“Princess Beatrice's Ridiculous Royal Wedding Hat”
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Princess Beatrice’s “Ridiculous” Wedding Hat: Performing Things within a Transnational Display Economy Marlis Schweitzer, Associate Professor, York University This is a paper about a hat. Not just any hat but a hat seen around the world by an estimated two billion viewers. Yes, that hat, the bow-shaped Philip Treacy fascinator worn by Princess Beatrice of York at the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. And so, given its silly subject, this paper is silly. But this paper also aims for something else. By following the transnational circulation of a silly thing, it sets out to show how objects can provoke less-than-silly opportunities for political commentary and charitable action. Fig. 1. The ―ridiculous‖ hat. In an essay published in Theatre Historiography/ Critical Interventions, Margaret Werry advocates a ―new materialist‖ approach to theatre and performance historiography, one that resists the binaries of object/subject, human/nonhuman, sociality/ materiality by focusing less 1 ―on what things are‖ than on ―how they happen, where they go.‖ Such an approach refuses to see objects as merely part of the background, the ―set‖ as it were, and ―admit[s] other cultural formations of performance, and the political rationalities they incarnate, into our disciplinary imagination.‖ 1 New materialism presents an alternative method for analyzing the formation and perpetuation of oppressive ideologies (by for example, examining how the organization and layout of racist imagery in children‘s books directs readers both emotionally and physically2); it also provides a way to identify moments when objects challenge existing perspectives and facilitate positive change. Working from this new materialist perspective, my paper looks at how fashionable objects worn on the body perform with and alongside human subjects within a display economy that privileges excess and the ridiculous over ‗good taste‘. In addition to situating Princess Beatrice‘s ―hat trick‖ within the history of sartorial escapades, I draw from the work of Robin Bernstein and others to consider the extent to which the extreme fascinator scripted the immediate and wide-ranging responses it received. Rather than interpret the hat as a static object with a fixed physical location, I see it as a mobile, mutating thing, a thing-in-process that took on a life of its own and occupied multiple locations simultaneously. Responding to Arjun Appadurai‘s call for scholars to ―follow the thing,‖3 I track the hat‘s movement from Treacy‘s salon to the Royal Wedding and out into the vast entanglements of the World Wide Web—to the blogs that made it a star, to Facebook, where it has its own page, and to eBay, where the original Treacy creation made its final appearance as an auction item. I argue that as much as Princess Beatrice breathed ―social life‖ into the hat when she decided to wear it, it was ultimately the hat in its many mutations that transformed the Princess from a fashion failure into an inspired and inspiring philanthropist. 2 Performing Hats/ Performing Things Hats are showy objects with the potential to upstage those who wear them. As actors, magicians, jazz dancers, and clowns know, a successful ―hat performance‖ requires not only finding the right hat but also spending enough time living and rehearsing with it until it becomes a fluid extension of the body. Most frequent theatergoers have witnessed moments when hats take over, when they misbehave or refuse to act as they should, leaving their performing human partners looking under-rehearsed or incompetent. Hats are rarely static objects. Within the theatrical universe, their function continually shifts in relation to the performer‘s body. Tossed aside (e.g. hung on a hat rack), a hat becomes part of the mise en scene; removed but still held by the performer, a hat transforms into a prop4 (e.g. the magician removes his hat, places it on a table, and pulls a rabbit from it); left on the head, a hat remains part of the costume, an ensemble player of sorts. In this respect, hats perform with, through, and alongside the humans who wear them. They afford insight into a character‘s personality, status, or motives and at times assume a life of their own (e.g. Lucky‘s hat in Waiting for Godot). Though hats cease to function as signs of signs outside the theatrical frame, they continue to perform in complex ways as they move along the production-consumption continuum. In the hands of a milliner, for example, a hat is the product of creativity and labor, a newly assembled thing made from an assortment of wire, fabric, feathers, and other trimmings. In the hands of a clerk, a hat is a commission, a possible raise, a promotion. In the hands of a customer, a hat is a promise, a projection of a possible self—no longer a (visible) product of labor but an enticing (fetishized) commodity waiting to become personal property. Once purchased and placed on the head of a new owner, a hat becomes part of a clothing ensemble—comparable at times to a string 3 quartet, at others to a band of misfits; it conforms to the shape of the body even as it enhances or extends that body‘s shape, speaking to or yelling at the clothes beneath it. And, of course, hats do many other things: they protect the body from other objects (e.g. hard hats); they shield it from the elements (e.g. a rain hat, toque, or sun hat); they signal affiliation with a specific group or community (e.g. religious, national, sports); they represent professional expertise (e.g. a police officer‘s hat); they symbolize status (e.g. a crown), and they attract attention. But some hats attract more attention than others; these hats cross over from the realm of object-hood into the world of ―things.‖ In her recent article, ―Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,‖ Robin Bernstein outlines the difference between things and objects in order to emphasize how certain things script human behavior. Drawing from Martin Heidegger and ―thing theorist‖ Bill Brown among others, she defines an object ―as a chunk of matter that one looks through or beyond to understand something human.‖ By contrast, a thing ―asserts itself within a field of matter.‖5 Bernstein uses the example of a knife to illustrate her point. In the hands of the amateur, the knife is merely an instrument used to complete a specific task: it is a means to an end. In the hands of the chef, however, the knife is a critical tool, an extension of the self, ―with potential and stubbornness, with past, present, and future motions of slicing and chopping.‖ The knife as thing scripts the chef‘s actions, leads her to perform certain tasks, and in so doing ―forces a person into an awareness of the self in material relation to the thing.‖6 Such things disrupt the boundary between humans and objects by calling attention to the processes whereby human subjectivity is constituted through an engagement with objects. As Bernstein elaborates, objects cross over into thing-hood when they ―trigger what Joseph Roach calls ‗kinesthetic imagination‘ as a ‗faculty of memory‘ - as when a knife cuts a finger and the person to whom 4 that finger is attached… performs a dance of pain that is stylized through its citation of gender, class, age, race, and other categories of analysis.‖7 In other words, when human interactions with objects lead to specific performances that go beyond the everyday, objects become things. Though hardly a thing theorist, milliner Philip Treacy understands how hats can influence or direct human behavior through the emotions they evoke. Born in Ahascragh, County Galway, Ireland in 1967, Treacy began sewing at age six for his sister‘s dolls, attended the Royal College of Art in the 1980s, and entered the world of high fashion in the 1990s through the mentorship of outspoken fashion editor Isabella Blow. ―She introduced me to everything I know,‖ Treacy explained in a recent interview with The Observer. ―She invented me…. I made the hats, she wore them.8 Treacy credits Blow with introducing him to the ―magic of the hat‖ and for encouraging him to reimagine how hats might look and behave on the human body. Not Fig. 2 Philip Treacy in his studio. 5 surprisingly, many of Treacy‘s most famous designs draw inspiration from, or play with, real- world objects not normally associated with millinery; his memorable creations for Blow (both Fig. 3. Blow in a Treacy hat modeled on a Japanese temple. his model and muse) include an eighteenth-century French ship, a castle, sheep horns, and a pheasant (Blow was buried wearing the pheasant hat after committing suicide in 2007).9 In Treacy‘s hands such objects became magical things that appealed to a younger demographic, overturning the long-held association of hats with old ladies. ―Everyone has a head so everyone has a possibility to wear a hat and you feel good in a hat,‖ Treacy has vehemently argued. ―People feel better for wearing them…[they] make the heart beat faster.‖10 For Treacy, then, hats operate on both an affective and a physiological level to change how a person feels and presumably how that person behaves. And some hats go beyond this to affect the feelings and behavior of all who come into contact with the hat. This was certainly the case with Princess Beatrice‘s ―ridiculous‖ fascinator. 6 The “Ridiculous” Hat When the twenty-something Princesses of York, Beatrice and her sister Eugenie, stepped from their elegant carriage onto the red carpet outside Westminster Abbey, their flashy wedding ensembles stood in sharp contrast to the more muted (if still colorful) outfits worn by the other guests.