Watt, Gary. "Series Editor’s Foreword." Dress, Law and Naked Truth: A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. xi–xiii. The WISH List. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 26 Sep. 2021. <>.

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Copyright © Gary Watt 2013. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Series Editor’s Foreword

Dress and the law are fundamental structuring devices for our global societies: dispensing with either has been seen in literature, art and theory as an indicator of anarchy, moral collapse, even totally unrealizable liberal utopianism. One end of the spectrum – the call to orderliness – is exemplifi ed by the closing line of Joe Orton’s satirical farce set in a dysfunctional private lunatic asylum What the Butler Saw: ‘I’m glad you don’t despise tradition. Let us put our clothes on and face the world.’ 1 Epitomizing the other is the manifestly more visionary but far less practical fi nal chapter of British psychoanalyst John Carl Flügel’s 1930 study The Psychology of Clothes, in which he calls for dress to be abandoned and nakedness to be embraced, encouraging his readers to

contemplate the possibility that dress is, after all, destined to be but an episode in the history of humanity, and that man (and perhaps before him woman) will one day go about his business secure in the control both of his own body and of his wider physical environment, disdaining the sartorial crutches on which he perilously supported himself during the earlier tottering stages of his march towards a higher culture.2

The abandonment of our ‘sartorial crutches’ is as much a utopian, lawless fantasy now as it was in 1930, as Gary Watt intimates when, at the outset of Dress, Law and Naked Truth he cites the story of Stephen Gough, the ‘naked rambler’, who was arrested while attempting to walk the length of the UK naked apart from his shoes. However inaccurate a prediction of future attitudes to nakedness, Flügel’s endpoint provides both an interesting challenge to the repressive conformity of either the representatives of law and order in Orton’s fi nal play or those affronted by Gough’s self-exposure. As Watt intimates when he says ‘dress always represents order and control’, law and dress are ostensibly used to set boundaries, establish rules or offer routes to conformity by suppressing subversive tendencies, whether social

1 Joe Orton, ‘What the Butler Saw’ (1969) in The Complete Plays (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), pp.361–448, 448. 2 John Carl Flügel, Psychology of Clothes (1930) (London: The Hogarth Press, 1950), p.238.

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or individual. However, ‘control’ – somewhat paradoxically – can also be exercised subversively, as when interactions with the law and or uses of dress and clothes provide ways for individuals to announce their individuality or unconformity. An illuminating and entertaining example is the iconic trial at the Old Bailey in 1971 of the editors of Oz Magazine, the longest obscenity trial in British legal history. , Jim Anderson and posed outside the courtroom in naughty schoolboy costumes and strode into Court 2 barefoot and in fl ares, their attire and long hair loudly proclaiming their anti-establishmentarianism and embodying the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ , which Justice Michael Argyle had such trouble comprehending. Law and dress defi ne us; they can form a barrier between civility and chaos and help keep bestiality and primitivism at bay. It was Aristotle who said: ‘At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.’ 3 This is rather categorical, but where would we be without our unspoken laws and sense of morality? As Immanuel Kant idiosyncratically put it, ‘Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me, and the moral law within me’. 4 And so, where also would we be without our attachment to dress? Clothes are discarded at several crucial junctures in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s irreligious allegory Teorema, in which enlightenment comes to all members of an upper-bourgeois Milanese household following their serial seductions at the hands of an anonymous ‘visitor’, played by Terence Stamp. Right at the end of the fi lm, the head of the household Paolo (played by Massimo Girotti) divests himself of all his clothes (and arguably also his conventionality, his heterosexuality and perhaps even his ‘mortal coil’) on the concourse of Milan station before running, with hands aloft, naked and screaming into a bleak, uncompromising volcanic wilderness. The puddle of clothes Paolo leaves behind (in Milan, after all, the centre of the Italian fashion industry) is perhaps the second skin that made him acceptable to the world but also accepting of it. Law and dress facilitate mutual understanding and public interaction. The WISH List has always sought to enable and extend interdisciplinary

3 Aristotle, Politics, Book I, chapter 2. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason ( Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) (1788) Gesammelte Schriften Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1910–55), pp.1–163, 161.

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dialogue within the Humanities, and in his discursive rumination on the interlaced cultural histories of dress and law, Gary Watt has embraced this ethos. Starting from the premise that ‘dress is law and law is dress’, Watt not only analyses the crucial intersections between law and dress but also ultimately mounts a brilliant and erudite argument for multidisciplinary study itself. Stella Bruzzi, University of Warwick. March 2013

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