it anyway.

'I think the jacket and waistcoat are more likely to make you hot than the fact that they're black', said Ms Formerly Aldgate. She is as usual right.

Keep Up At The Back

A text conversation.

Cylene: Is Pastel Goth one of our relatives or are they just neighbours who only really do a similar look but have their own scene (like Gothic Lolita)?

Me: I don’t know – I don’t think I've ever met anyone who described themselves as a PastelGoth, or pointed someone out to me who was!

Cylene: I've only seen it online! Hence why I don’t know if they’re ‘us’ or not

Me: Or whether they exist at all?

Cylene: Well, if major newspapers are doing reports on Health Goth I've just come to assume everything exists now

Shoulda gone with Hula Goth while I had the chance

Me: I hadn't heard of Health Goth either. I’d argue it’s not Goth until Goths wear it, regardless of what some idiot fashion journalists with a Tumblr think

Cylene: It’s literally just Goths who go to the gym; and it was covered I think by the Telegraph

Me: As far as my in-depth study of the last 5 minutes suggests, there’s no indication that exists outside the pages of said newspapers

Cylene: Your eagerness to disprove almost sounds like elitism ;p

And actually Irena had Health Goth in her belt, but first and foremost she considered herself Rivet

Me: It’s not elitist really, because I don’t think there’s any such thing as ‘real’ or not real Goth – except I don’t think it could conceivably be ‘real’ unless people beyond the imaginings of fashion journalists or designers were actually wearing anything like that style. There’s a parallel with CorpGoth which has been a definite ‘thing’ for many years but was originally just a matter of Goths trying to dress in a way acceptable to both straight employers and their own tastes. I’ve seen people with pastel hair and clothes but it doesn’t become Pastel Goth until people consciously think ‘I’m going to look like that’. If Irena wore something that said ‘Health Goth’ that she or someone else had made it does suggest it’s more than just a designer’s label of convenience or what Goths wear in the gym …

Cylene: Agreed, actually. I feel mainstream is all too eager to stamp Goth on things just because there’s black in it or a Goth did it once, and it’s always worst in Autumn

Me: Exactly! Goths go to bed and might well have one or even more pairs of black pyjamas but that doesn't mean there’s a sub-style called ‘Bedtime Goth’ you can get in Debenhams

(And then a couple of weeks later when I and Ms Formerly Aldgate went to the V&A for Alexander McQueen I spotted a young couple the chap of whom was a typical off-duty example of one sort of Goth - beard, long hair, long black coat, big boots), but whose companion retained Gothy eye makeup but was wearing a pink wool 1950s-style coat and a maroon beret - the overlap of Goth and (slight shudder) Vintage). 

Two-Exhibition Day

On my own I wouldn't have chosen to go to 'Savage Beauty', the exhibition about fashion designer Alexander McQueen at the V&A: it was Ms Formerly Aldgate's suggestion, and I wasn't sure what to expect, but the spectacle was worth the travel and the ticket. I know very little about the branch of the art industry that is high fashion, though perhaps just enough about clothes to be able to recognise when somebody knows how to stitch, but this was extremely entertaining and engaging, even if the weakest element of the show are the words of Mr McQueen himself, scattered here and there throughout the displays - you should never take seriously what artists say, and arguably if they had anything worthwhile to put into words they wouldn't need to make the art. As a former museum curator I find myself paying almost as much attention to the staging of these big shows as to what's in them, and here the arrangement, set-dressing, lighting and even music renders devastating what could otherwise be an enervating experience, if done in a less imaginative way. Of course fashion designers often have the label 'Gothic' slapped onto their work, but there is more justification than usual for describing some of Mr McQueen's designs in those terms, and there's a whole row of black outfits that wouldn't be at all out of place at Whitby.

From there we found our way to the slightly less spectacular surroundings of the London Metropolitan Archives, wedged into a sidestreet in Clerkenwell and not at all easy to get to, for the very last day of their London Gothic show. This is mainly a display of reproduced images and graphics although there are some documents on show too as well as a very odd mock-up of one of those spatchcock 'mermaids' that used to appear in sideshows. The exhibition is a bit of a rag-bag of Gothic themes and history though none the less amusing for that. I liked particularly the 1980s footage of the Batcave (awful), the 17th- and 18th-century Bills of Mortality (who would have thought so many people would have died of 'evil'), and the sketches of Boris Karloff's feet made by a travelling shoe salesman. I didn't take any photos, so this one is pinched from www.badwitch.co.uk. The show is now closed so if you wanted to see it I hope you already have!

Marginalia

We went to the Chap Olympiad last Saturday, and I’ll write a bit more about the event itself some other time. Ms Formerly Aldgate had been before, but it was my first venture there.

A friend posted a link on Facebook to this very annoyed blogpost by Ms Redlegsinsoho, justifying the event and the antics of the people who attend it against various critics. I think she gets a little intemperate and, as is the manner of these things, edges into the sort of intolerance she herself has a go at, especially as I couldn’t find much online which is particularly hostile towards the Olympiad or Chappism in general. The one exception is this vile, angry article in Vice, but then you don’t go to Vice for anything well-considered or understanding and its contributors toe a dedicated line in mock-fury.

Nevertheless, Goths, Vintagers and Anglo-Catholics all know what it’s like to be insulted for their interest in certain forms of dress. I will leave aside the last case for the time being, as its context is a self-consciously ideological one which separates it from a mere fashion subculture.

Or does it? Those subcultures do each carry a sort of ideological gloss. For Goths, that ideology can be expressed in very succinct terms as ‘Life’s a drama: let’s dress up’. I haven’t done as much thinking about the ideological implications of the Vintage scene, but they are there: you can’t flick through very far the pages of The Chap without becoming aware that there is a definite agenda in favour of tradition, politeness, decorum and formality. I suppose you might sum it up as ‘The past can teach us stuff: let’s dress up’. Both subcultures share an assumption that the way you look encodes and declares these basic ideas. Both are also complicated by a knowing self-awareness that there are ambiguities in their positions, and both use camp and over-the-top humour to defuse the ambiguity: for Goths, the ambiguity is to do with the dangers of melancholy, romanticism, self-involvement and deathliness, and for Vintagers it’s the negative elements of the past whose positive lessons they want to draw on.

In both subcultures, too, there is a privileging of the idea of beauty and a commitment to beautiful things, even if they find beauty in different places. You could argue (as society once assumed) that meticulous care of one’s appearance rubs off in the form of care for other matters – the feelings and needs of other people, a concern to do work well, respect for one’s surroundings; that’s definitely what Chappism argues, and the idea even finds a place in Goth (read Jillian Venters’s writings on the matter). An old-fashioned sort of Christian thinker might argue that beauty elevates the soul and, paradoxical though it may seem in the case of the Goth world, a concern for beauty is connected to a joyousness about life, provided it remains light-hearted and full of gratitude rather than censoriousness.

Non-subcultural people looking at these ludicrously attired individuals can respond negatively to the implied criticism of themselves that they see embodied before them. If these people are so concerned to distinguish themselves from me and others like me, it must be because they think they’re better than me and want me to know about it. And very often there is some justification for this: I have come across (thankfully indirectly) Goths who contemptuously use the horrible words ‘norms’ and ‘mundanes’ for non-Goths, while arch criticism of non-Chappish dress is what keeps The Chap going. But as always happens, these mutual criticisms chase each other round, using each other as the justification for an escalating cycle of contempt and misunderstanding, based on what each party thinks the other thinks.

The truth is that ‘Life’s a drama’, ‘The past can teach us stuff’, and ‘Beauty is good’ are pretty unexceptionable ideas which most people can happily subscribe to: it’s just that not everyone chooses to devote their time and resources to expressing those ideas in what they look like and the things they do. The fact that some people do and some don’t doesn’t give either group any reason casually to despise the other when they meet them. Because a person hasn’t dedicated a good portion of their lives to symbolising and ritualising these basic ideas doesn’t mean that they necessarily have a superficial view of existence, disdain everything about the past, or are indifferent to beauty, although they may exhibit all of those traits. Conversely, subcultural participants may equally pay no more than lip-service, or not even that, to the ideals of beauty, creativity or civility their particular fashion embodies, no matter what they look like, as neither a Darkangel dress nor a tweed three-piece proves that its owner is not an idiot. I can vouch for the truth of both these statements.

A subcultural participant meeting someone who isn’t might despise them for not coming up to their standards, or they might assume that they had chosen to devote their limited resources to something else equally life-enhancing; a ‘normal’ person meeting a subcultural participant might choose to resent their pretentiousness and elitism, or appreciate their attention to the task of increasing the general gaiety of the world. Either way, we ought to presume the best of other people and treat them accordingly, and take an interest in them, until they demonstrate that we are wrong. This utterly banal and obvious advice ought not to need stating, but it

clearly does.

New Year's Eve

We were determined to drag ourselves to the capital for Reptile's New Year's Eve party, as for residents living out beyond the suburbs it's the only night when one can stay late and still catch a train home before the following Sunday morning. It's also the night when Reptile takes over the whole of the Minories premises and the Goths can spread out in leisurely but obviously still pestilential fashion into the other half of the pub with its congenial cages and cubbyholes. For some reason there was a strange undercurrent of discomfort which several people remarked on. Apparently there was some kind of tantrum later in the evening after we left; the fire alarms went off at one point; and one friend remarked on the difficulties presented by having to wade through shoals of bustles to reach the bar. I put it down to the event being remarkably busy making it therefore harder to move around, to see, and to hear anyone even than it usually is.

'You could tell who were the regulars and who was there just for New Year', it was said, the line being between those who came wearing 'meringues' and those in more sensible attire. 'Goth does have an element of panto' commented another person, 'which is why I don't have anything to do with it any more'. Yes, it does indeed, and the dividing line, I prefer to think, is not to be found between this or that style or elaboration of dress or between people who are or aren't club regulars, but between knowing that it is panto and not realising the fact. And beneath the fanfalou and folderol of pantomime, remember, there are matters of deadly seriousness - and that juxtaposition is exactly what makes Goth both terribly amusing and quite interesting, quite apart from the pleasant individuals one might meet there.

We left the Minories at about 1.30 and fought our way through the Tube, out and into the one-way system which operates around Waterloo on New Year's Eve. This is the third year I have done this, and the route seems to grow more extensive each time. I could hardly believe it when, funnelled with the thousands of other lost souls stumbling through increasingly rain- and wind-lashed Southwark streets not quite knowing where we all were, I saw a sign pointing towards Blackfriars Station which we'd passed through about forty minutes before; we should have got out then. We must have walked for over a mile, and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds began much earlier than last year. Arriving at Waterloo just before 3am only to find there was no 3am train to Guildford after all, we 'enjoyed' a bagel and execrable tea from one of the station outlets before spotting a train scheduled to leave, apparently, at 3.35 - a horrible, raucous, weary train as it happened, and one which meant getting back in to the rectory at 5, strongly suspecting that alternative plans may be made for next year.

Misbehaviour

What a day of contrasts. At Widelake House this morning they'd forgotten we were coming and the staff rounded up a strange collection of residents and day visitors, virtually none of whom we'd ever seen before. Normally they're very placid but today were actually rather awkward; one lady was tearful and repeatedly complained of being lost (which is quite understandable), but another remarked loudly and scornfully 'What's wrong with 'er?' and, regarding me, ' 'E don't look like any vicar I've ever seen. If 'e's a vicar, I'll eat my 'at'.' I wonder what vicars do look like, and should I change?

(Only yesterday a parishioner - not one I've ever seen in church - accosted me and congratulated me precisely for 'dressing like a proper vicar'. 'I'm glad that bloody woman's gone,' he further offered, meaning my predecessor, 'couldn't get on with her'. The day before, one of the local alcoholics had been telling me what a good friend she'd been to him, which just goes to show. What will be said about me after I've gone? I shall just have to outlive them all).

Then this afternoon we had Church Club after school. The children were particularly nuts today. Ben couldn't seem to sit up straight and continually ended up on the floor, gyrating in strange convolutions and cycles, while Michael appeared to have his hands permanently down the front of his trousers. You can't help speculating what will become of them.

I finished off the day with the solemn observance of Candlemas which attracted a dozen people. I'm very pleased about this! We processed around a darkened church to the accompaniment of the Office Hymn, Quod Chorus Vatum, which has been a pig to learn but went rather well. Next step is to get the people themselves learning plainchant ...

Whitby Views

One Goth clothing show from my few days in Whitby - I do like the typewriter so visitors can leave an email address ...























... and another in the lobby of (what was) the Metropole Hotel ...























... and possibly my favourite little group of folks seen out and about. What I like especially is the young lady's outfit, a garment that simply would never have existed in the era she's invoking. How wonderful is that?


















At least I assume it's a girl. And lastly my chums at the Cottage pondering a jigsaw in a very Cabinet War-Room pose.

What Goes With Black

'It just seems like play-acting', said my mother about the Goths. And of course it is. My couple of days in Whitby made me reflect on whether, and how far, grown-up people should indulge in such antics. Especially very grown-up people.

Of course I’m never satisfied. I’d ended up, accidentally you understand, trailing one particular Goth girl all the way from the Tube to Ruswarp station where she went on to the town itself. Unfeasibly tall, skinny twenty-or-so thing in a long plum brocade coat, frilly jabot and enormous boots, hair shaven into a wonderful pattern like one of Fuseli’s fantasy women. Now she looked the part. But once she gathered a gang of like-aged friends and they sat at the back of the train incessantly chattering about nothing other than computer games and how pissed they got the last time they went to Whitby, I was converted into the mindset of a Goth Daily Telegraph leader.

Then, walking round the town on Thursday, the opposite. Whenever I saw someone who was younger than 50 who didn’t walk with a limp because they’d done a knee in I doubted the evidence of my senses. This is Whitby, for heaven’s sake, the town which for a week or so each year has a higher proportion of top hats and crinolines than anywhere else on earth: it ought to be glamorous. It ought not to make me weep at the sight of yet another pot-bellied fossil squeezed into a brocade coat. It ought not to make me feel slightly ashamed at owning a Darkangel frock-coat myself. It ought not to make me start thinking that the ordinary residents and day-trippers look better than the Goths do. Thank God for the evening concert where some youngsters restored my faith. Leave it to them, I wanted to say, leave it to them, as I sat in my very sober black three-piece suit and tie. There’s a reason why chaps (and even Chaps) developed traditional male dress: it was to stop aging gentlemen looking preposterous. The girls don’t look quite as nuts, but even so...

On the way home I was reading a book on cinematiste terrible Ken Russell. 'Russell', fumed one exasperated critic, 'trivialises and debases his source material, and then re-inflates it to monstrous proportions'. Well, there’s the Gothic enterprise in a nutshell which explains why so many of us even have an uneasy relationship with it.

As a friend commented, with the best will in the world there are visitors to Whitby Gothic who are wearing their Gothic finery as costume, and for most Goths the c-word is anathema. There’s a difference between costume and clothing, the difference between adopting something essentially outside you and expressing something essentially from inside. The one can perhaps be a stage leading to the other, because in some ways we are, or become, what we wear, but they’re not the same, and the waters are muddied because anyone with enough money can go to a Goth retailer and buy dramatic-looking gear without really considering how daft it looks on them. We lose the notion of materialising the drama and beauty of the world (which is what Goth does) while maintaining a sense of individual style.

And then there’s the question of what you aspire to. Why does Steampunk style have such appeal for gentlemen (and some ladies)? Because the values it embodies – the values of gentility and adventure – are achievable (and worthwhile) no matter how old or young, portly or svelte you happen to be. Expressing your inner Victorian engineer or explorer is realistic. But your inner pirate, vampire, Byronic aristocrat or highwayman had better stay inside if you look more like you’d have a coronary chasing after your victim.

This isn’t to be snotty: my friends recalled meeting a bearded man on a Whitby street, a couple of years ago, wearing a huge white wedding dress because it was the only place and occasion he could wear it outside and still be accepted. There’s something rather moving about that, notwithstanding the dreadful offence against aesthetics, and I suspect many Whitby-goers are isolated folk with no other outlet for their inner sense of who they are. But perhaps there’s a need for some friendly advice here. It doesn’t suit you, sir, it really doesn’t.