Hatfirst

1

As I drink my tea, I look at the bottle from which it has come flowing toward my mouth. The bottle assures me that I am beautiful, and furthermore that my beauty has a history. Its legitimacy and reason for being originated in the mouth of the Duchess of Bedford, and the Duchess of Bedford must have been a beautiful woman who wore a hat.

Click to enlarge.


2

The catalog of the art dealer Phillips de Pury opens in my computer, adding icons in the center of the screen to the icons already on permanent display in the margins.

Some of the central icons display as thumbnails: little pictorial allusions to history's way of knowing. Oh, of course: those are the Arbus twins. But the online publisher Issuu.com has opened the catalog to a larger icon, one whose caption we may have to depend on for information. It hasn't been immer schon internalized in the form of ironic connoisseurship, as the Arbus image may have been. Outside the aura of certainty which gives the glow to an iconic name like Arbus, we drift toward the photograph's caption space, and there with some relief we spot a flock of speaking words. The words fly toward us to say that the photographer was named Lillian Bassman, and in 1949 she created an image and gave it a name of its own with some other names inside it: "Fantasy on the dance floor: Barbara Mullen, dress by Christian Dior, Paris."

The photograph forces us to read those words on its own terms. Beyond the word "model," I don't know who Barbara Mullen is, or was -- but the image is peremptory in its insistence that I do know, I must. Fashion photography exists to teach us the lovely deadly fiction that cloth and color and pose are eternally real, real for the only length of time that can be significant: the instant it takes to see and catch our breath and then forget again. For that long and only that long, there was Barbara Mullen. But forever there will be (in ascending order) shoulder fingers mouth nose hat.

3

Hat, encore:

Casper Emerson, Jr., 1918. From 

60 Great Patriotic Posters, ed. Mary Carolyn Waldrep
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010), image 014.

"The body dies, the body's beauty lives," chants Wallace Stevens. The war ended, the war will never end. See how the hat shapes evanescent life into eternal geometry.