Second Amendment 01d No.2 Brand Shirt
A slightly crumpled white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, an untied narrow black tie, skinny black pants and a jacket thrown over her shoulder: Patti Smith stares at the photographer in this portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, taken in 1975 and used on the cover of her debut album Horses. Although it is posed, the picture uses natural light and exudes a simplicity that is unusual in the music industry of the 1970s. The habitual codes of fashion, gender and music are muddled, and the white shirt plays a central role in this: timeless and androgynous, pure and absolute. Smith once remarked that the cover reminded her of the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, two important sources of inspiration for her at the time. But there is also something of the Balzac of 1842, caught on a Daguerreotype in this portrait: the same hand on the heart, right shoulder forward and the crumpled shirt that evokes in his portrait the activity of writing as work. The Horses cover, in short, concatenates references and associations that together would raise enough issues to write a history of the white shirt from the perspective of 1975.
Second Amendment 01d No.2 Brand Shirt
While the black suit characterises men’s clothing in the Paris of the nineteenth century, this striking daguerreotype showing the author of La Comédie Humaine in 1842 is a rare instance of a writer captured in such unkempt clothing. It is on a par with Rodin’s sculpture of Balzac in his dressing gown. Both images, which play with the notion of outside and inside, public and private, also foreground Balzac ‘s intense and exhausting activity. Balzac poses not as a bourgeois or an aristocrat, but neither is he a manual worker: the white dress shirt here becomes the uniform of the writer.