The Photographers’
Gallery presents Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity, a
group exhibition exploring the identity of the black dandy as
performed in studio and street photographs from London to New York to
Bamako.
In the early 21st
century, black men are influential trendsetters in fashion, music and
culture. This increased prominence however, has not had an impact on
the state of high vulnerability still experienced by black men - as
illustrated by disproportionate rates of incarceration the UK and
USA. Dandyism, with its emphasis on dress and flamboyance, is
examined as radical personal politics and a provocative counter to
stereotypical representations and physical objectification of black
masculinity. This exhibition seeks to consciously problematise ideas
of a male identity through dress and deportment that is arresting,
tantalising, louche, camp and gloriously assertive.
Social and gender
norms are negotiated in the studio space where the roots of the dandy
are traced back to 1904 in a rare series of outdoor studio prints
from The Larry Dunstan Archive. Thought to be taken in Senegal, the
images depict young men asserting a powerful personal presence
through stylish dress. In Malick Sidibé’s(1936-2016, Mali)
commercial studio, men were encouraged to model in animated poses
while playfully engaging with personal props, including motorbikes
and boxing gloves.
The studio as a site
of bold experimentation and fantastical expression is explored in the
works of Samuel Fosso (b. 1962, Cameroon) and Hassan Hajjaj (b. 1961,
Morocco).Fosso’s 1970s self-portraits picture the artist in varying
guises, assuming imagined black males identities. Hajjaj’s images,
produced in collaboration with his subjects, feature men meticulously
dressed in vivid African prints and photographed against bright
backgrounds of clashing colours. The results are placed in frames
handmade from food and drinks packaging, emphasising craftsmanship
and the individual styling of each sitter.
A collection of
street photographs celebrates the ordinary elegance of the dandy and
his ability to transform everyday attire into ostentatious style
statements. In his series the Black House (1973 - 1976), Colin Jones
(b. 1936, U.K)captured the careful and discreetly extravagant styling
of young men living in an Islington Housing Project. Liz Johnson
Artur (b. 1964, Sofia) presents her work from the last thirty years
of photographing on the streets of London, Detroit and Kingston,
Jamaica, while Jeffrey Henson Scales (b. 1954, USA)covers asimilar
period inNew York.
Complex notions of
gender and sexuality are visited in Isaac Julien's (b. 1960, UK)
still shots from the set of his pivotal movie Looking for Langston
(1989). Blending archival and scripted scenes, the film portrays
black gay desire during the liberal explosion of the Harlem
Renaissance in the 1920s. Gender is further explored in the context
of contemporary South Africa with work by Kristin-Lee Moolman’s
(b.1986, South Africa). Tapping into youth and township culture her
images feature androgynous characters that reject labels and oppose
stereotypes.
The exhibition is
curated by writer and broadcaster Ekow Eshun
Dressing
to express
Ranging from New
York to Soweto, a new exhibition shows the power of clothes to
challenge assumptions about race, class and gender
In 1975 a teenage
photographer called Samuel Fosso opened his own studio in Bangui, in
the Central African Republic. During the day he would photograph
clients; at night he would use up the unexposed rolls of film, taking
photos of himself in different costumes and poses, sending some to
his mother in Nigeria to reassure her that he was alright.
In one self-portrait
he poses in an outfit that could have come out of David Bowie’s
wardrobe: platform shoes, football socks and white fringed shorts. It
was a provocative way to dress in a country then under the tyrannical
rule of Jean-Bédel Bokassa. In 1979, the dictator reportedly
sanctioned the execution of 100 schoolchildren for not wearing the
correct school uniform.
“Dandyism”, said
Roland Barthes, “is condemned to be radical or not exist at all.”
The dandies featured in “Made You Look”, an exhibition at the
Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, London, range from fops wearing
pearls and flares in modern-day Soweto to Senegalese men in bowties
and bowlers at the beginning of the 20th century. All sport the same
mixture of pride and insouciance.
As Ekow Eshun, the
show’s curator, explains, certain black men invest a lot in how
they look, dress and carry themselves: “not purely for superficial
reasons but as a kind of personal politics, as a way of defining an
identity against a white gaze, against a society that can often
caricature them, ‘other’ them as a brute, and define them by the
colour of their skin rather than the texture of their inner lives.”
The exhibition is
definitely on trend. “Dandy Lion” at the Museum of the African
Diaspora in San Francisco takes a similar premise, while “2026”,
a futuristic exploration of black masculinity and fashion, has just
opened at London’s Somerset House.
It’s not a
coincidence that people are interested in these themes now, Eshun
tells me. “Some of the biggest cultural figures on the planet are
black men but at the same time black men are pretty vulnerable…You
just have to look at the Black Lives Matter [campaign].” He is
fascinated by how black men negotiate these spaces between “high
visibility” and “high vulnerability”.
“Made You Look”
celebrates men who have used fashion to question assumptions about
race, class, gender and sexuality. Encompassing North America,
Britain and Africa, over two centuries of intense social and
political upheaval, this exhibition cannot possibly represent the
full spectrum of black dandyism. But perhaps that’s the point.
Made You Look:
Dandyism and Black Masculinity Photographers’ Gallery until
September 25th 2016
Fleur Macdonald is
features editor of TRUE Africa, a website that looks at culture,
music, sport and politics from an African perspective
Samuel Fosso, “Self
Portrait from ‘70’s Lifestyle” (1973–1977)
A young man trying
on different identities until one fits, Fosso here possesses a
fragile confidence. His work seems all the more precious given his
home in Bangui was looted in 2014. Luckily many of his prints and
negatives were found, littered on the streets.
Malick Sidibé, “Au
cours d’une soirée (During a party: the poses)” (1964)
Sibidé knows how to
photograph a dance move. He took photos of people having fun, letting
loose and being young. He captured the optimism and pride of a young
nation (Mali had recently gained independence from France), and its
citizens’ assertion of self-identity. Eshun explains: “This young
guy has gone to the studio and has chosen to dress the way he
dresses, to represent himself how he wants to look. It’s a move
away from colonial-era photography of African people as
anthropological subjects. He wants to be seen on his own terms, in
his own light, in his own clothes…”
Kristen Lee-Moolman,
“Wayne Swart” (2015)
The South African
photographer references Fosso in her playful portraits of young men
from Soweto. They are “quite louche and quite camp,” Eshun says,
pointing out that they echo gender-fluid role-models from America,
like the rapper Young Thug or Will Smith’s son Jaden, who wears a
skirt. “Young men in influential positions are consciously
insisting on a blurring of [gender] boundaries. A couple of years
ago, it would have put them in a very vulnerable position.”
Liz Johnson-Artur,
“Kingston” (1991)
This young man
confidently “owns” the camera, challenging the viewer to accept
his authority. “He carries himself with such self-assertion, such
inner belief that he [rises above] his circumstances” says Eshun.
“As a black man you spent a lot of your life being told ‘you are
this’ or ‘you should be that’ and so to arrive at a place where
you can say ‘this is who I am’ is very powerful.”
Jeffrey
Henson-Scales, “Young man in plaid” (1991)
This photo of a
young man waiting in a doorway in New York City, his chest sticking
out, is captivating. You can’t help but wonder who or what he’s
waiting for. His louche, subversive dress is deliberately
reminiscent, says Eshun, of historical dandies like Lord Byron or
Oscar Wilde. And that is the strength of this exhibition: while it is
very much about race, it’s also a reminder that true dandyism
transcends race, as well as time and place, age, sex and background.
The clothes we wear are an outward expression of our personality, a
clue to what lies beneath, and a warning not to define us by
something as arbitrary as skin colour.
The only picture
Beatrix Potter drew of Kitty-in-Boots. Illustration: courtesy
Frederick Warne & Co and the V&A Museum
Beatrix Potter was a
writer of strong contradictions. A keen business woman, the first
author to license fictional characters to a range of toys and
household objects still on sale today, she allowed herself to be
short-changed over her royalties for years. She was an expert in
natural history, boiling down animal corpses to extract their
skeletons so she could understand their anatomy well enough to draw
them, yet she wrote stories in which rabbits wear blue jackets and
hedgehogs pinafores. A huge success, she turned her back on her
literary achievements in middle age to pursue a career as a
sheep-breeder.
She had a lonely
home-bound childhood with parents intent on keeping her on as their
companion, but she still managed to get engaged twice despite their
disapproval. She lost her first fiance, Norman Warne, through his
premature death and married her second, William Heelis, at 47. By
then she had become as tough as the old boots she wore to sheep fairs
or while working in her Lake District garden. Often seen in her
oldest clothes, her resemblance to Mr McGregor, the distinctly
unsmart gardener in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was sometimes remarked
on locally.
My friend, the
fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones, claimed that in 1940 her younger
sister and a friend were slapped by Potter for swinging on her gate.
But with respect, I doubt this. Diana’s family and mine were living
in the same Quaker commune on Lake Coniston to escape the blitz.
There were many cross old ladies who resented noisy young evacuees up
from the south, any one of whom could easily have been mistaken by us
children for Potter.
She was certainly
austere, insisting on good manners from visiting children. But the
number of beautifully illustrated letters she sent to appreciative
readers attests to someone with a great love for the young, albeit
more easily expressed at a distance.
What remains
indisputable is her genius as an author-illustrator. She insisted on
a miniature format for her works. This was unpopular with bookshops,
which preferred uniform sizes, but was ideal for small hands. Often
using a bare minimum of words on the page, she made her illustrations
play an active part in taking the story forward. She was devoted to
the King James Bible, always open by her bedside, and revelled in its
cadences and vocabulary. “Children like a fine word occasionally”,
she wrote to her publisher. Later she insisted on retaining
“scuttered” to describe the hurried movements made by an evil
family of rats even though neither she nor her editor could find this
term in a dictionary.
Her stories have the
same toughness found in fairytales, with foolishness punished and
danger never far away. But her cottage interiors, with their open
fireplaces, inglenooks and vernacular furniture, provide a vision of
country living at its most charming.
She helped to
establish the National Trust; her wish that none of her tenants
living in traditional Lake District farmhouses should be allowed to
build indoor lavatories or have wireless masts is offset by her
generosity in leaving to the nation large tracts of countryside.
The exhibition of
her illustrations in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the
Royal Mail’s special stamp set released on what would have been her
150th birthday are testament to a remarkable author and artist. And
there is still one more story to come. The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots,
published on 1 September with illustrations by Quentin Blake,
includes favourite characters, from the sinister badger Mr Todd to
Peter Rabbit, now “older, slower and portlier”. It won’t just
be children who want to get their hands on this final offering.
• Beatrix Potter’s
London is at the V&A, London SW7, from Thursday. vam.ac.uk.
Potter had been a
disciple of the land conservation and preservation ideals of her
long-time friend and mentor, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, the first
secretary and founding member of the National Trust for Places of
Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. She supported the efforts of the
National Trust to preserve not just the places of extraordinary
beauty but also those heads of valleys and low grazing lands that
would be irreparably ruined by development. She was also an authority
on the traditional Lakeland crafts, period furniture and stonework.
She restored and preserved the farms that she bought or managed,
making sure that each farm house had in it a piece of antique
Lakeland furniture. Potter was interested in preserving not only the
Herdwick sheep, but also the way of life of fell farming. In 1930 the
Heelises became partners with the National Trust in buying and
managing the fell farms included in the large Monk Coniston Estate.
The estate was composed of many farms spread over a wide area of
north-western Lancashire, including the Tarn Hows. Potter was the de
facto estate manager for the Trust for seven years until the National
Trust could afford to buy most of the property back from her. Her
stewardship of these farms earned her wide regard, but she was not
without her critics, not the least of which were her contemporaries
who felt she used her wealth and the position of her husband to
acquire properties in advance of their being made public. She was
notable in observing the problems of afforestation, preserving the
intake grazing lands, and husbanding the quarries and timber on these
farms. All her farms were stocked with Herdwick sheep and frequently
with Galloway cattle.
Swallows and Amazons
is the first book in the Swallows and Amazons series by English
author Arthur Ransome; it was first published in 1930, with the
action taking place in the summer of 1929 in the Lake District. The
book introduces central protagonists John, Susan, Titty and Roger
Walker (Swallows) and their mother and baby sister, as well as Nancy
and Peggy Blackett (Amazons) and their uncle Jim, commonly referred
to as Captain Flint.
At the time, Ransome
had been working as a journalist with the Manchester Guardian, but
decided to become a full-time author rather than go abroad as a
foreign correspondent. He did continue to write part-time for the
press, however.
The book was
inspired by a summer spent by Ransome teaching the children of his
friends, the Altounyans, to sail. Three of the Altounyan children's
names are adopted directly for the Walker family. Ransome and Ernest
Altounyan bought two small dinghies called Swallow and Mavis. Ransome
kept Swallow until he sold it a number of years later, while Mavis
remained in the Altounyan family and is now on permanent display in
the Ruskin Museum. However, later in life Ransome tried to downplay
the Altounyan connections, changing the initial dedication of
Swallows and Amazons and writing a new foreword which gave other
sources. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 57 on the BBC's
survey The Big Read.
The book relates the
outdoor adventures and play of two families of children. These
involve sailing, camping, fishing, exploration and piracy. The Walker
children (John, Susan, Titty and Roger) are staying at a farm near a
lake in the Lake District of England, during the school holidays.
They sail a borrowed dinghy named Swallow and meet the Blackett
children (Nancy and Peggy), who sail a dinghy named Amazon. The
Walkers camp on an island in the lake while the Blacketts live in
their house nearby. When the children meet, they agree to join forces
against a common enemy - the Blacketts' uncle James Turner whom they
call "Captain Flint" (after the character in Treasure
Island). Turner, normally an ally of his nieces, has withdrawn from
their company in order to write his memoirs, and has become decidedly
unfriendly. Furthermore, when the Blacketts let off a firework on his
houseboat roof, it is the Walkers who get the blame. He refuses even
to listen when they try to pass on a warning to him about burglars in
the area.
In order to
determine who should be the overall leader in their campaign against
Captain Flint, the Blacketts and the Walkers have a contest to see
which can capture the others' boat. As part of their strategy the
Walkers make a dangerous crossing of the lake by night, and John is
later cautioned by his mother for this reckless act. The Walkers
nevertheless win the contest - thanks to Titty who seizes the Amazon
when the Blacketts come to Wild Cat Island. During the same night
Titty hears suspicious voices coming from a different island -
Cormorant Island - and in the morning it transpires that Turner's
houseboat has been burgled. Turner again blames the Walkers, but is
finally convinced that he is mistaken and feels he was wrong to
distance himself from his nieces' adventures all summer. The
Swallows, Amazons and Turner investigate Cormorant Island, but they
cannot find Turner's missing trunk.
The following day
there is a mock battle between Turner and the children, after which
Turner is tried for his crimes and forced to walk the plank on his
own houseboat. They agree at the post-battle feast that on the final
day of their holidays Titty and Roger will go back to Cormorant
Island while the others go fishing. Titty finds the trunk, which
contains the memoirs on which Turner had been working, and is
rewarded with Turner's green parrot.
James Turner appears
in some ways to be modelled on Ransome himself. The story, set in
August 1929, includes a good deal of everyday Lakeland life from the
farmers to charcoal burners working in the woods; corned beef, which
the children fancifully refer to as pemmican, and ginger beer and
lemonade, which they call grog, appear as regular food stuff for the
campers; island life also allows for occasional references to the
story of Robinson Crusoe.
A British film
Swallows and Amazons is scheduled for release in 2016, with director
Philippa Lowthorpe. The film features Sherlock's Andrew Scott, plus
Teddie-Rose Malleson-Allen as the renamed Tatty.
Swallows
and Amazons review – sails on merrily, despite spy ballast
3 / 5 stars
Children
messing about in boats is not enough for this adaptation, which
injects an adult espionage twist more Famous Five than Arthur Ransome
Arthur Ransome’s
wholesome prewar classic of children’s literature is all about
fresh-faced girls and boys sailing dinghies around the Lake District
with no health-and-safety nonsense about flotation jackets. The 1930
novel is now given a good-natured, if self-conscious period
adaptation that grafts on a new grownup plotline of treachery and
derring-do, probably closer to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five or John
Buchan.
It is as if the
children’s innocent fantasy world of pirates and adventurers isn’t
enough. The action must be ramped up. They have to get real baddies
to vanquish, but this new and implausible line in melodrama is taken
at the same pace and treated the same way as the children’s
innocuous high-jinks. There is even a frankly bizarre and not
entirely logical chase sequence aboard a train in which sinister
trench-coated figures behave strangely – to say the very least –
though somehow without drawing attention to themselves.
Kelly Macdonald
plays Mrs Walker, who is taking her boisterous four children away for
a summer holiday in the idyllic Lakeland fells while her husband, an
officer in the Royal Navy, is away in the far east. They are Susan
(Orla Hill), Roger (Bobby McCulloch), John (Dane Hughes) and Tatty
(Teddie-Rose Malleson-Allen) – her name was “Titty” in the
original, and rather coyly changed.
On the way, the
children chance across the mysterious Mr Flint (Rafe Spall) who
appears to be being hunted down by an equally enigmatic figure played
by Andrew Scott – and the casting of these two principals should
probably tip us off as to which of them is the good guy.
The family arrive at
their cottage run by a hatchet-faced comedy yokel couple, Mr and Mrs
Jackson, played deadpan by Harry Enfield and Jessica Hynes. And the
children beg to be allowed to sail to an island in the middle of the
lake in Mr Jackson’s dinghy, the “Swallow”, and camp there –
only to find that two other children, Nancy (Seren Hawkes) and Peggy
(Hannah Jayne Thorp) have already staked a claim to it, and have a
dinghy of their own, called the “Amazon”. A high-spirited battle
commences, complicated by the unlikely danger they are in from the
adult world of espionage.
Swallows and Amazons
was always treasured for its innocent charm, and maybe Golding’s
Lord of the Flies made this kind of story unfashionable even before
our modern preoccupation with the danger that unaccompanied children
can be in. There’s no point updating the story, of course, and in
fact the girls do in any case take a reasonably bold and assertive
role in the adventure. Perhaps what there is to like about it is the
simple, almost action-free shots of people sailing their little craft
across the rippling lakes. And in fact nothing in the film rivals the
very real catastrophe of the children’s wicker basket full of
picnic food being lost overboard. This is despite the deployment of a
failed “man overboard” rescue manoeuvre – although in trying
this out, the children have in fact perfected it, and it is to come
in useful when there is a real man-overboard emergency.
This Swallows and
Amazons is decent enough: but probably best savoured on the small
screen after tea on a rainy Sunday.
Backwards
to the future: how Britain’s nostalgia industry is thriving
From
the new film of Swallows and Amazons to Harry Potter, Britain is
obsessed with a past that never existed. What is this endless
Downtonisation all about?
Ron Howard had a
theory about why the US sitcom Happy Days was such a hit. The
Oscar-winning director, who played Richie Cunningham in the show,
argued that central to its appeal was that it was set in the 1950s,
before Vietnam, drugs and hippies, when teenagers were civil to their
elders. Happy Days – which ran from 1974 to 1984 – was, he told
me, a return to lost innocence before Watergate. It put the 50s back
into the 70s and made people happier.
The new film
adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s novel Swallows and Amazons, starring
Rafe Spall, Kelly Macdonald and Andrew Scott, has a similar nostalgic
function. It takes us back to 1935, a time before multicultural
Britain, swinging London, gay marriages, gender fluidity, online
avatars and goggles for conker contests.
It’s set in an era
before the Sodom and Gomorrah of onesies and flip-flops, when there
were only two kinds of nightwear – winceyette nighties and
winceyette pyjamas – and there was never any question of you
wearing either if you went to the shops.
Most importantly,
director Philippa Lowthorpe and writer Andrea Gibb take us back to
the time when the Great Outdoors was a place for wholesome
prepubescent rampaging rather than one so overrun with stabbings,
abductions and drug scores not to mention health and safety
infractions, that today’s fearful parents have decided for the most
part to keep their little twerps indoors. Better our Vitamin
D-deprived kids are under lock and key, safely eviscerating aliens
during PS4 Doom marathons.
At the press
screening for Swallows and Amazons, Gibb said her adaptation sought
to address our anxieties over helicopter parenting. That certainly is
what gives Ransome’s story relevance to our anxious, nostalgic
society. We have apparently raised – as the father of the four
sibling heroes of Swallows and Amazons would say – a generation of
duffers.
At the start, the
four Walker children are heading off for a Lake District holiday with
their mother, while their father is away with the Royal Navy. The
removal of the patriarch is a recurring plot device in nostalgic
children’s literature that involves urban kids finding themselves
giddily adrift in rural England. Think of Edith Nesbit’s The
Railway Children (in which the Edwardian paterfamilias is falsely
imprisoned as a spy) or, more recently, Michelle Magorian’s
Goodnight Mister Tom (in which a second world war evacuee finds a
surrogate father in a grumpy village widower). Both were made into
stirringly nostalgic films set in a simpler, gentler England.
Perhaps, if you
believe the premise of such books and their adaptations, only when
parents are away can children play. Even Harry Potter, though an
orphan, comes to imaginative life the further the Hogwarts Express
races him away from the quotidian dullness of his muggle family. And
how striking it is that the Hogwarts Express is a lovely old steam
train rather than a grisly Pendolino. For all that JK Rowling’s
franchise starts in the early 1990s, its charmed world time travels
back to an earlier Britain of retro locos and school gowns.
In Swallows and
Amazons, the Walker siblings, once installed in their lakeside rental
owned by a couple of satisfyingly lo-fi rustics called the Jacksons,
demand that they be allowed to sail across the deepest lake in
England and camp out on the island in the middle. Kelly Macdonald’s
Mrs Walker agonises over the risks of death by burning and drowning
such autonomy would entail, but eventually agrees. “I don’t want
them frightened of the world,” she says. “If life was always
early to bed, we’d never learn ’owt,” counsels Jessica Hynes’s
Mrs Jackson.
And so the Walker
siblings set off on theirawfully big adventure, one that would have
present-day health and safety ideologues crying into their
risk-averse muesli. Will they survive? Are canvas plimsols and
knitted sleeveless sweaters really what one should wear for an
excursion in Cumbria? Go see the film and find out.
Swallows and Amazons
could be seen as part of a reactionary nostalgic industry, part of
the Downtonising tendency. To Downtonise the past is to rid a book or
film or TV drama of the things that some in the audience might
dislike about the present – black people, uppity proles, uppity
Poles, women who don’t know their place, kids who have exchanged
their right to graze their knees outdoors for the right to contract
carpal tunnel syndrome indoors.
The tendency to
reverse backwards into the future is a particularly British
phenomenon. “Fifty years from now,” said John Major in 1993,
“Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county
grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools
fillers and – as George Orwell said – ‘old maids bicycling to
holy communion through the morning mist’ and if we get our way –
Shakespeare still read even in school.” Wouldn’t you like to live
there? Me neither.
Conservatives have
regularly used an apparently gilded past age as an alibi for
rubbishing the present. It is the basis of one of our most successful
export industries. In 1981, for instance, Jeremy Irons narrated the
lyrical introduction to Charles Sturridge’s ITV adaptation of
Brideshead Revisited: “Oxford in those days was still a city of
aquatint. When the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high
and clear over the gables and cupolas, she exhaled the soft airs of
centuries of youth.”
Evelyn Waugh’s
1945 novel already dripped with nostalgia for a pre-war England and
its allied oleaginous underlings (think Sebastian Flyte’s
ever-so-’umble barber). Sturridge effectively put that nostalgia to
work in Thatcher’s Britain. Just as Waugh’s novel, behind its
lament for lost innocence, expressed posh contempt for upstart prole
scum, so its TV adaptation was handily broadcast at a time when it
could serve the reactionaryagenda of a Conservative government that
spent the 80s destroying the organised working classes.
Thirty years later,
Downton Abbey similarly aided a later Tory government with its
depiction of Edwardian England as one in which the lower orders knew
their place and were contented with their lot. It fitted into the
reactionary Keep Calm and Carry On ethos that has permeated austerity
Britain from 2008 onwards, urging political quietism on those
suffering most from George Osborne’s public expenditure cuts. No
wonder the Tories gave that Downton creator and inveterate snob
Julian Fellowes a knighthood. Kirstie Allsopp should have been made a
dame, too, for her craft programme which, so far as I understood it,
had the subtext: crochet your way out of recession like they did in
the 1930s, whiney proles.
But British period
drama doesn’t always have a reactionary agenda. It is striking that
Lowthorpe worked as a director on Call the Midwife, the BBC series
set in London’s East End in the late 1950s and early 1960s based on
Jennifer Worth’s memoirs. Since 2012, it has been broadcast in the
Sunday-evening vintage slot. With its sweet midwives in cardies and
starched uniforms, it fits into that slot perfectly and courts the
Downton demographic perfectly. But, as Radio Times’ Alison Graham
argued, it should “take its place as the torchbearer of feminism on
television”, since it has dealt with domestic abuse, illegal
abortion, rape, the pill, women enslaved by dull marriages, poverty
and big families. “I believe the series should be shown to teenage
girls in schools across the country,” argued Graham.
Swallows and
Amazons, similarly, comes on cosy and nostalgic, but then wrongfoots
us. Lowthorpe and Gibb’s adaptation cunningly punches up the
subversive storyline of the Amazons. Lowthorpe rightly points out
that the proto-feminist girl gang are startlingly modern (and
apparently in keeping with Ransome’s counter-zeitgeisty views on
women). “They are definitely not your archetypal 1930s girl, and
for that they are wonderful,” says Lowthorpe. “They’re like
warriors, and they are funny and brave and up to no good.”
Otherwise, though,
the film helps make the past seem, not a foreign country, but a
better realm than the rubbish one we have inflicted on our enfeebled
offspring. It chimes with recent rose-tinted eulogies to childhood of
simpler times, captured in the following viral email:
“Congratulations to all my friends who were born in the 1940s, 50s
and 60s…. We ate white bread and real butter; drank cows’ milk
and soft drinks with sugar; but we weren’t overweight because... we
were always outside playing!” The corollary? Modern life is
rubbish.
It’s an abiding
theme. In her memoir of a growing up in suburban Ruislip in the
1950s, Michele Hanson wrote: “So what did ‘play’ mean back
then? There was barely any telly, no mobiles, iPhones or iPlayers, no
internet, computer games, PlayStations and no pop stars. We had only
the simplest of equipment: jacks, marbles, skipping-ropes, bats,
balls and bicycles. Most of the time, my friends and I made our own
games up: making perfume from rose petals, brewing ginger beer,
holding snail races, picking blackberries, making dens in the woods.”
The conviction that
the past was better speaks to our current anxieties. If Philippa
Lowthorpe and Andrea Gibb are looking for another book to adapt for a
film corrective to modern life, they should try Robin Stevens’s
cunning series of novels Murder Most Unladylike, set in a boarding
school in 1935, about two girls who run a detective agency. “Bother,”
says Hazel in Murder Most Unladylike at one point. “Daisy, my
pullover’s in the gym.” Bother? Pullovers? Is there any thing
more vexing than misplacing one’s knitwear? Not in this corner of
Downtonshire there isn’t.
Stevens’s genius
is to produce a mash-up of English fiction from the 1930s, 40s and
50s, borrowing the boarding-school setting (from Enid Blyton’s St
Clare novels no doubt) and erasing the unpalatable bits (PG
Wodehouse’s occasional racist stereotyping, say, or Blyton’s
insistence in the Famous Five mysteries that Anne is a wannabe
housewife to Dick and Julian, or Waugh’s posh-boy wail against the
rise of the common man).
But like Lowthorpe
and Gibb’s retread of Swallows and Amazons, Stevens wants to have
her twee and subvert it. Her heroines Daisy and Hazel are
proto-feminists like the Amazons, girls out of time gently
challenging the patriarchy. What’s more, instead of dramatising the
past as a means of going back to a time in Britain before
immigration, Stevens time-travels to right a racist wrong. The book’s
narrator is Hazel Wong, the daughter of a Hong Kong businessman, who
yearns to become the Chinese Sherlock Holmes. In a lovely scene in
First Class Murder, nasty Little Englanders travelling on the Orient
Express assume that Mr Wong must be a servant. He, marvellously, and
with great dignity, exposes their racist assumptions.
One reason Stevens’s
books are so successful is because, while part of a lucrativeBritish
nostalgia industry, they aren’t really about depicting the past
authentically but about recreating it to escape a present we don’t
like much. Her books teem with polite girls in boaters, white
ankle-socks and sensible plaits – the whole sartorial panoply of a
bygone age.
It’s hard to read
them, or watch the new film of Swallows and Amazons, without thinking
how much kinder, better-dressed, and simpler the world was in 1935.
Why can’t we have those times back? Because they never happened.
And Happy Days didn’t exist until we invented them.
• Swallows and
Amazons is released in the UK on 19 August
The
Gucci wife and the hitman: fashion's darkest tale
When Patrizia
Reggiani married Maurizio Gucci, they became one of Italy’s first
celebrity power couples. But then he left her – and she had him
murdered. Abigail Haworth unpicks an incredible tale of glamour, sex,
betrayal, death and prison in the dizzying world of high fashion
Two years ago, not
long after Patrizia Reggiani was released from prison, a camera crew
from a trashy Italian TV show turned up unannounced at her Milan
workplace. Reggiani had just spent 16 years inside after being
convicted of arranging the murder, in March 1995, of her ex-husband
Maurizio Gucci, the last of the Gucci family dynasty to run the
luxury brand. The former socialite had always maintained her
innocence – her best friend had set her up, she said – but the TV
crew caught her in a reckless mood.
“Patrizia, why did
you hire a hitman to kill Maurizio Gucci? Why didn’t you shoot him
yourself?” badgered the reporter.
“My eyesight is
not so good,” she lobbed back. “I didn’t want to miss.”
Understandably then,
when I try to find her, Reggiani’s inner circle doesn’t seem keen
to let her near another journalist. “She’s not here. She’s off
work with a bad back,” says Alessandra Brunero, co-owner of Bozart,
a Milanese costume jewellery firm that has employed Reggiani as a
“design consultant” since April 2014.
Sentenced to 26
years on appeal, Reggiani was required to find a job as a condition
of her parole. She turned down her first offer of release in 2011,
according to the Italian press, because the very idea of working
horrified her. “I’ve never worked in my life and I don’t intend
to start now,” she told her lawyer.
Bozart, with its
Renaissance-style premises full of sparkling necklaces and
chandeliers, was obviously an acceptable compromise. Brunero and her
business-partner husband have now become Reggiani’s de facto
minders, tasked with ensuring the 67-year-old sticks to her parole
and quietly rebuilds her life as a regular citizen.
“Oh, mamma mia,
it’s not easy,” says Brunero, a stylish 40-something. She invites
me inside, and I get the impression she really needs to talk. “I
cried after that TV interview. It was terrible,” she says, putting
her head in her hands. “Naturally, Patrizia was only joking…”
Even before the
impromptu “confession”, persuading Reggiani to remain low-key was
a lost cause. One of her first acts of freedom was to go shopping on
Via Monte Napoleone – Milan’s Bond Street – decked out in gaudy
jewels and movie-star sunglasses, with a large pet macaw perched on
her shoulder. The paparazzi couldn’t believe their luck. Lady
Gucci, as she used to be known, was back.
The gunning down of
46-year-old Maurizio Gucci one morning in the red-carpeted foyer of
his office, and the subsequent murder trial, captivated Italy in the
late 1990s. It was sensational fin de siècle stuff. This was elegant
Milan, not mob-riddled Naples, and execution-style killings of the
city’s glamorous elite were unknown. Reggiani, dubbed the “Liz
Taylor of luxury labels” in the 1970s and 80s, was an immediate
suspect. She had openly threatened to kill Gucci after their split.
But, without evidence, the crime went unsolved for nearly two years.
A tip-off led to her arrest in 1997, along with four others,
including the hitman.
I met Maurizio at a
party and he fell madly in love with me. I was exciting and different
While the public
loved it, the Gucci company was less enthralled. After decades of
infighting among the heirs of the founder Guccio Gucci, the brand was
no longer under family control. Maurizio, a grandson of Guccio who’d
ousted his relatives from the business to become CEO in 1992, had
been forced to sell his stake 18 months before he died. Ownership was
taken over by Bahrain- based investment bank Investcorp. The murder
coincided with a thrilling revival of the brand’s image in the
mid-1990s under new boss Domenico De Sole and edgy young designer Tom
Ford.
“The last thing
Gucci wanted was a sordid scandal,” says Giusi Ferrè, a veteran
Milan-based fashion writer and cultural critic with trademark spiky
orange hair. “The company tried to ignore the whole drama and they
wanted everyone else to ignore it, too.” The label’s continued
rise over the past two decades has eclipsed memories of the murder
even more. Gucci is currently on yet another high. Revenue is
soaring, and androgynous new creative director Alessandro Michele
recently turned Westminster Abbey into the most hallowed venue ever
for his latest collection. Yet the amnesia is odd, because the saga
has everything: glamour, greed, sex, death, betrayal, raging status
anxiety. It probably says more about the primal allure of a name like
Gucci than all the sales figures in the world.
After Reggiani was
arrested, the media dubbed her Vedova Nera – the Black Widow –
and touted all the stereotypical theories about her likely motives.
She was jealous of Maurizio’s girlfriend, she wanted his money, she
was bitter about his neglect, she was plain mad. If there is a grain
of truth in any of these, there was also something deeper, too.
“Everything Reggiani was stemmed from being a Gucci,” says Ferrè.
“It was her whole identity, even as an ex-wife. She was furious
with Maurizio for selling out.” Even after her release from prison,
Reggiani couldn’t let go. She told La Repubblica newspaper in 2014
that, now she was available again, she hoped to return to the company
fold. “They need me,” she said. “I still feel like a Gucci –
in fact, the most Gucci of them all.”
Bozart’s owners
relent a week later and agree to introduce me to Reggiani at their
offices. She appears in their grand sitting room wearing a short
floral dress. She is tiny, barely 5ft tall, although her enormous
hair, now reddish brown, and nude high heels give her extra height.
“That’s a lovely dress,” I say to break the ice. “It’s
Zara. I don’t earn enough at this place to buy proper clothes,”
she replies, throwing a disgruntled look at her hovering employers.
We sit down on
matching white sofas to espressos and iced water, and I ask her about
life in Milan’s San Vittore prison. “I think I am a very strong
person because I survived all these years in captivity,” she says
in the heavily accented English she picked up during her jet-setting
days. “I slept a lot. I took care of my plants. I looked after
Bambi, my pet ferret.” Bambi, she adds, was a special privilege
negotiated by her lawyer, but the creature met a sticky end when a
fellow inmate accidentally sat on him. “I don’t like to talk
about this time at all,” she says, already keen to change the
subject. “It is all a bad dream to me.” Reggiani won’t admit
out loud that she was in prison, referring to her incarceration as
“my stay at Vittore Residence.”
She relaxes more
when we start to talk about the past. She was born in a small town
outside Milan to a waitress and a much older man who made his fortune
in trucking.
They were very rich,
but not part of Milan’s high society. As a young woman she liked
fine things – her father spoiled her with mink coats and fast cars
– and she found her way on to the elite social circuit. “I met
Maurizio at a party and he fell madly in love with me. I was exciting
and different,” says Reggiani. The Guccis came from Florence so
Maurizio also felt something of an outsider. “I didn’t think much
of him at first. He was just the quiet boy whose teeth crossed over
at the front.” Reggiani had other suitors, but the young Gucci
chased her hard with all the riches at his disposal.
They married in 1972
when they were both around 24. The union caused a rift with Gucci’s
father Rodolfo, one of Guccio Gucci’s sons, who disapproved of
Reggiani’s background and, no doubt, her strong personality.
Maurizio was an only child whose mother had died when he was five,
and his father had always been overprotective.
“Maurizio felt
free with me. We had fun, we were a team,” says Reggiani. Rodolfo
softened after she gave birth to a daughter, Alessandra, and he could
see that she “really loved Maurizio”. The elder Gucci bought the
couple numerous properties, including a luxury penthouse in New
York’s Olympic Tower. Early adopters of celebrity coupledom, the
pair rode around Manhattan in a chauffeur-driven car with the
personalised plate “Mauizia”. They hung out with Jackie Onassis
and the Kennedy brood whenever they were all in town.
I was angry with
Maurizio about many things. But losing the family business was stupid
“We were a
beautiful couple and we had a beautiful life, of course,” says
Reggiani, throwing her hands in the air and briefly leaving them
there. “It still hurts to think about this.” She perks up when
she remembers the lavish colour-themed parties she threw in the early
1980s – “one was all orange and yellow, including the food” –
and the trips to private islands on their 64m wooden yacht, the
Creole, which Maurizio bought to mark the birth of their second
daughter, Allegra. (Worth millions, it is still owned and sailed by
the couple’s two daughters). Their charmed world also included a
ski chalet in Saint Moritz, a holiday home in Acapulco and a farm in
Connecticut.
It all started to
unravel after the death of Rodolfo in 1983, Reggiani says, when
Maurizio inherited his father’s 50% stake in Gucci. “Maurizio got
crazy. Until then I was his chief adviser about all Gucci matters.
But he wanted to be the best, and he stopped listening to me.” The
Gucci brand had been losing prestige from over-licensing its famed
double-G logo and from mass production of canvas bags. Maurizio had a
plan to restore it to high-end glory by reverting to the exquisite
craftsmanship the company was built upon.
He fought for years
with his uncle and cousins, who jointly owned the other half of the
firm, until he pulled off a plot to buy them out with the help of
Investcorp. The couple’s marriage imploded along the way.
Apparently weary of Reggiani’s constant “meddling”, one evening
Maurizio packed an overnight bag and left. Meanwhile, the company
lost millions under his control. Reggiani had been right, at least,
that Maurizio was mismanaging business and not creating enough
revenue to execute his grand ideas. His personal fortune was
dwindling and he was forced to sell Gucci wholly to Investcorp for
$120m in 1993.
“I was angry with
Maurizio about many, many things at that time,” says Reggiani. “But
above all, this. Losing the family business. It was stupid. It was a
failure. I was filled with rage, but there was nothing I could do.”
She turns her head and drops her voice so low I can hardly hear her.
“He shouldn’t have done that to me.”
Giuseppe Onorato was
sweeping away leaves inside the arched doorway of Via Palestro 20,
the graceful building where Maurizio Gucci had his private office, at
8:30am on 27 March 1995. “It was a lovely spring morning, very
quiet,” says Onorato, now 71, the former building doorman and the
only person who witnessed what occurred next. “Mr Gucci arrived
carrying some magazines and said good morning. Then I saw a hand. It
was a beautiful, clean hand, and it was pointing a gun.”
The gun fired three
shots at Gucci’s back as he went up the steps, and a fourth into
his head as he collapsed. “I thought it was a joke. Then the
shooter saw me. He lifted the gun again and fired two more times.
‘What a shame,’ I thought. ‘This is how I die.’”
Reggiani couldn’t
bear the thought of another woman taking the power, status and money
she ‘had earned’
Onorato can’t
remember how he made it to the foyer’s steps after he’d been shot
twice in the arm, but he was sitting there in a pool of blood when
the carabinieri arrived. “I was cradling Mr Gucci’s head. He died
in my arms,” says the ex-doorman.
Speaking on the
phone from Sardinia, where he has a small holiday house, Onorato
still sounds incredulous that he survived. “I still have stabbing
pains in my left arm, but every day for the past 21 years I’ve
woken up thankful I’m alive.” The gunman vanished into Milan’s
Monday morning rush hour. The aftermath wasn’t easy for the
doorman.
As the only direct
witness, Onorato was terrified that the killer would return. “I was
a poor man, so I had to go back to work at Via Palestro 20 when I
recovered. I had a panic attack every time an unfriendly looking
stranger approached.”
After Reggiani’s
conviction, the courts ordered her to pay Onorato compensation of the
equivalent of roughly £142,000. He has yet to receive any of it, he
says. Reggiani’s daughters, who are now in their late 30s and have
always stuck by their mother (at least publicly), directly inherited
Maurizio Gucci’s millions, as well as the yacht and properties in
New York, Saint Moritz and Milan. Reggiani declared herself
nullatenente – the Italian word for bankrupt, meaning “a person
who has nothing”.
“I’m not
bitter,” says Onorato, “but I do wonder, if a rich person had
been wounded in that doorway instead of me, whether they’d have
been treated with more respect.” He has a point. When, for
instance, Gucci’s lawyers proposed a divorce settlement to Reggiani
of £2.5m plus £650,000 per year, she rejected it as “a mere bowl
of lentils” and landed a better deal.
Onorato isn’t the
only person whose life was turned upside down by the murder. Paola
Franchi, now 61, had been Gucci’s live-in partner for five years
before his death. The couple shared a palatial apartment on the city
centre boulevard, Corso Venezia, along with Franchi’s 11-year-old
son Charly, and had planned to marry. Tall and blonde, Franchi didn’t
fare much better than Reggiani in the trial’s media coverage, which
often portrayed her as a glamorous gold digger.
“Oh, they always
resort to these stupid types,” Franchi says. “Actually my
previous husband, whom I left for Maurizio, was even richer, so it
was all nonsense.” An interior designer turned artist, Franchi
lives in a converted porcelain factory in Milan and spends half the
year in Kenya. Her home is stuffed with books, paintings and exotic
souvenirs. She’s chatty and quick to laugh, with a lightness of
spirit that I wasn’t expecting.
During the trial it
emerged that Reggiani had put pressure on her hired accomplices to
carry out the murder quickly, before Franchi and Gucci’s wedding.
Reggiani’s one-time best friend Pina Auriemma, who confessed to
arranging the hitman, testified that Reggiani couldn’t bear the
thought of another woman taking her place as Mrs Maurizio Gucci –
and with it, the power, status and money that she “had earned”.
She also feared that
her daughters could lose some or all of their inheritance if the
couple had children. “Patrizia was stalking us,” says Franchi.
“She still had spies in Maurizio’s circle and she knew all about
our plans, his business dealings, everything. She called many times
abusing him and threatening to kill him.”
If Gucci didn’t
take Reggiani’s calls, she sent him diatribes on cassette tape,
later played in court, saying he was “a monster” for neglecting
her and their daughters, and warning that “the inferno for you is
yet to come”.
“I begged him to
hire a bodyguard,” says Franchi, “but he refused. He didn’t
believe Patrizia would go through with her threat because of their
girls.”
My family has cut
off my financial support. I have nothing, I haven’t even met my two
grandsons
Gucci and Franchi
had crossed paths briefly in their youth on the Euro-rich-kid party
circuit. They reconnected by chance when they were both reeling from
unhappy marriages. “We fell in love immediately. Maurizio used to
tell me” – Franchi starts to cry – “that we were two halves
of the same apple.”
The day after the
murder she received an eviction order from Reggiani to move out of
the grand apartment she’d shared with Gucci. The notarised
timestamp, Franchi noticed, showed the papers had been drawn up at
11am the previous day – less than three hours after Maurizio died.
“In those days co-habiting couples had no legal protection. Charly
and I were out, just like that.”
Franchi slowly
began, as she puts it, “to build a different future”. But five
years later she suffered another tragedy. While visiting his father
over Christmas, her son Charly killed himself at the age of 16. “It
was completely unexpected,” she says. “He was a happy, shining
boy, greatly loved. We think it was a flash of teen madness.”
Franchi has photos of Maurizio and Charly all over her house, but
says they’re not there so she can dwell on her pain. “I like to
have their faces around, to say hello. For a year after Charly died I
felt a rage in my soul, but then I got on with life. I’m the kind
of person who has to keep moving forward.” She poured her emotions
into painting and writing, she says, and is also active in a charity
for troubled or suicidal teens, L’Amico Charly, that her ex-
husband set up in memory of their son.
When Franchi moved
out of the Corso Venezia apartment, Reggiani moved in with her
daughters. She lived there in luxury for the next two years, until
one of her accomplices boasted about the murder to the wrong person.
The man informed the police, who launched a sting operation to trick
Reggiani and her four paid accomplices – her friend Pina Auriemma,
a friend of Auriemma’s who set up the hitman, the hitman himself
and the getaway driver – into discussing the crime on wiretapped
phones. It succeeded. Among other evidence they found at Reggiani’s
home was her Cartier diary, which had a one-word entry for the day of
Gucci’s death: “Paradeisos” – the Greek word for paradise.
In court, Reggiani
admitted she’d paid Auriemma around £200,000, but denied it was
for the murder, claiming Auriemma had arranged the hit herself and
was threatening to frame her if she didn’t pay. “But it was worth
every lira,” Reggiani then added, confusingly, unable to help
herself even then. All five involved in the murder plot were found
guilty. Despite the Gucci company’s supposed indifference to the
scandal, on the day of the verdict the Italian media reported that
Gucci shops around the country hung silver handcuffs in their
windows. (Gucci declined to make any comment at all for this
article.)
At Bozart, Brunero’s
husband and co-owner Maurizio Manca gives me a tour of Reggiani’s
new workplace. It seems almost too perfect for her. The jewellery the
upmarket firm creates is designed to be big, ornate and dazzling.
Manca, who is dressed all in black and has a mop of floppy grey hair,
freely admits the 60-year-old company had its heyday in the 1980s
when “there was corruption everywhere and the money was flowing”.
Stars, including Madonna and Pamela Anderson, have worn Bozart’s
designs which, best of all, supplied all the glitz worn by Linda
Evans’s character Krystle Carrington on the set of Dynasty.
When she’s at
work, Reggiani spends much of her day advising Bozart’s design team
and reading fashion magazines. “She’s like our Michael Schumacher
– she keeps on top of trends and test-drives our creations,” says
Manca.
“I prefer Senna.
He has much more class,” Reggiani says, emerging from her portrait
shoot with the Observer photographer. There’s a pause while
everyone remembers the unfortunate fates of both drivers, and the
analogy is quickly dropped. Reggiani says she enjoys the job, but
admits that she hasn’t found it easy to adjust to the modern
workplace. “I don’t like computers. They are quite evil.” Manca
points out, in her defence, that the fax machine was still
cutting-edge technology when she went to prison. Still, he adds that
they had to remove her computer from their internal network after she
permanently deleted Bozart’s entire photo archive.
Nobody says it
directly, but it seems clear a big reason for taking on Reggiani was
to generate publicity and try to rekindle the firm’s edge of flashy
danger. If so, it hasn’t been straightforward so far. When Reggiani
first arrived she helped to design a collection of rainbow coloured
jewellery and evening bags inspired by her pet macaw, Bo. Bozart held
a launch in Milan in September 2014 and invited the fashion press.
“Everybody came and it was a big success,” says Manca. “But it
happened to be on the same day that Gucci was having a runway show up
the street. The next day there was nothing at all in the newspapers
about Patrizia’s collection.” Manca says the journalists later
told him they’d been leaned on by “someone at Gucci” not to
publish. While Gucci wouldn’t confirm or deny, an Italian fashion
editor friend later doubts his claim. “The fashion corps probably
just didn’t like the parrot designs,” he says.
All the same, Manca
and Brunero appear to be genuinely fond of their employee. As the
afternoon goes by, Reggiani gets tired and cracks in her bravado
appear. She talks about how, by court order, she lives in a Milan
townhouse with her 89-year-old mother, who is still in good health.
“Sometimes I wish I was back inside Vittore Residence because my
mother is very difficult. She berates me every day for no reason.”
Reggiani’s daughters Alessandra and Allegra, who were 18 and 14
when she was arrested, are both married and now live in Switzerland.
Unimaginably rich thanks to their father’s estate, they haven’t
visited Reggiani much since her release.
It’s almost the
stuff of Greek tragedy. “We are going through a bad time now,”
says Reggiani. “They don’t understand me and have cut off my
financial support. I have nothing, and I haven’t even met my two
grandsons.” She says she has “no idea” what the future holds
when her parole ends, possibly in a few months. She may continue to
work at Bozart and says she’d like to travel when she’s allowed
to leave the country again. She seems to have given up the idea of
trying to find a job at Gucci, even if she hasn’t quite let go of
the past. “If I could see Maurizio again I would tell him that I
love him, because he is the person who has mattered most to me in my
life.” I ask her what she thinks he’d say to her in reply, and
she sounds a note of realism at last. “I think he’d say the
feeling wasn’t mutual.
