magazine article – The Softer Sex

An Article: Shrouded History
Vice Magazine South Africa

Vice used to be published and circulated for free in South Africa many years ago. I considered it a pretty trashy, over-purposely grungy and obnoxious magazine.

Now that I have a soft spot for Vice photographer Richard Kern my understanding and appreciation for the magazine and the culture it cultivates has changed.
I used to pick up Vice, page through it and put it back down; this article, and its images, caught my eye and I’ve kept them in some file for the last 8 or 9 years.

Written in true Vice style and with an excessive vocabulary which ironically mirrors the age-old history of the topic it discusses via satyr, it’s a very nice compilation of information of the veil which truly does have a crooked history.

Lets take a look behind the veil…
Sometimes around the days when it was fine to throw slaughtered pigs into the crick behind the factory, the bridal veil outsourced its power to the wedding dress. The latter gets all the credit these days for a lady in white’s blushing beauty, but really, that’s bullshit. The veil contains the secret lore of marriage rites, its origins so arcane even the smartest historians of head lace do not see eye to eye on its inception.
Is the veil a quick derivation of the canopy under which a middle eastern bride and groom of yore set their forevermores, hand held somewhat apocalyptically by four members of the wedding party? Or was it perhaps invented for the crusaders, who upon returning from slaying vile heathens were presented with maidens, face-swathed to hide their probable homeliness.
Regardless, the veil begat lots of rituals referring to death rites and shrouds, the womanly triumvirate of blood (of period, of deflowering, of child birth, as demonstrated with the colour red), hiding sadness and other seemingly behaviors or appearances and preventing a women, a natural conduit for evil, from possession.
Lets lift some mystery from this gossamer delusion with the following compendium of veil-trivia bits and bobs.

A bridal veil is more like a gimp hood among the Berber folk in Morocco. The bride is dressed from neck up like a fancy execution victim, donning an attractive square red sack into which a long thin cushion is stuffed, along with her head. Called a “aãbroq”, the pillow case mask get up goes down to her chest, and just to make extra sure she won’t be showing any skin from the collar bone up, she is sewn into it. It is not to be removed through out the three-day ceremony, to protect her otherwise easy entered face orifices from crabby anthropomorphic spirits who are known to posses or even kill a bride if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed. It only comes off (maybe) when the couple goes home to do you-know-what.

Veil popularity vanished for several centuries after the time of the Roman hair dart. Early Anglo-Saxon brides preferred the Ren-faire look, with garlands of flowers crowning their free-flowing locks. Early Christians held a square net, called a care-cloth (a pale rip-off of the Jewish Chuppah), over the bride and groom while the service was performed. During Renaissance and Elizebethian times, lots of ladies married in glorified bathing caps trimmed with all sorts of flouncy girlie stuff.

In the Slavic areas of Europe in the 1500’s brides were given extra head gear on their special day to distinguish their new status, since daily veils for women were customary. This “capping ceremony” was a puberty initiation ritual during which an older married woman removed the brides headdress and chopped her hair off while she and her fair maids sang maudlin dirges for her tresses (metaphoric for impending loss of cherry, of course). It was generally assumed the sadness was a sham and the Slav teens were anxious to get laid.

In Random, Poland, it was customary for the bride to run away screaming when it was time for the shearing and to be forcibly returned to a sheep skin covered box, where she finally became a matron. For Polish brides, this was only the beginning for the ritualistic embarrassment. After a wedding ceremony, bridesmaids would put on red veils and blind fold the bride with her white one, rub honey on her mouth and throw wheat at her while the groom escorted her to their home. (Greeks also enjoyed red veils, as it was the colour associated with Hymen- which is not only that sexy membrane, but also their God of marriage).

Veils continued their shame spiral and weren’t worn at all for white weddings of the 18th century. Western brides instead opted for hats, bonnets, wreaths, tiaras, jewels, lace and ribbons. But then, one magical day, technological advances in clothing manufacture made veils feasible again. Tulle, once reserved for the lace machine of 1768, became handy and cheap thanks to new fangled machinery. And then came Queen Victoria who was the first modern monarch to wear a veil. After her, no self-respecting lass would be seen without one.

In the Christian church of Abyssinia, a happy couple are locked away for their marriage, during which the new wife has to wear a black veil over her face the entire time. The 19th century saw the invention of another fun Christian veil game in Lorraine, France. The bride and her three pals were covered with a large white cloth, the peaks of their head gear adjusted to the same height. Using a twig, the groom had to prod the body he thought was his future sweetie. If he selected the wrong girl his punishment was to dance with her all evening, not with his bride.

The record for longest veil worn down the aisle was, for more than a decade, a 25-footer that was propped on the head of Princess Dianna. But in 2004 monstrous demon Star Jones decided she’s top the record with a crystal-encrusted 27-footer. Maybe one day she’ll further follow Diannas example and get decapitated in a car wreck.

Patric Fouad’s German Brothel Interiors

I found Patric Fouads images of German brothel interiors by accident when I bought an edition of Design Week in 2005. The gaudy kitschness and the definite inimitable style of the spaces combined with their function is intriguing. I tore the article out of the mag all those years ago and kept it along with so much other female related material…

Amazon, who sells Fouad’s book “Frauenzimmer”, writes about the book:

Since 2001, prostitution is no longer illegal in Germany. Patric Fouad gives us rare insights into the interiors of eleven rooms of brothels all over Germany. The photographer left the places he saw unchanged in order to allow the most authentic view of the scene. Despite the absence of any human beings, the interiors speak for themselves: The pompous elegance of some and the imaginative or reduced decoration of others suggest the wishes of the clientele that is being served. The candid images are strong in their impact and yet subtle in their implications. By leaving out the main characters, the viewer’s imagination and curiosity is increased even further. A high quality coffee-table book of a different kind.

The article in Design Weekly from 10 February 2005, written by Clare Dowdy, reads:

Sex is everywhere. Harmony has a licensed sex shop on London’s Oxford Street, Hustler has opened a “department store” in Birmingham and has its sights set on the major European cities; Ann Summers is planning to open outlets in Spain; and Selfridges-based sex toy retailer Tabooboo has 60 vending machines in bars and clubs across the UK and stores planned for the continent. Even venerable high street chemist Boots the Chemists briefly mooted giving vibrators shelf space alongside shampoos and verucca treatments.

All this in-you-face activity around Europe is the result of our increasingly relaxed attitude towards sex (think Sex And The City) and legislation that is gradually being relaxed. A recent development in Germany is the legalisation of prostitution, which came into force in 2001. This- in theory at least- means selling sex is now like any other business and should be treated as such. Hard to swallow, but Patric Fouad’s photographs go some war to persuading us of that. There are around 400 000 practising prostitutes in Germany, with more than half offering services in brothels. Fouad, who was born in Düsseldorf, has chosen to shoot the interiors of 11 of these venues as you might shoot a restaurant or retail environment. “I wanted to make these rooms accessible to the public, especially women,” he explains. What started out as a thesis project for the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund has ended up as a coffee-table book: Frauenzimmer, Brothels in Germany. Its title is a (German) play on words: archaic German for woman, Frauenzimmer’s literal meaning is “women’s rooms”.

Despite their new-found legitimacy, Fouad had to go to considerable lengths to get access. It all started with an intense internet search- no mean feat considering that many of the brothels are registered via paysites that require a log-in. Contact details of the operators were also supplied through journalists and social workers. Then it was a case of calling the patrons up and persuading them to agree to the photo shoot. “I tried various strategies, using different choices of wording,” he says. “Usually, after a brief moment of hesitation, they agreed.” And on location he was given a warm welcome.

As with many images of retail interiors, these are people-free zones, Fouad was not in the business of taking portraits and wanted the rooms to speak to themselves. “There are so many details, colours, patterns that repeatedly appear in the various bordellos and give an idea of the people who decorate and live in them,” he says. Clues to the nature of the room’s occupants include PVC novelties pinned to the wall and a pair of kitten heels by the bed. By shooting all the rooms, where possible, from the same angle, Fouad has presented us with a succession of comparable images. This gives the scenes a nice coherence and helps to concentrate the viewer’s eye. With their curtained or blacked-out windows, all illumination is artificial. As Fouad was determined to shoot these places in all their naked glory, there was minimal additional lighting and no styling. “Naturally, a well-kept room contributes to the image of the house and is therefore important to the owner as well as to the prostitute,” he points out.

While it doesn’t appear that these have had the interior design consultants in, they do display some rules of thumb concerning aesthetics and layout. Unsurprisingly , the main attraction is the bed, though it might surprise the uninitiated that many are single rather than double. This is because half the rooms featured were in the houses for “occasional traffic” or clubs. As well as the gadgetry, walls are adorned with mostly tacky art showing ladies in provocative poses. Meanwhile, the paraphernalia of the profession (lubricants, tissues and such like) stand brazenly by the bed. When it comes to aesthetics, red and pink dominate. In fact, all the colour combinations would make John Pawson followers reach for the bucket. Some of the rooms share common features, clearly a case of the owner getting a job lot of items such as bedspreads or lamps.

Frauenzimmer mixes images of decadence with those of mean cheapness, demonstrating both spectrums of the “profession”. As a book it works on two levels: an insight into a hidden world and a set of interiors images. Either way, it’s intriguing stuff.