Becky raises a really interesting point about the rejection of fashion as a political act. Maybe Lee Miller's turn away from fashion after witnessing the effects of the Holocaust, as Becky seems to suggest, is like a reflection of a reworked form of Adorno's famous dictum to say "there is no fashion after Auschwitz."

By Kathy P from Brooklyn at 01:39 Wed 12 Mar 2008
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Interesting, too, that Miller turned to food. Herzog's documentary about Dieter Dengler ("Little Dieter Needs to Fly") illustrates how the deprivation experienced in war can lead to an obsession with food and plenty of it. Also, Becky asks how many male WWII correspondents were criticized for turning slovenly while turning themselves into gourmets. Really, has anyone questioned the slovenly-ness of any of those male correspondents at all -- or is that seen as a masculine fashion statement rather than a reflection of their emotional duress?

By mlbryer at 05:36 Wed 12 Mar 2008
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http://www.wayodd.com/funny-pictures2/funny-pictures-anorexic-barbie-Pe7.jpg

I find this story rather puzzling I must admit .... we can assume and speculate about why she let herself go due to the incredible events in her extraordinary life ... there might be some truth... there might be some guilt as explained .. or just simply the fact that with age .... views and interests do tend to change .... and yet I keep wondering . " Does the world improve around us if we join someone's unfortunate and regrettable misery, do we add anything positive to those in misery already by becoming one of them ?.... just wondering and wondering ..... I once saw a story of a woman who was absolutely dashing and full of life and then at certain point in time she turned a slob .... depression followed and lost her confidence ... but then by chance she turned her life around with the help of .. you guess ! ..... fashion!! ... and from that moment on she regained her confidence and became more alive.... who would ever believe that ? ... as shallow as it might read to some !

What I find interesting about fashion today is ... that in a certain way it's a knife of two edges .... just be careful how you use it ...... it might cut you or it might help you to be an useful tool in the matters of the feeling good factor, that is something many people need badly more often than not ..... no harm in that :):) as long as it doesn't become the ruler of you life .... In the end it all depends how we use it... it is just like ..... FIRE ... if only to illustrate it ......:):)

By Galileo's Universe at 14:32 Wed 12 Mar 2008
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PS> ... on the other hand, my speculative answer would be that ..... what she meant was that events in her personal life led her to lose ' total control ' ..... whatever that may mean .... as in ' let herself go ' but then again ... I'm just guessing :):)!

By Galileo's Universe at 19:53 Wed 12 Mar 2008
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...with reference to the above comments, I think it is worth considering that the phrase 'to let oneself go' is sometimes used to describe someone losing their inhibitions and reaching an (albeit often temporary) state of release... perhaps their is some irony in this statement being used negatively to describe Miller's decline in personal appearance when in terms of personal relevance, Miller was perhaps freeing herself of the social constraints that fashion had, for so long, imposed upon her and those around her?

Becky, a wonderful essay, I can't wait to read more from you about Miller!

By FrancescaL at 23:15 Wed 12 Mar 2008
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I agree with the idea that, having witnessed the horrors of WW2, Miller simply didn't think fashion was amusing anymore. Think of W. Somerset Maugham's comment: "Art is merely the game which those who, being supplied with food and women, invent to pass the tediousness of life" (or something like that- to the same effect). Granted, Lee Miller was not the type to be 'supplied with women' but the point is the same: fashion is fun when you're safe and well-provided for, and when you aren't, it seems less necessary, unless you're French (or me) and then it's always necessary. So her rejection of fashion was a result of what she saw. But it was also a rejection of the construction of femininity to which women were and are subject, and of course when a woman rejects femininity she often suffers for it (witness the Rei Kawakubo collection dubbed 'Hiroshima chic').

By Anjo at 04:04 Thu 13 Mar 2008
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' So her rejection of fashion was a result of what she saw. ' ..... I find this hard to believe.... however true it might be !.... Perhaps that was the moment when she realised how 'shallow' she was and how wrong her values were ... but to reject fashion in order to announce to the whole wide world that you have regained ' control' of your life by rejecting you own femininity ..... that amounts ( in my opinion of course ! ) to wanting to punish yourself for the evils created by fellow humans , as in her case. What is the point in that ?...... ' altruism' towards fellow humans at its best ? ... However interesting and highly intellectual the whole episode may become ! ...is this a kind of ' Mea Culpa ' ?....... If that's true then we should definitely see the Pope , indeed, wearing a totally different kind of ....'fashion' as in robes .......

But if we are talking about characters such as IMELDA MARCOS...... then I can understand why Imelda would had want to pay penitence for her sins !

By Galileo's Universe at 06:27 Thu 13 Mar 2008
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'it seems that your point that" fashion is fun when you are safe and well provided for and when you're not it seems less necessary" is completely disproved by Marcus Werner Heds (brilliant) film yesterday.Have a look and then see what you think.

By la at 07:38 Thu 13 Mar 2008
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Great article. I wonder as well about the form of fashion photography in the post-war period. In the 1930s and even the 1940s, it was possible to be a surrealist and a fashion photographer - to combine that kind of politics with fashion - does the form of fashion photography allow this in the 1950s?

By theoisbest at 12:17 Thu 13 Mar 2008
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Dr. Conekin's essay gives a good example of how the war divided people's lives into the 'before and after' of pleasures and guilt. Unlike WWI, where nobody won and most everyone was killed, and all of Europe ended up ashamed, the stark moral issues of WWII required individuals to figure out what had to change now and for them. Women like Lee Miller--who had experienced the war at the front -- and women who got nowhere near it -- were alike being counted (at least among themselves) as moral agents. I think Conekin is absolutely right to make this point in the case of MIller.

But I also think that Miller's post-war life as Conekin and her witnesses attest, is about the problems of being a beautiful woman who grows old: the anecdotes of her getting fat and losing her hair sound like symptoms of menopause: there was no HRT therapy around then. The comments by those around her remind me of the fate of her contemporary Barbara Skelton, who had started out as a model for Schiaparelli and became one of the central figures who wrote for and edited Cyril Connelley's important journal, HORIZON, all the while choosing husbands and lovers from Fitzrovia and beyond (she figured as the temptress Pamela Flitton in Anthony Powell's A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME). Skelton's brilliantly hilarious two-volume autobiography details her frustration and surprise at becoming an older woman whose former lovers were now loving women decades younger than Skelton herself. In her case, some of her rebellion against age took the form of her satirical writing about the coterie in which she had been the Femme Fatale.

Certainly Skelton was furious at being deprived of the kind of sex life that she, like many others who had been known for their beauty and seductiveness, had considered to be part of who they were. But that fury doesn't speak its name -- in Skelton's case, it was called alcoholism.

Great essay -- lets learn more about how women deal with sex and appearance all the way through their lives, and about how War changes everything.

By AnnieJ at 12:33 Thu 13 Mar 2008
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Certainly a lot to think about, protest fashion and the politics of dressing against the New Look grain. While others in America were busy buying up their 2 cars, bungalows and displaying conspicuous consumption, Miller went in the opposite direction. Her need to compensate for the horrors of war is activistic, perhaps even moralistic in chastising fashion as trivial. Also interesting re: Miller taking up gourmet cooking. While food is a necessity, it is then transformed into some artistic enterprise as 'cuisine' and therefore, an ultimate luxury to be playing with one's food.

By ceekaylau at 13:18 Thu 13 Mar 2008
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.... there is a kind of irony in this example ..... different circumstances sure .... but ! and in my opinion there is a 'but ' , were the person who might be going hungry given the choice between which store would they want to go into in order get that very desperate needed meal ..... and chose for him/herself between Tesco or Harrods' Food Hall .... I really wonder which of the two would be chosen and why ? .... To dream ? To enjoy the meal ? or just simply to fill the stomach ? ..... yes those red shiny shoes keep coming back to my mind, even when they meant a big sacrifice but if just to put them on .... for a very short moment in a cut short life .....

By Galileo's Universe at 10:48 Fri 14 Mar 2008
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I can't really speak for that particular person and his motivations as in this particular case with that particular hat as an example ..... but if you were to ask me personally ... my answer would be ........ because is comfortable, good quality, keeps me warm and last but not least because it does look good ...:).... and never would I chose it to impress others ! ...

By Galileo's Universe at 12:07 Fri 14 Mar 2008
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Could you make an educated guess?

A fashion designer creates clothes by interpreting current fashions. A clothing designer who does not do this is either broke, or by rare coincidence, produces work that fits in with current trends.
Fashion makes something desirable, or fashionable, regardless of any intrinsic qualities the thing has or has not got. And, just as importantly, on the same terms it makes things undesirable, or unfashionable.

By Karl Fuler at 12:21 Fri 14 Mar 2008
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I agree ... ' Fashion makes something desirable, or fashionable, regardless of any intrinsic qualities the thing has or has not got. ' ....

But this bit, in my personal opinion, is not necessarily ' Black and White ' ... ' on the same terms it makes things undesirable, or unfashionable '..... this is true I suppose when people become ' fashion victims' ..... which indeed is mostly the rule that the exception ....

By Galileo's Universe at 12:31 Fri 14 Mar 2008
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Both in response to this essay and in response/encouragement to Galileo's comments on 'The Red Shoes' I thought I would throw this into the mix. I originally found this in Banksy's 'Manifesto' section though he has now replaced it. Though weeping is a somewhat outdated reaction for our modern jaded selves you might want to give it a shot.

The liberation of Nazi death camp, Bergen-Belsen

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywher, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen.

It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing could save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit becasue they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference.

Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wantering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was amongst the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Source: Imperial War Museum.

By Brooke Taylor at 11:59 Sat 15 Mar 2008
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What a profound and provocative essay! Conekin has completely changed how I think about Miller.

By thursday at 17:47 Sat 15 Mar 2008
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Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin's diary entry is extraordinary and extremely thought-provoking, not to mention visually stunning. Thank you for sharing it, Brooke Taylor!

By becky c at 18:39 Sat 15 Mar 2008
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' At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity."

' THEIR HUMANITY ' ........ no argument can ever surpass this beautiful and profound statement ! .... by ALieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO

Thank you indeed ........ Brooke Taylor ......... for sharing it !

By Galileo's Universe at 21:24 Sat 15 Mar 2008
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Professor Conekin's story of Miller's "letting herself go" fascinates. That one letter tantalizes, but it seems possible that her slob turn also had more personal roots in her own fed-up-ness (yes) with the tyranny of fashionable presentability. So many beautiful women "let themselves go." Marianne Faithfull writes about the burden of beauty and her effort to unburden herself of it in her wonderful autobiography.

By alice e at 13:38 Sat 05 Apr 2008
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