Angela Carter on Elizabeth Wilson (1985)
… Zola saw his store, the Au Bonheur des Dames of the title, as a vast juggernaut crushing traditional tradespeople and small shopkeepers beneath its wheels in its headlong progress and, above all, transforming business methods. These department stores, abandoned hulks, may now be seen, empty of stock and bereft of custom, in the deserted downtowns of those American cities that have already committed themselves to the 21st-century vision of the total shopping environment embodied in the shopping mall. And when Elizabeth Wilson reaches the period when classical Modernism disintegrates in a mass of self-contradicting signs, she also loses confidence, somewhat, and her writing loses some of its beautiful clarity, although on the nature of Post-Modernism itself she is wonderfully cogent: ‘Post-modernism, with its eclectic approach to style, might seem especially compatible with fashion: for fashion, with its constant change and pursuit of glamour, enacts symbolically the most hallucinatory aspects of our culture, the confusions between the real and the not-real, the aesthetic obsessions, the vein of morbidity without tragedy, of irony without merriment, and the nihilistic critical stance towards authority, empty rebellion almost without political content.’
Here she sums up the present condition of aesthetics with positively majestic severity. Yet it is precisely when she discusses fashion in the present day and the recent past that bits and bobs of fashion journalists’ argot creep into and disfigure her prose. ‘Fashion anarchy,’ she says, speaking of the demise of ‘the single, Paris-dictated line’ which evidently once existed and now does not; she talks about ‘the ethnic look’, and this look, and the other look, with neither irony nor apology, but almost a kind of exhaustion, as if all that is solid really is melting into air, this time, but ‘wolf’ has been cried once too often. She fails to appreciate adequately the incorporation of fashion into the leisure industry; she, mysteriously, seems to admire Mary Quant.
Elizabeth Wilson blames the Sixties for a good deal, especially for the promotion of decadent images of Woman as Waif, and as ‘the art nouveau nymph, stoned and tubercular’. It is as if the capacity for dialectics deserted her when faced with something of which she did not approve, and evidently she does not approve of that ramshackle yet glorious decade. As a result, she tends to misread icons. For example, the whole point of Twiggy, whom she fingers as waif incarnate, was the contradiction between the extraordinary refinement of her features and the raucous cheerfulness of her personality. She looked, and, indeed, still does, like a creature from another planet where people are more beautiful than we are: and she sounded, as her then boyfriend remarked, like ‘a demented parrot’ …
