Philo Philo burning bright (part 2)

the godlike fashioning of mortal grandeur

This is the second of a two-part post. Voilà la première:

I do not think it an overstatement to say Phoebe Philo’s first edit breeds terror in my soul. Terror and beauty are famously, poetically entwined, after all—an amalgam for which Yeats tends to get the lion’s share of the credit, but Blake’s Tyger both predates and, in my opinion, outshines.

For those unfamiliar with Philo’s work, who might have the tendency to brush aside her impact if not the broader art of fashion as superficial, I’m tempted to go full Miranda-Priestly-blue-sweater on her:

I myself discovered the absurd breadth of Philo’s influence in retrospect; that she was behind not only my most extravagant purchase ever, of these Céline sunglasses in 2015, but also the Chloé dresses I’d hopelessly coveted in Vogue more than a decade earlier.

Chloé F/W 2004 by Phoebe Philo

And there’s a literary bent to her work, too. Philo contributed materially to perhaps the greatest literary brand of all time—yes, Didion’s—taking the queen of cool to ice cold in a modeling choice so consequential the ad was covered as news by The New York Times.

Joan Didion for Céline Spring 2015 by Phoebe Philo—arguably the most famous literary image of the 21st century (with apologies to Jeffrey Eugenides!)

Suffice it to say: even if you’re not a die-hard Philophile, if you’re into the latest incarnation of “quiet luxury”; if you’ve ever bought a sculptural staple from Zara or COS; if you registered the Joan Didion estate sale (the sunglasses fetched $27,000)—you’ve been touched by the immortal hand and eye of Phoebe Philo.

Her new eponymous label’s “A1” edit and the Tygresses she has fashioned most recently are in Didion’s mold, clearly, though in a way of an even more fearsome breed. Joan Didion was, after all, Joan Didion; the ad a portrait of an artist, cashing in her preexisting glamour as much as it enhanced it. What makes the women in the new images extraordinary is merely that Phoebe Philo has dressed them.

In other words, whereas Didion’s specter imbued 2015 Céline with legendary artist-magic, the magic of 2023 Phoebe Philo follows the clothes. “They do something that possesses the wearer, makes her feel a bit more almighty,” as

Leandra Medine Cohen

put it recently. “You can kind of just tell when a woman’s dressed in Phoebe because, ironic as it sounds, it’s not about the clothes. Is this the inimitable magic?”

Cohen knows heaps more about fashion than I do but I’m going to take a stab at answering her question, inimitable magic being at the center of The Portrait of a Mirror, and very much my thing:

What I’m trying to say is, Wes just had this thing about him—the not-actually-a-thing thing that people always seem to think they’re going to achieve by buying certain shit and doing certain things, but never seem to be able to. You know—you know the special effect some people give off that seems materially imitable, but just isn’t? He had that. Do you know what I mean?

Certainly Philo is a master of cultivating textbook Girardian metaphysical desire, understands the idea that all desire is a desire for being. The Chloé girls were like designed in a lab to thus entice collegiate me. But I’d argue that at some point in her time at Céline, Philo started moving beyond the skillful execution of mimetic advertising and illusory appeal of manufactured nonchalance towards something more novel. Casting a model in her eighties, even if it was the great Joan Didion, was an intermediary step en route to these haughty, makeup-less women with all of her intimidating bearing absent the titanic cultural provenance.

My friend Erin Somers (author of the novel Stay Up with Hugo Best, which I will never stop recommending) got to try on the sunglasses herself last year in covering the Didion estate sale for Vulture, and the piece she wrote ended up revolving around them:

I thought, before I showed up to the gallery, Why bid on someone’s dusty old stuff? It felt akin to owning movie props. The Bat Suit, or something. Dorothy’s ruby slippers. It seemed like a Planet Hollywood impulse, part of our national obsession with celebrity. What are you going to do with Joan Didion’s hurricane lamp, I thought, make an altar?

But then I tried on the sunglasses. They had been designated “Lot 5” and by the time I put them on, the leading bid was $3,200. Their final price tag could clear $5,000, I speculated (naïvely). For $440, you could buy them brand new. You could buy them anytime on the Céline website. But I can’t deny that I felt a charge when I put them on. I know it was imagined. I know that nothing of a writer’s essence clings to her possessions after death. I know genius is not transferable via luxury goods. And yet.

I asked Erin to clarify precisely what she meant by this “charge.” Here’s an extract from that conversation, lightly edited for clarity:

ES: I would say that the charge was from the fact that they are a beautiful luxury object and also that they’re historically significant. Powerful combo. I felt cool in them. It contradicted what I expected to feel, which was nothing.

ANJ: Did you feel like Didion? Or more powerful as you? Or both? Did the cool come more from her essence or from its transmutation into yourself? Does this distinction make sense?

ES: Yeah, I think it was both. Like being in costume. How you borrow a little of the person’s essence while being conscious of the fact that it’s fake.

Then I thought back to my own experience with just one half of this powerful equation, at Saks trying on the pair I bought in 2015. Not Didion’s. Not even the same style. This was right around the time my disillusionment with the things I’d wanted—theoretically including astronomically expensive sunglasses—had started crystalizing into what I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to call mimetic theory. Still, I easily recall the “charge” Erin described; a thrill in the costume of myself, even as I feared it to be misleading. “Sunglasses hide emotion,”

Virginia Postrel

explains in The Power of Glamour. “They create an impression of coolness and detachment. Someone wearing sunglasses is visible yet veiled.”

But the power of my Célines seemed to extend well beyond their glamorous categorical properties. Luxury items often have the disappointing effect of making one’s other belongings seem suddenly shabby or inadequate in comparison, but these sunglasses operated differently. They seemed to elevate whatever else I was wearing.

I pulled them out again—eight years later, and not only have I managed not to lose them, but still wear them regularly—and the effect is miraculously durable. They still make me feel cool. I’ve written a lot about the dangers of getting what you want, but these sunglasses, unlike so many other once-desired acquisitions, have never come to disappoint me.

Here’s where I start getting uncomfortable, because the hypothesis I’m about to proffer somehow undercuts both my devout secularity and the Girardian mechanics of metaphysical desire. (Though I’ve also come to associate such psychological discomfort as particularly fertile mental ground for artistic flowering, so this excites me, too.)

What if Don Quixote was right that a barber’s basin was the helmet of Mambrino, but just got the wrong barber’s basin? What if the thing about Wes was materially imitable with the right materials? Not in them—to Cohen’s point, it’s not about the clothes—but through them? “Genius is not transferable via luxury goods.” But what about via art?

Is it possible that, with monkish superiority, I abandoned the pursuit of a material grandeur not only compatible with enlightenment, but conducive to it?

Much about Phoebe Philo’s A1 edit suggests this is the case. That she is the divine creator of terrifying beauty, a godlike artist capable of astounding metamorphosis.

First, there is the models’ conspicuously unmasked mortality—not just the bareness of their faces, but their diversity (with the conspicuous exception of size—these are sinuous hearts, all). They act as canvases on which you might project yourself without losing your own identity. I suspect this blankness is part of why, as Cohen notes, the clothes look even better “in the wild,” in attachment to an established one.

Then there is the edit’s aesthetic religiosity, by which I mean it often literally recalls ceremonial robes and clerical vestments. Consider the drapery, the layering. The collars! The Tygress vibe is very fierce priest:

Phoebe Philo A1

I noticed this as a broader trend among Phoebe Philo’s peer set—The Row, Khaite—while hanging out with a lot of Catholics a few weeks ago, but it seems particularly pronounced in A1 to me, which even includes a couple of modern chastity belts!

What the hammer? what the chain—STUDDED BIKINI BOTTOMS in gold ($1,200) & STUDDED BELT in black ($5,500)

The sex appeal of restraint and freedom from desire are simultaneously implied not just in the designs but in the prices, Proustianly “advertising their rarity as a high price enhances the value of a thing that has already taken our fancy.” These—the prices—seem less outlandish when you compare her pieces not to other brands but to lots at Sotheby’s though, and it’s hard to disqualify such comparison on commercial grounds when the big auction houses have long embraced Andy Warhol and choice designer luxury goods alike.

So what exactly separates Phoebe Philo from Caravaggio? Empty materialism from a pragmatic pursuit of beauty? Of cool and contentment and ease?

Further research was clearly required. I logged on to The RealReal and bought what I thought was a skirt but turned out to be very wide Phoebe-Philo era Céline trousers for $100. Philo is known for her pants, the new butt-zips being merely the latest in a storied tradition, and my find did not disappoint. The fit, the tailoring was perfect. They made every top I tried on with them punch far above its weight. I wore them to a party the next day and felt remarkably uncostumed, comfortable with myself. Perhaps I was imagining it, but it felt like people were looking at me less, yet seeing me more clearly.

ZIP TROUSERS in black ($2,400)

It all felt like a defense of the lifestyle I’ve spent a great deal of time patting my own back for resisting. They’d be worthless if I didn’t have time to go to a party, I tried to comfort myself—which sort of worked, skeptical as I am of my human brain’s penchant for self-protection.

Still, this is basically where I land. Phoebe Philo’s work can—often does for me—elicit an almost spiritual artistic experience, but so too can fine art be reduced to mere commodity, bought and sold for escalating numbers without ever leaving its climate-controlled crate. Artistic receptivity does not cleave cleanly along any line I’ve ever come across, including those of even my most formative decisions.

I’ll leave you with the epigraph to Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being (with thanks to my best friend, Jessica, for recommending):

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” Robert Henri

I dare say you might claim the same of looking and seeing.

ANJ

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