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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783204526 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books Ltd |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2015 |
| Series: | Fan Phenomena |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 156 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Marisa C. Hayes is a Franco-American film scholar specializing in dance films and genre cinema.
Read an Excerpt
Fan Phenomena: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
By Marisa C. Hayes
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-452-6
CHAPTER 1
Fashion and Fetish: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dark Cabaret Aesthetics and Proto-Punk
Diana Heyne
Manifestations of alternative culture or Bohemianism in fashion have worn many faces over the years, inspired by a desire to celebrate the qualities of uniqueness, creativity and individual freedom rather than rest unnoticed in the safety of the mainstream fold. Alternative fashion is also one of the most highly visible means of social and political provocation available, but as such requires periodic renewal to retain its attention-getting power.
In this most telling badge of membership in another realm, fashion amongst the hip has relied on a spirit of creative change and rebellion, even against its own ranks, in order to retain momentum and keep the deadening forces of ennui at bay. Borrowing a cue from physics, one might even posit that for every alternative fashion action there is an equal and opposite reaction; as looks evolve from one 'movement' into another they often embrace the polar opposite of their predecessors, to which society at large has become gradually acclimated. This framework of cyclic evolution provides one lens to examine the fashion and cultural influences that shaped the style of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and, conversely, how its inspirational fashion energy helped to create some of the defining looks of 1970s alternative and popular culture, participating particularly in the genesis and eventual international style dissemination of punk and its less astringent, romantic sibling New Wave.
If hippie fashion of the late 1960s and early 1970s looked to a natural, earthy aesthetic of ethnic cotton, peasant-style embroideries, faded denim and long, unstyled hair for both sexes, offering a celebration of nature centred, agrarian cultures around the globe, the look that evolved in alternative culture at the very end of hippiedom was in many ways its antithesis. The punk culture that burgeoned during the 1970s celebrated anarchy through its street-smart urban dress of slashed T-shirts, laddered fishnets and safety pin piercings as well as borrowing heavily from then lesser-known specialty fashions like the corsets, extreme stiletto heels and latex garb of fetishists and drag queens, among others. The 1960s had opened the Pandora's box of free love; the 1970s wanted to explore the previously shadowy margins of desire, and alternative fashion reflected this urge.
In this transitional period of the early to mid-1970s, Rocky Horror was present as an alternative fashion force, setting trends but more especially diffusing them, from its beginnings as a London stage show through its distribution as a film available to an international audience. In this era prior to cable television, music video channels and the Internet, the uniquely blended anarchy of nostalgia, fetish dress, drag glamour and cosplay inspiration that is Rocky Horror became a prime instigator in the widespread change that would eventually propel the styles of first-wave punk, New Wave and proto-Goth into an international spotlight.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show posited anything but naturalism; it presented a fashion aesthetic drawn from the secret worlds of the imagination, of the unbridled id expressed in sexual anarchy and fetishism, with inspiration drawn from mid-twentieth-century horror and science fiction married to rock and roll. The look was studied, corseted and manufactured: make-up, hair colour and style were obviously artificial, a careful construct that clearly denoted the wearer's tongue-in-cheek, oddly menacing otherness. Dark glamour and sequins edged out natural fabrics; kitsch was celebrated and the cynical edge of urban civilization, always on the brink of potential catastrophe, overruled the naïve desire to return to an archetypal paradise garden. This was fashion with a confrontational edge and grittiness the likes of which had not been previously available for widespread consumption. At this remove, it is almost difficult to imagine the full aesthetic shock-value that The Rocky Horror Picture Show possessed during its first years of release, since so much of the look has been assimilated into popular culture, yet RHPS still possesses a classic alternative fashion appeal that is a tribute to the film's pioneering creativity and unrestricted sensual energy.
Sue Blane, costume designer for both the stage and film versions of Rocky Horror, has been credited by some as a prime force behind the punk look that originated in 1970s London. In an interview that first appeared in the publication Crazed Imaginations #84 in August 2002, Blane was asked by writer Ruth Fink-Winter:
Ruth Fink-Winter: Patricia Quinn says that you invented punk. What do you think about that?
Sue Blane: There's no question that the punk look was about in London on the streets, and I was drawing on that. But what I added to it was the ripped fishnets, the sequins glued on, the whole distressing idea, plus I think the fun of it ... So whether I invented punk, I don't know, but I'm very happy Pat Quinn says I did. If one can be proud of something like that!
Then Blane goes on to explain that:
Malcolm McClaren [sic] and Vivienne Westwood had a bit to do with it as well ... certainly I was drawing on all that. I owe a lot to them in that respect. In fact, Magenta's wonderful little spiky boots that she wore with the spacesuit came from 'Granny Takes a Trip' [Crazed Imaginations ed. note: McClaren's (sic) and Westwood's shop that later became 'Sex']. One of our totally over-the-top purchases with our very small budget ... We remade them for the movie.
This pointy-toed, fetish-inspired look in footwear selected by Blane certainly became an iconic, long-lived and much-beloved style among those of the punk, Goth and New Wave persuasions.
In her Crazed Imaginations interview Blane also elaborates on how corsets, another look that would become a punk and New Wave standard, came to feature so intrinsically in the signature Rocky Horror style, stating that she had previously costumed Tim Curry in a production of Jean Genet's The Maids, staged by Lindsay Kemp in 1971 at Glasgow's Citizens' Theatre. Blane credits Kemp's vision of dark cabaret, transexuality and gay theatre as guiding forces in developing the costuming for the Genet work and explains that she herself went on to build on this aesthetic for the costuming of Rocky Horror, even going so far as to borrow Tim Curry's original corset from The Maids. Here Blane has clearly established the cabaret/drag queen standard, one of the iconic looks of punk, Goth and New Wave: underwear as outerwear, in particular the corset as a fashion 'must have', in a lineage that descends (and becomes increasingly commercialized) through Madonna's skilful exploitation of the concept, to the contemporary manipulations of Lady Gaga.
Blane's work in costuming Genet hints at the alternative cultural forces at work at Rocky Horror's inception, forces that were to influence the androgyny present in punk and New Wave style overall, as the gay liberation movement that emerged during the late 1960s continued to gain momentum throughout the decade of the 1970s. Gay culture and drag cabaret in particular certainly provided the inspiration for important nuances of the costuming that was being explored by glam rockers like David Bowie or the New York Dolls, and was an integral part of the look that set The Rocky Horror Picture Show in a sexually ambivalent realm of its own. Alongside the send-up of the more flamboyant aspects of drag culture present in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, there are also more sobering references to gay history: Frank-N- Furter's pink triangle-adorned surgical scrubs co-opt the symbol used by the Nazis to mark homosexuals, a symbol that was later transmuted by gay activists into a positive acknowledgement of their identity.
In regarding the other eclectic sources that informed Blane, propelled The Rocky Horror Picture Show and stimulated the fashion world of punk and New Wave, it is impossible to overlook the effect of mid-twentieth-century classic films, especially horror and science fiction. In a world pre-Internet, home video/DVD players and cable television, films shown in theatres were perhaps the most accessible and influential visual links to the fashion of earlier eras, whether portraying historic styles or those of imagined realms. In the 1970s repertory art cinemas grew in number and popularity, mixing alternative films with vintage classics at an appealing price, offering a source of inspiration and ready access to a showcase of aesthetic styles from the past, one that often changed nightly with the swiftly rotated films. The world of cinematic theatre was ripe to inspire, share and promote, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show reaped the benefits from each of these aspects, first for its own creative formation, and second, from having precisely the sort of venues needed to become a participatory cult success and international source of style inspiration.
Theatrical rock and rollers like David Bowie, taking a fashion cue from the feminine glamour in many vintage films, initially began to flaunt a nostalgically clothed transgender style which for Bowie soon evolved into a series of looks that were literally alien in character. On the cover of his Aladdin Sane album (1973), resembling nothing less than an androgynous extraterrestrial, Bowie was an avant-garde head turner at the time of the LP's release and certainly provided ample inspiration to slightly later fashion ventures like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and punk styles in hair and make-up. During the early 1970s, Bowie continually mined the science fiction/extraterrestrial vein for entire concept albums and the looks that went with them, such as his Ziggy Stardust persona. It was a look that Rocky Horror and punk culture would embrace and exploit, although The Rocky Horror Picture Show also draws directly on the kitsch costuming of vintage science fiction and horror films like Flash Gordon (Frederick Stephani & Ray Taylor, 1936) and The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935) for outfits such as Riff Raff and Magenta's visually striking space suits, and her coiffure at the film's conclusion.
While it would be overly simplistic to credit Rocky Horror's fashion influence with the invention of punk style (since clearly any alternative fashion movement is the result of multiple influences, including some concepts built upon the alternative culture that proceeded them but also embracing the destruction of earlier fashion aesthetics with a visual polar shift); however, if The Rocky Horror Picture Show was not the sole progenitor of these styles, it was most certainly among the guiding lights to punk and New Wave fashion. Rocky Horror achieved this status with a mix of quirky originality that was diffused through film's then unrivalled ability to disseminate style at a larger-than-life scale. In the 1970s, at a time when today's contemporary plethora of virtual visual stimuli did not exist, cinema (as discussed earlier) was a lively force in heralding fashion change, reaching an audience that the limited number of television networks and their basically conservative stance could not.
Beyond the more obvious impact of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, retained by viewers in visual and emotional memory – witness the mounting anticipation among early audiences as Frank descended in the elevator and that shared gasp when it was finally seen what sort of beautifully perverse creature stepped out of the cage, unfurling himself from a cloak straight out of Dracula's closet – there is the culturally significant birth of the phenomenon of audience participation. The Rocky Horror Picture Show's well-defined and not taxingly difficult-to-replicate looks facilitated these forays into nascent cosplay; a simple collection of items carried enough symbolic weight to become shorthand for a character: Frank requires little more than a corset and garters, heavily layered eye make-up and a heart tattoo; Eddie, a leather biker vest and jeans, pomaded hair and a comb; neither too difficult or costly to procure, but instantly recognizable. Audience members were invited not just to fantasize, but become, and they took quite literally to the film's challenge. The legacy of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was multiplied exponentially when audience participation stepped in. Audience members were (and still are) challenged to investigate their own creativity within the parameters of a guiding template, and their treasure hunts for costume parts frequently took them exploring through thrift shops and dusty attics. Many of them discovered it was the foundation of a look they could carry happily into life outside the theatre. In a world where Halloween was for children under twelve and costume parties few and far between, The Rocky Horror Picture Show answered a need to be different and fulfilled the love of dressing up that so many fans have revelled in over the ensuing years. Even the contemporary manifestations of various cosplay conventions outside the Rocky Horror universe owe a great debt to that simple exhortation: 'Don't dream it, be it'.
Whether The Rocky Horror Picture Show was an original instigator or acted as a promotional conduit, the eclecticism that is an RHPS fashion tenet was also embraced by the alternative fashion styles of punk and New Wave. Rocky Horror provided an appealingly varied catalogue of inspirational choice drawn from historical dress, established fantasy and free imagination. One could borrow from any or several of these to create looks that astonished, selectively offended or questioned the logic of mainstream culture; especially significant since much of first-wave punk ideology revolved around the idea of anarchy and street confrontation via style.
While Frank's eye-catching lingerie-clad look and beautifully made-up face are the stylistic visual focus of much of the film, other characters brought equally influential fashion details to RHPS, and into the field of play during the initial burgeoning of punk and New Wave. Memorable and recognizable examples of this influence are alive and well today, and though no longer brave new looks, are still powerful enough to rest outside the comfort zone of most of mainstream culture.
While at first glance eyebrows might seem a relatively secondary feature, in reality Columbia's brows, camouflaged and re-drawn a la Marlene Dietrich (channelled via gay cabaret) provided immediately visible verification of otherness. This created or drawn brow remains an attention getter capable of remaking the appearance of an entire face, and was often employed during the punk era in make-up designs that pushed the boundaries of human appearance, the more extreme creating illusions that also relocated other features entirely. The thin-line eyebrow is still much in evidence today, touted by the likes of Gothic dreamers, neo-punks and alternative performers such as Amanda Palmer. Additionally, Columbia's intensely red-dyed, boy-cut hair in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is both androgynous and visibly faux. It signalled a thumbs-up to fantasy hairstyles after the constraining naturalism of the late 1960s, revelling in the anti-naturalism and imaginative possibilities of hair dyes as well as elevating to new popularity a previously reviled hair colour that had long deserved a return to the revered status it held in the nineteenth century (those with naturally red hair went during this period from being mercilessly teased 'carrot tops' to objects of envy and desire, like the nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelite painter Rossetti's ginger 'stunners'). From the neck down, Columbia's vintage movie-musical inspired sequined tap suit or burlesque corset and boa have inspired punk/New Wave costume accessories and become staples that are perhaps more popular than ever in contemporary alternative burlesque theatre.
Magenta's iconic punk footwear was not the only style-setting look provided by this character. The halo of hennaed hair, white face, heavily kohl-rimmed eyes and profoundly red lips sported by Magenta offered a slightly more sinister, vampiric take on vintage film style, recalling the publicity photos of silent film star and 'vamp', Theda Bara.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fan Phenomena: The Rocky Horror Picture Show by Marisa C. Hayes. Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction MARISA C. HAYES,Fashion and Fetish: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dark Cabaret Aesthetics and Proto-Punk DIANA HEYNE,
Fan Appreciation no.1 Sal Piro President, RHPS Fan Club Doing the Time Warp: Youth Culture, Coming-of-Age and The Rocky Horror Picture Show Through the Years TAOS GLICKMAN AND SHAWN DEMILLE,
Fan Appreciation no.2 Shawn Stutler Director, Rocky Horror Saved My Life,
Shadowing the Boss: Leadership and the Collective Creation of a Frank-N-Furter Identity in Rocky Horror Fan Casts TARA CHITTENDEN,
'A Strange Journey': Finding Carnival in The Rocky Horror Picture Show MOLLY MCCOURT,
Fan Appreciation no.3 Stephanie FreemanFounder, TimeWarp,
Fishnet Economy: The Commerce of Costumes and The Rocky Horror Picture Show AUBREY L.C. MISHOU,
Fan Appreciation no.4 Ruth Fink-WinterBOSS Award Recipient,
Performing Promiscuity: Female Sexuality, Fandom and The Rocky Horror Picture Show ALISSA BURGER,
Philosophical Currents Through Film: The Rocky Horror Picture Show REUBEN C. OREFFO,
Fan Appreciation no.5 Jim 'Cosmo' Hetzer / Bob Brennan Webmaster /Fanfiction Writer,
Sanity for Today: Brad and Janet's Post-Rocky Shock Treatment FRANCK BOULÈGUE,
'Don't Dream it, Be it': The Method in the Madness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show SARAH CLEARY,
Fan Appreciation no.6 Larry Viezel Collector,
Mercy Killing: Rocky Horror, the Loss of Innocence and the Death of Nostalgia ANDREW HOWE,
Contributor details,
Image credits,