"fancy boy"
note: a v short excerpt from this essay first appeared in the spring 2022 issue of seasons of des pair, the quarterly journal that the ultra-chic los angeles bookstore des pair used to publish. the full piece is a good survey of how i think about history and fashion and ✨presentation✨. because i wrote this a few years ago, references to “recently” might not be about anything recent at all.
I like to cross my legs like a man—that is, I prop my right ankle over my left knee. That’s why I wear the same tight black pants every day, to allow for range of motion. I have been looking for a red hat for 500 years. The hat appears in Botticelli portraits with titles like Portrait of a Youth or Portrait of a Young Man or Portrait of a Boy. All of Botticelli’s youths look bored, like they have never smiled, their brown hair coming to rest in curls on the shoulders of jackets lined with fur. The red hat they wear is brimless, maybe soft on top. When I show the portraits to friends on my phone over a second or third drink, they ask, “Are you sure it’s not a fez?” But why would a Florentine boy in the late-15th century wear a fez?
A few years ago, I purchased a pair of black loafers with an exaggerated pointed toe because they remind me of depictions of 14th- and 15th-century merchants and noblemen wearing shoes I have learned were called poulaines or crakows, depending on what part of Europe one was from. Every night I fall asleep scrolling through images of men in damask tunics and clownish slippers. They must have spent a lot of time sitting and reading and passing decrees, because one can’t go hunting in shoes with toes that long. Maybe they tripped through very slow dances and their wives maintained bland, tranquil expressions, as if to say, “If we all wear the same insipid smile, no one will have to think about how terrible and stupid this is.” Still, a pointed toe elongates the leg, and all those medieval men must have looked at each other’s calves, sheathed in black hose, thinking, “Yes, yes,” with envy.
I wear my pointed black loafers with tight black ponte pants and then cross my legs like a man. I would like to think this is more out of comfort than the politics of presentation. In some ways it is. But when I get to work every morning and sit at my desk in front of my two screens, slouch down a little and prop my right ankle over my left knee, I feel incredibly significant. Someone could ask me to do something for them, and if I said, “No, thanks, not right now,” they would reply, “OK,” with no resentment. That’s how powerful and breezy the difference is between crossing my legs one thigh over the other (as femininity dictates) and crossing my legs like a man. Maybe this attitude can be reduced to a pillow-stitchable maxim, like, “An Airy Crotch Is a Power Crotch.” But it is also just true that moderately thin women with conventional good looks who seem only slightly androgynous (their bearing is a touch masculine, they wear a boyish hat) command not a small amount of authority, if they are playful enough. I am simply trying to be realistic about where I fall on the spectrum of beauty in the world. Compared to one of Botticelli’s blonde goddesses and nymphs, I am rough and not the least angelic. And once, in a poem, I described myself as having “middling intellect,” which I really do believe is true, sometimes.
Men were not the only fools to wear the poulaines. In illuminated manuscripts from the mid-15th century, courtly scenes show women pulling back the excess fabric of their overskirts to reveal long narrow points peeking out from the layers underneath. I have a book that belonged to my mother when she was in high school called The Portable Medieval Reader, an anthology of bizarre texts that spans the several hundred years of the Middle Ages. There are dozens of pieces in this book, but one of my favorites is a lament over the state of fashion in Italy. In this latter piece, dating from the 14th century, Franco Sacchetti writes, “The Lord created our feet free, yet many persons are unable to walk on account of the long points of their shoes.” Of women’s fashion in particular, he complains, “And what more wretched, dangerous, and useless fashion ever existed than that of wearing such sleeves as they do, or great sacks, as they might rather be called? They cannot raise a glass or take a mouthful without soiling both their sleeves and the tablecloth by upsetting the glasses on the table.”
Years ago I saw a photo of the guests at a private preview of Virgil Abloh’s SS17 Off-White collection during Paris Fashion Week, and I swear there was a man in the small crowd wearing the red hat, or at least something that closely approximated the red hat. I pulled the image link and texted it to a friend. She responded, “Yeah, I don’t think that’s the hat, bb.”
Once I read an interview with the writer Hilary Mantel, who said of her interest in people long departed from this world, “Instead of thinking there was a wall between the living and the dead, I thought there was a very thin veil. It was almost as if they’d just gone into the next room.” In museums, I spend the most time with portraits of men and women in brocades and velvets in dark hues, their collars and ruffs starched stiff. The sitters of these portraits invariably turn their heads to a three-quarter view, offering me a long look at their cheekbones. I make my husband take my photo in front of these paintings, and I affect the same tilt of the head, the same side-eye glance. It takes at least ten shots to get it right, because my husband isn’t a great photographer, and in my frustration I let him know that. Afterward, we have to spend a few minutes on opposite sides of whatever gallery we’re in. There is but a veil separating me from these figures, and by posing as they posed, I feel I have stepped so close to the veil I might catch small movements and sounds from the other side, the slightest whisper of satin moving across the floor, a quick sighting of silk and skin, dull light winking off a pearl, a cough.
Several seasons ago, the fashion house Bottega Veneta put out a structured red cap for men. The description for the hat on the brand’s website read, “Brimless hat with a flat crown crafted in a pleasantly compact cotton knit. This original design perfectly complements the Runway looks and conveys style and character.” Can a woman with a slightly boyish affect wear such a hat? If I wear this hat, will my walk, my carriage, my bearing convey style and character? Will I appear as a bored youth?
When the hat was first released, I reached out to a family friend who happened to be a buyer at Bottega Veneta. I told him I wanted to write a piece about the lingering influence of 15th-century Italian fashion for the magazine where I worked. I hoped he could help me call in the hat and have the magazine’s photo editor shoot me in the style of one of Botticelli’s youths. The family friend put me in touch with a publicist for the brand who seemed angry by my request. “I’m sorry,” the publicist told me, “this hat is not available for you. I do not even have an image file for you to use in your piece.” And so I slouched, and so I crossed my legs, and so I felt very bored and young and not very significant.
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I want to look like an 18th-century prince every day. In the Met, in the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the Statens Museum for Kunst, the National Portrait Gallery, I seek out the portraits of men wearing silk pastel suits. If these men are standing, they typically rest most of their weight on one leg, letting the foot of the other leg turn out. It’s a posh pose. I try to affect it, every time muttering to myself, “I, too, am a fancy boy.” On my honeymoon, I stood in a window at Versailles and turned out my left foot, a heavy velvet curtain to one side of me, pooling on the ground. I asked my husband to take photo after photo. When he couldn’t get it right, I pulled a notebook out of my bag and sketched the image I needed him to capture. I couldn’t draw it and he couldn’t photograph it, and in the end we walked to the Grand Trianon without speaking.
I want something really specific, and I can’t have it. More than the pose, it’s the shoes the men wear in the paintings that elude me. A block heel, a leather or satin or silk upper dyed to match their clothes, the shoe tied closed with ribbon pulled into a lavish bow.
There are block heels everywhere these days. Block heels on boots, block heels on mule sandals, block heels on regular sandals. I say I want something specific, and I think I’ve found it in the block heeled Mary Jane shoe by Suzanne Rae. This isn’t a huge brand. It doesn’t even have a brick-and-mortar shop. I only know about this designer because one morning in a moment of profound lucidity, Instagram belched up a recommendation that actually felt relevant to me, the image of a model wearing fuchsia silk pants and yellow Mary Janes with a block heel and a gauzy white bow. Somewhere deep within Instagram’s engineering, an algorithm did what it was supposed to.
Every day I share to my Instagram Stories paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries of men and women in fine dress. After each image I then share something contemporary, either a runway photo or a still from a film, that illustrates how modern clothing bears traces of the garments that came before. Forty-eight weeks ago Instagram presented me with the image of Mary Janes from Suzanne Rae’s SS19 collection, and I felt like the internet recognized me, saw what it meant to retreat into a pop-academic headspace, saw what it meant to crave a fancy-boy aesthetic. I shared the Suzanne Rae photo to my Instagram Stories and wrote, “These shoes have me thinking about other shoes.” Then I shared image after image of similar shoes from paintings saved in my camera roll, a parade of pink, beige, cream, yellow, and green heeled slippers with bows or ribbons tied to look like flowers, cropped from 17th- and 18th-century portraits.
Last summer, L’Officiel ran an interview with Chloe Wise, one of my favorite contemporary painters, who once pranked the fashion world by creating handbags shaped like bread goods. She clipped labels from knockoff designer bags and sent her friends to fashion week parties carrying Prada baguettes, Moschino pancakes, Chanel bagels. In an outtake from the L’Officiel shoot that Wise posted to Instagram, the artist wears emerald green Suzanne Rae Mary Janes while standing in front of one of her own paintings. Scrolling through my feed, I recognized the shoes before I even tapped the photo to see the fashion credits. Wise isn’t shown straight on but at a three-quarter view, her head barely tipped forward. She wears a black quilted suit by Puppets and Puppets, a brand that as of yet has only produced two collections. I searched for this suit online and saw a male model wore it on the runway, but female models have worn it in other shoots since. If I were to curate an exhibition at a museum with an expansive permanent collection, I’d hang this photo of Chloe Wise next to a painting of a duke or count in similar shoes standing in front of a large canvas.
The Suzanne Rae shoes are expensive; at $510 they exist in that sweet spot between exorbitant and impractical. Last summer, the brand held a sample sale with three other brands in Chinatown, and the possibility of discounted Mary Janes was too seductive to ignore. My husband agreed to come with me. We followed the address to the third floor of a dumpy office building with no air conditioning. Racks of clothes lined the walls of the room where the sale was, one wall for each brand represented. In the center of the space was a table covered in hats and bags, picked-over and disorganized. A dozen young women flipped through the racks of clothes, sweating from the stress of not finding what they’d come for. It was the sale’s second day. Sizing was limited. The best pieces had gone the day before. No one was happy.
Sample sales require a show of bravery, which has never been my most pronounced personality trait. One has to be prepared for a fight, to use the side of one’s body to block another woman’s hunt, to glare, to snatch. As the smaller sample sales rarely have a designated dressing room, one must be willing to either risk buying the wrong size or find creative methods of trying on clothes. At the Suzanne Rae sample sale, one more resourceful shopper found a way around all of this by wearing a leotard the same color as her flesh under her clothes. When we walked in my husband panicked: “Is that girl not wearing a shirt? Should I leave?” The young woman would pull a dress off its hanger, slip it on over her head, evaluate her reflection in the room’s only mirror, and then return the garment to its rack of origin. Her efficiency was impressive, inspiring even. She was a machine of focused decision-making. This was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and when something wasn’t right. I admired her, and in another life we might have been friends. But the sample sale is a battlefield, and we were enemies simply by occupying the same space.
I too had come for something specific (the Mary Janes, of course). In a corner of the room I found a few waist-high stacks of white boxes, the only Suzanne Rae shoes left. None were the Mary Janes, none had a gauzy ribbon, none were even my size, and none looked like the slippers of a princeling. I want something extremely specific, but more and more, it starts to feel like a mood board fantasy.
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I am obsessed with fit. When a retailer I love changes its sizing in even the tiniest ways, I can feel it across my shoulders and down my arms. It’s a pulling and a pinching. Last week, I spent an hour just trying on denim jackets, having worn my old one to the point of literal disintegration. I only looked at two styles, a boxy cropped black jacket in sizes extra-small and small and a blue denim jacket in a “classic” cut in sizes small and medium. My process for trying on jackets is as follows: I strip to the lightest layer worn over my bra (generally, just a t-shirt). I put the jacket on. I lift one arm over my head, then the other, then both. How far above my hips or waist does the jacket rise as I lift? Do I have to hike up the sleeves a little in order to prevent pulling in the arms? I cross my arms over my chest. This is really the most important test I put a jacket through. Does the material pull at the armpits? What about along my shoulder blades? If there is any uncomfortable tugging, I hug myself with as much stretching as my body will allow and ask, how long could I do this before the jacket rips up the back? I lower my arms. Then I bend my arms at the elbow like I’m doing bicep curls. I note the bunching of the fabric and try to rate it. Moderate bunching? Uncomfortable bunching? I try to gauge whether this is because of the thickness of the denim (or wool or cashmere or leather, depending on the piece) or because the jacket simply doesn’t fit.
I have a difficult time making decisions on my own, so when trying on the denim jackets I recorded four videos of the fit tests (one for each size) and sent them to my husband. I do this every time I’m trying on any outerwear, always asking him to tell me which size he thinks at the very least looks right. He usually texts back, “Wow, thanks for taking me on this journey with you” or “Looks great” (which doesn’t actually answer my question) or “I’m trying to do work right now” or “This is starting to feel like a complex.” Last week, in response to the onslaught of videos of me in various denim, he texted, “Look, I love you, but since you woke up this morning, you’ve had a million questions and a million fears.” Yes, of course, because I’m afraid of buying the wrong thing. I’m afraid of not looking exactly the way I think I ought to look in jackets and coats. More specifically, I should look trim, like the garment was made for me and only me. People should look at me and mistake me for vaguely sporty.
To be fair to my husband, sometimes he gets photos of me exactly right. When we were in Amsterdam last, I stood in front of two paintings by Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck from 1652, portraits of the wealthy merchant Eduard Wallis and his wife, Maria van Strijp. The sitters are angled in three-quarter view to face each other from their respective frames. Maria drapes her left arm across the back of a chair, revealing a bracelet and ring with pearls and dark stones. She holds a fan in her right hand. Eduard rests the back of his right hand against his hip, and holds a tall black hat in the left. I took Maria’s pose for the photo, angling the left side of my body forward slightly and letting my head fall back just a bit. I draped my husband’s denim jacket, oversized on me, across my shoulders. I wore a dress I’d bought just the week before in Copenhagen. I did not smile. My husband got the distance and perspective just right, and in the photo I look so languid and pale. Eduard and Maria stare into the camera from their perch on the wall, framing me from behind like they created me. I posted the photo to Instagram with a filter that washed me out even more and caption that read “stoic couple + new dress + denim + rijksmuseum.”
Weeks later, I returned to New York, and one of my coworkers approached me. “Do you believe in past lives,” she asked. I don’t, but she was so excited and hopeful that I just said, “Oh, I’m not sure.” “Well, even if you don’t, I do,” she said. “And I have a sense about these things. You are just from that time. You just have the face and the shoulders. And in front of those paintings? You really do just look like you’re from another time.” I told her, “That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” and I really meant it.
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I have terrible posture; my shoulders are naturally rounded, and I am always a little slouched, even when I’m straining hard to sit up straight. Once when a masseuse put her hands on me, she actually said, “Oh my god, your shoulders are so rounded. Wow, wow.” But when I walk the museums of Europe, I find myself surrounded by portraits of slouching women. I ask myself, are rounded shoulders noble shoulders? I have to think there is beauty in a slight hunch. Why else would all these women from the mid-19th century with their low-cut gowns and enormous skirts slouch across the canvases of Franz Xaver Winterhalter, who famously depicted the great beauties of Europe’s royal houses. Winterhalter’s portraits always make me feel better about my rounded shoulders, as if I’m onto something, but just a century and a half too late.
A radical theory I could pursue in earnest if I weren’t too busy slouching over here in my chair, with my right ankle propped over my left knee, is that bad posture is good posture. If women of a certain class, a literal ruling class, were always depicted with posture that might today be called lazy, there is some logic in suggesting that to slouch is to affect a regal bearing. On America’s Next Top Model, Tyra Banks tells contestants with large breasts to round their shoulders in a way that must feel unnatural in order to achieve a more editorial look (this is the pose she characterizes as “hoe, but then make it fashion”). To slouch, then, is extremely stylish—indeed, the upper echelons of style. It elevates the perceived class of the sloucher. Besides, it feels good. Even just now, I had to remind myself to drop my shoulders and roll them back. I am from that time!
While visiting Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst last summer, I took a photo of a portrait of a French nobleman from the 1780s, the Comte d’Angiviller. He wears a lavender silk suit with a cream silk waistcoat. A roll of crinkled paper spills off the table next to him. Light reflects in ripples off his torso. He has the bland body of an inactive man slipping into middle age, but his jacket fits just right. I posted the photo to Instagram with the caption “it was then the comte realized he really was his father’s *fancy* boy.”
