Marie Antoinette Markers and Costume Continuity

I've always found 'dressing up' to be a remarkably complex activity. It is also weirdly divisive: love or hate, you are a dresser-upper or you are not. I don't really want to delve too far into the psychology of the masque, however, because I am afraid I will get lost, but I would like to muse a bit on the corpus of symbol triggers that signal a specific costume. How we know who/what costumed friends are without asking.

For the past two weeks my daily life has been centered around costumes. I am helping out at a costume shop just until the big H or until I drop from shock and exhaustion. Whichever comes first. One thing people have been asking me, to paraphrase, is "what is the salient aspect of x theme costume". In other words: what is the minimum collection of clear symbols that I need to buy to be a 1940's pin up girl (high heeled shoes, correct wig). There is always one step that can be taken to mitigate ambiguity; there is always a fake beard and a white Russian vs a towel that separates a bath-robed Dude from The Big Lebowski from Arthur Dent.

I am asked to reduce costumes to their least common denominator several times an hour and I am surprised that there is almost always a clear answer. This is particularly the case with the ever popular line of "sexy" costumes. All of these costumes are, essentially, a scrap of cheap fabric that barely covers anything at all with the previously mentioned salient symbols stuck to it. Sexy little red riding hood has a cape and basket; Sexy Sherlock Holmes has a magnifying glass, pipe and hat; Sexy Freddy Krueger has that glove and hat.

What actually surprises me most are the costumes that I wouldn't have thought crossed the threshold into clear and instant identification; the costumes that just don't seem to have all the symbols there. Case in point, the sexy Marie Antoinette line.

Sure, ol' Marie was a trend setter in her day but I, rather faithlessly, do not fully believe that the public at large really knows who she was. Case in point, over breakfast my brilliant fella indicated that he thought she was some sort of courtesan and not the wife of Louis XVI which prompted my to waggle my wikipedia enabled iphone in his face. In a way, because of that, I just don't think someone in a sexy version of late 18th century clothing is obviously supposed to be Marie Antoinette.

Full disclosure: it seems like none of our customers have this problem. They see these as obviously Marie Antoinette and MANY people ask for "Marie Antoinette" specifically and they see it in these costumes. Now what would push it over the edge for me, so to speak? What would make any of those costumes obviously Marie Antoinette? A red line around the neck and a little fake blood. The general weirdness of the sexy aspects of the costume aside, big white wig and decapitation = Marie Antoinette.

Because I am a horrible Classics nerd, this all reminds me of Greek pottery iconography. In black and red figure ceramics, it only takes the inclusion of one small scene element to make anonymous characters into household names. This pot is CLEARLY 'Oracle of Delphi' because the column means they are in a temple and the lady is looking into a dish. But "Woman and a Bull"…is it Europa or is it Pasiphaë? Well clearly Pasiphaë would be INSIDE a cow costume (hard to draw) but to be clear, best just depict Europa with the bull and Pasiphaë looking angry with her smug Minotaur baby.

Suffice to say a fun Saturday afternoon for me is walking through halls of greek pottery and playing "guess the story" from the symbols alone. Tags are for the weak. It is more fun to solve the iconographic mystery alone (then check yourself later). I can't help thinking about how long it takes me to add up the symbols on each pot and formulate my speculation. For anyone in the ancient greek world it would be instantly obvious that this or that pot either commemorated the Athenian games vs the Olympics and so on. Just as the differences between sexy Dorothy (checkered blue dress, ruby slippers) and sexy Alice in Wonderland (solid blue dress, playing card iconography) are obvious to us.

As a side note

I have *just* submitted my PhD dissertation which means I am unemployed.

Inspired job ideas/opportunities are always welcome. Near or far from archaeology, heritage, anthropology, museums, publishing, education, researching, thinking etc. Get in touch.

"The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age"

Way back in 2008 it was announced that squiggles (pictured left) from an obscure experimental transcription device from the mid 19th century were potentially playable. These preserved 'phonautograms', which were never intended to be heard per se, but once scanned into the wonders of technology world, out sprung the audio artifacts. Thus, a version of Au Clair de la Lune, probably sung by the phoneautograph's inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, became the oldest known recording of human voice in existence clocking in at 9 April 1860. To push this whole idea farther into the world of fantasy, there is even a totally unfounded rumor that Abraham Lincoln was 'recorded' with the phoneautograph.

Go here to hear Au Clair de la Lune and, as a special treat, here to hear his rendition of Voile Petite Aribelle from around September of 1860.

I think that we forget that the bulk of heritage loss happens within the first couple of decades and then evens out to a long decline. We get rid of things that we cannot ever imagine wanting and we save incompletely or wrongly. After we are really, really, REALLY sorry about it. There is absolutely no way to avoid this and I suppose there is no way to completely mitigate the muted sense of loss that underscores every discovery. I read and re-read Diego De Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, reveling in the only glimpse of the conquest-era Maya that I will ever get, run my hand over the 'alphabet' page and bless it for opening the door to the pre-conquest Maya. The famous "I do not want to" strikes me as so wonderfully and magically human...like a phonautograph from 1860. I am crushed when I get to the part where Maya books are burned. Why can't I just enjoy what I have, rather than lament what was lost?

I find the idea of lost and found media to be completely compelling. Silent film re-discovery, for example, makes me well up with 'heritage' joy, so to speak, then bubble over with a sense of loss. I saw the new new Metropolis recently, with the 30 extra minutes found in Argentina. The piece is almost complete now; reassembled. I enjoy it until I think of the glorious stills of Theda Bara who made 40 films, only 6 of which survive. Among the lost is a 1917 Cleopatra, "one of the most elaborate Hollywood films produced up to that time". Vampy Art Nouveu Egypt scenes? Every archaeologist's dream. Also you KNOW you want to see a 1926 version of The Great Gatsby. But you can't.

So 80% of films from the silent era are lost (at last according to Martin Scorsese's film preservation organization), and this is because they represented outdated technology. Talkies hit, times change, and no one is going to pay to see Theda Bara vamp it up in silence. Nitrate film was hard to store and, you know, tended to catch on fire so in several fell swoops in the 1930s, whole archives were trashed or incinerated. Really, the only reason any of these films survive at all is that they were widely distributed and sometimes the crazies and the hoarders at the ends of the earth could not let go. And, indeed, 30 minutes of Metropolis turns up in Argentina in 2009 and there could be more somewhere...like a Maya book sitting in a cave in Belize just waiting to be found. I think that we cushion that muted sense of loss with hope for the unlikely.

The reason I am posting on this topic is that the Library of congress released a report on the state of recorded sound preservation in the US (full report available here; executive summary available here). I've only had time to read the summary, but the writers open with the idea of the phonaudiograph stating:

The hunt for the Scott phonautograms is nothing less than a recorded sound equivalent of an archaeological dig to locate and secure the permissions to make them available for study

And that it is. Perhaps that is the appeal: I am sucked into such stories the same way I am sucked into other aspects of the past.

Hearing the recognizable sound that lay in the wavy lines on that smoked paper is a profound experience—an encounter with real time and space in the mid-nineteenth century.

Much like brushing the dirt off a recently uncovered bit of the past and knowing you are the first person to experience it for ages...yet someone experienced it before you.
The point of this study is that, despite what people might think about the nature of digital technology, we may be setting ourselves up for massive loss. I highly recommend taking a look at the "Scope of the Problem" section of the executive summary. It is interesting to note that they feel that digital recordings are "at particular risk". I wonder if that has to do with the lack of physicality: there is no actual object (a master tape, a phonautogram paper, a piece of nitrate film) that can be discovered a century later in a box somewhere. We are at the mercy of digital collectors and their ability to update their own technology it seems.

And, to come back to what I said before, we probably do not even know that we might want these seemingly random digital files. As the writers of this report say:

Significance is too often recognized and conferred only after the passage of years. We do not have the luxury of waiting until the significance of a sound recording is apparent before its preservation begins. By then, it may be too late.