Is this a dress or a phallus?
Something gorgeous and warm? Or a crotched, hellish “cocoon” of knitted wool?
If you know what it is, the answer tunes up.
It's a wedding dress designed by Yves St Laurent in 1965 and inspired by Russian Babushka dolls.
A costume based on the design featured recently in a brilliant new work by choreographer Michael Clark.
At the start of I Do - a dance set to Stravinsky's Les Noces - a figure of the Bride emerges from a Russian doll, wearing a knitted poncho and headpiece based on St Laurent's original design.
The Bride attends her wedding, almost immobilised by her dress.
Weird, shocking, the effect is somewhere between trussed-up, mummified toy, limbless white phallus and a chic, crotched satire on an English High Court judge.
On the night of the performance, I was reminded me of Crass' Berkertex Bribe:
The object unsoiled is packed ready and waiting,
For the moment of truth in this spiritual mating.
The object unsoiled is packed ready and waiting,
To be owned, to be cherished, to be fucked for the naming.
....
You can pack them away with the rest of your lies.
Your painted mask of ugly perfection,
The ring on your finger, the sign of protection,
Is the rape on page 3, is the soldiers obsession,
How well you've been caught to support your oppression.
Photograph by Fouli Elia.
