Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairytale, ‘The Little Mermaid’, is in many respects about a subordinated being who dares to seek a future that defies her society’s expectations. The eponymous protagonist rescues a Prince who falls overboard, and then vows to become human and win his love at great personal cost because the sea-witch who transforms her demands the mermaid’s beautiful voice, and also threatens that if she fails to win the Prince’s love she will dissolve into sea-foam on the morning of his marriage to another.

All visual interpretations of the fairytale face the challenge of expressing not only the mermaid’s transformation into a human, but her desire to be recognised by a so-called higher being, and the love that makes her grow, change and even break. The Parisian Librairie Delagrave edition from 1935, with its illustrations by Maurice Berty and watercolour by Christiane Hameau, is striking in its attempt to interpret the fairytale for contemporary readers.

Illustrations of the mermaid prior to her transformation show her as an inhabitant of a natural realm, largely untainted by civilisation. In a depiction of the mermaid beside a giant octopus, her waist-length brown hair, pink and white floral wreath and rosy cheeks and lips are perennials of Western feminine beauty, and seem untouched by contemporary fashion. Hameau’s gold highlight on the mermaid’s green tail gives her figure sculptural relief, and also indicates her otherworldly majesty. Nevertheless, her eyes’ feline slant and long, lean torso, with arms crossed to conceal her breasts, recalls mid to late 1920s beauty ideals, and indicates that Berty and Hameau’s vision of nature was influenced by the art deco movement.

Although this Libraire Delagrave edition was published in 1935, the mermaid’s transformation, after her acquisition of legs, is dramatised through her relinquishment of a timeless, feminine oceanic realm, to a masculine historic realm, and her subsequent resemblance to the 1920s garconne. In a departure from Andersen’s text, Berty’s illustration of the mermaid on shore in the prince’s court, depicts her with a straight page-boy bob, fashionable in the mid-1920s, wearing an androgynous red tunic and hose, which emphasise the ‘loveliest legs and feet that a young girl could dream of’. Her red garments symbolise her passion for the prince, but also the punishing pain that accompanied her acquisition of legs, because every step felt like walking on hot coals. The notion of sacrifice is further apparent in the mermaid’s androgyny. Although her high-arched feet and legs with their rounded tapering line are gendered feminine, her shorn hair and the phallic sword about her waist indicate that she has given up a measure of her femininity by occupying the active, masculine position of adventurer and wooer. Indeed, the fairytale duly punishes her for her presumption, because the prince admires, but dismisses her current form. He instead prefers to remain faithful to his original memory of her as his rescuer when she still had her fish-tail, and then eventually marries a human princess who mysteriously resembles the mermaid prior to her transformation.

While the patriarchal myth that a woman who occupies a masculine position sacrifices both herself and the love of men is timeless, it appears especially poignant in these 1935 illustrations, which were conceived in the wake of the female emancipation that characterised the post armistice years, and manifested most strongly in mid-1920s fashion. Thus, in their depiction of the mermaid’s metamorphosis for a children’s fairytale book, Berty and Hameau drew attention to society’s lingering discomfort with regard to feminine agency.

Sci Fi references come in and out of fashion as futuristic aesthetics periodically capture designers’ imaginations. However, references that may seem forward thinking at first can turn out to be retro-futuristic on closer inspection. Unravelling these unexpected connections is one of the many things that makes studying fashion history an exciting enterprise. Looking at Versace’s Fall 2014 couture collection with its asymmetric, monochrome dresses adorned with sleekly cut geometric patterns for example, I was reminded of the little known British science fiction film High Treason. However, it wasn’t completely incidental that I should recognise familiar motifs because I wrote my dissertation on Gordon Conway’s costumes for the feature. Analysing her designs and thinking about how contemporary viewers may have perceived them allowed me to consider how the sartorial language of science fiction fashions powerful images of life in the future.

High Treason, directed by Maurice Elvey in 1929, takes place in the mechanically-driven world of 1940 and focuses on a love story that unfolds while an escalating international crisis threatens with a second world war. The film addressed contemporary concerns regarding technology and depicted a world where machines were not inherently good or evil, as the outcomes of their use depended on human responsibility and a commitment to world peace. Despite its lofty themes, the feature’s principal aim was to astound viewers with its portrayal of the future, therefore flying machines, automated showers and real-time conversations over television screens are shown as the perks of life in 1940. The movie especially sought to appeal to female audiences, as they were considered the primary consumers of cinema at the time. As a result, women were shown to be equal partners in society, whose participation in public life was a key ingredient to world peace.

Fashion played a defining role throughout the film as an added source of entertainment because it was thought that women would pay more attention to costumes than to anything else they saw on screen. Gordon Conway’s futuristic sketches and costumes therefore reflected on the way that women could be both glamorous and practical in a mechanised world. An imaginative range of evening dresses in the film’s nightclub scene illustrated the combination of these two concepts. Actresses appear in hybrid garments; in dresses with daring slits that reveal short trousers underneath. These costumes were decorated in varied ways, but geometric patterns, asymmetry and the use of reflective textures such as black leather and silver silk characterise the pieces shown. Although these costumes appeared futuristic, they also built on an established association between trousers and emancipation that originated from 19th century American feminists. Conway’s costumes therefore reinterpreted avant-garde aesthetics and referenced forward-thinking political movements from the past in order to craft a believable image of the future, one that seemed new yet familiar at the same time.

It is this mix of familiarity and futurism that seems to have been quite prominent in the 2014 fall couture collections, and perhaps it is not a complete coincidence that designs such as Atelier Versace’s geometrically streamlined collection bring to mind science fiction aesthetics. Fashion is always in dialogue with its own past, even when the futuristic is concerned. Due to its propensity for novelty, it has frequently been used to envisage life in the future over the course of the twentieth century. These sartorial prophecies could be viewed at world exhibitions, in films and on the catwalk. As a result, a visual vocabulary of the futuristic has developed, components of which we can recognise without knowing their precise origin. The influence of science fiction aesthetics on high fashion indicates the extent to which technological advances stir the collective imagination. Furthermore, it calls for a comparison with earlier periods when futuristic fashion proved popular, in order to understand how we approach the future, the body and technology today.

High Treason can be viewed for free at the BFI Southbank Mediatheque.

Fashion-orientated depictions of swimming primarily focus on appearance. Swimwear histories and the annual beachwear magazine features alike, discuss the shapes of swimming garments and how the exposed body should look or has looked over time. Appearing before strangers wearing nothing but a few choicely-positioned fig-leaves is certainly an important aspect of the swimming experience, but once you enter the water, other considerations come into play: will the suit cling acutely, forming a seal-like second skin, float buoyantly around you or threaten to leave you altogether?

Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, a memoir of her swimming experience both as a trainee Olympian and later as a recreational swimmer begins to answer some of these questions as she elaborates upon the sensory aspects of swimming and swimwear. She recounts how the water feels against her skin, hair and muscles, and considers how its variable temperature, smell, colour and parameters vary with each aquatic encounter.

Each swimming experience is synaesthetic, where the look of the water influences the feeling and vice-versa: for example, the Olympium pool in Etobicoke, Canada is ‘blue’, ‘hums in the mornings’ and is of a scale ‘amplified by the density of chlorinated air over the water’s surface’. The pure blue colour and chlorine smell preside over an atmosphere of concentrated swimming ambition. Subsequently, the bodies that enter the pool reflect its streamlined, utilitarian purpose. Conversely, the seawater at the women’s swimming pavilion at Saltsjöbadens Friluftsbad in the Stockholm Archipelago, where clothing is optional, appeared ‘a beautiful olive-green colour, turning (Shapton’s) skin ochre beneath the waves’ and tasted ‘only mildly saline’. The experience of swimming nude amongst other women was one of ‘indifferent animality… as though in our polite blankness we are brushing up against one another, our furs , our similarities’. Here, the water’s olive waves transfigure the women’s forms, both in terms of appearance and sensation, and indicate a natural, non-competitive realm, where bodies are free from scrutiny.

Shapton’s book also features black and white photographs of her swimwear collection, modelled by white, headless linen mannequins. She describes how one high-necked black Speedo, ‘used for training, 1988-1992’, was ‘made of nylon, more durable and less flexible than Lycra’ and worn doubled up with other suits in order to provide extra weight and ‘drag’. Shapton compared the team’s uniform mentality to their extra suits to that of a ballet company because ‘we’d roll them down wet after warm-up, as ballerinas roll legwarmers up over their knees and then down around their ankles.’ While Shapton’s competitive swimwear was exposed to the shared, routine experiences of a team, her often vintage, recreational swimwear, which hangs shapelessly from the mannequins, acquired personal associations. She reproached one vintage Cole of California, brown zebra-stripe full piece for being ‘slightly too short in the waist’ despite its pattern’s promise to transform the wearer into the zebra-fish it resembled, and recounted that a whimsical Vintage Charmant mustard-yellow and white polka-dot bikini was worn to host a suitably retro pool party ‘where guests played Bananagrams, croquet and Catchphrase’.

Shapton demonstrates how swimming is always an occasion because one leaves behind one’s terrestrial habits and gains ‘knowledge of watery space, being able to sense exactly where my body is and what it’s affecting, an animal empathy for contact with another element.’ Thus, each entry into the water, whether competitively in a team, or recreationally, is ripe for memory-making. Our swimming costumes, and how they transform in the water, become part of our aquatic beings. As we move through the water, we notice that racing stripes are the image of speed, or the ruffle around our bikini resembles a gill. We remember these garments not merely by how they appear dry, but by how they perform when wet.

Sources:
Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (London: Penguin Books, 2012).