“Jammed” between Body and Mind: The Liberatory Fashion of Leonora Carrington

Figure 3. Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, ca. 1937–38, oil on canvas, 25 9/16 x 32 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Surrealism, Fashion, and the Female Body

The artistic and cultural movement of surrealism has long held ties with the world of fashion. In the early twentieth century, surrealist icons such as Salvador Dalí and Man Ray blended commercial and aesthetic pursuits in their creative direction of fashion photography shoots for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Dalí collaborated with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in the 1930s and 1940s, an artistic partnership that inspired him to create his own fabric patterns, perfume bottle labels, clothing, jewelry, and retail window displays. Notable among the results of this collaboration is Schiaparelli’s 1937 lobster dress (see fig. 1), whose design was inspired by a motif developed by Dalí in response to Sigmund Freud’s writings. A work of sexual innuendo, the lobster dress challenges gender norms by invoking the violence of castration while also celebrating masculine sexuality: painted onto a silk tulle skirt, the lobster’s tail “sits provocatively over the vulva, while its body extends down to the hem like a huge, red phallus . . . revel[ing] in the contrast between elegance and base sexuality, soft femininity and its tough masculine counterpart.”[1] 

Female surrealist artists also influenced the fashion industry in their disruption of patriarchal norms, working within—and yet chafing against—a movement that touted freedom from gender hierarchies while simultaneously hypersexualizing the female body and exploiting the emotional (and physical) labor of women muses. Fashion became the grounds for female artists to disrupt the machismo of surrealism by merging different realms of experience—conscious and unconscious, male and female, sane and mad—in a distinctly embodied medium.

Figure 1. Elsa Schiaparelli, Woman’s Dinner Dress. 1937, printed silk organza, synthetic horsehair, 52 in. (length) x 22 in. (waist), Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia.

This essay bridges mad studies, gender studies, literary studies, and fashion studies to examine the ways in which British-born Mexican surrealist artist, writer, and costume designer Leonora Carrington decenters Western rationality in an attempt to theorize a selfhood that is plural and interconnected with all matter—humans, animals, vegetation, machines, and the cosmos. Mad studies is a field of inquiry and domain of activism with its origins in Canadian psychiatric consumer/survivor movements that has increasingly gained international popularity in its attempt to relocate the “problem” of mental illness from within the individual to the psychiatric/medical system and the social relations that produce, or heighten, distress in those living with mental illnesses. In applying a mad studies methodology to my analysis of Carrington’s transmedial oeuvre, I seek to appreciate her experience as a woman who lived with a mental illness without confining it to a biomedical framework that supports problematic—and often gendered—power dynamics. To that end, I intentionally employ terminology of “mad” and “madness,” finding in this language a means of destigmatizing mental illnesses without romanticizing them. In her chapter “Defining Mental Disability,” Margaret Price recounts the debate over the language of mental disability. She notes that “mad” has gained currency in contemporary movements (e.g., “Mad Pride” movements) to advance the rights of people living with mental illnesses because it “has a long history of positive and person-centered discourses,” is often “detach[ed] . . . from implication in medical and psychiatric industries,” and enables a broad historical understanding of mental illnesses that other, more recent terms do not.[2] Like every term related to mental illness, however, “mad” is not neutral. As Peter Beresford explains, “‘Mad’ is a frightening word, but this is because madness and being driven to madness can be frightening. At the same time ‘mad’ is a word that sparks fear, threat and danger to many mental health service users/survivors because of its continued pejorative use against them.”[3] Acknowledging both its strengths and limitations, I use the terminology of “madness” throughout this essay to acknowledge the distress that can result from mental illnesses and their treatment while resisting their biomedicalization and pathologization. 

The language of “madness” feels most suitable for understanding Carrington’s personal experience with a mental illness, as it emphasizes survivor-led attempts to negotiate the boundaries between sanity and mental illness and to reclaim agency in a system that often silences and disempowers them. As I will show, Carrington wrestles with the binary construct of sanity/madness in order to conceptualize a fluid selfhood. In her fiction and nonfiction writings, paintings, sketches, and costume designs, Carrington situates clothing as a means of releasing the female body from the “jam” of Western rationality as well as the sexist tendencies of the surrealist movement. Rejecting the hypersexualization of the female body by male surrealists such as Dalí and André Breton, Carrington explores the liberatory potential of clothing that blurs the boundaries between different modes of experience. What emerges is a revolutionary materiality that offers clothing as a means of reconfiguring rationalist notions of the unified self. 

First, I explore Carrington’s representation of bodily adornment in her memoir of institutionalization, Down Below, as enabling her to gain autonomy in an oppressive, male-dominated psychiatric system. Next, I examine how she continues to challenge rigid notions of selfhood in her short stories, art, and costume design, finding in clothing a means of dismantling the sharp divisions between sanity/madness, nature/culture, male/female, human/animal, and animal/machine. Finally, I consider the legacy created by Carrington’s engagement with fashion as a means of reconciling the rational and the irrational through the surrealist concept of the “marvelous,” highlighting Dior’s haute couture fall/winter 2020–21 collection as an exemplary effort to capture Carrington’s notion of a porous female subjectivity.

Unsettling the Cult of Female Madness: Convulsive Beauty in Nadja and Down Below 

Carrington’s most notable challenge to masculinist ideologies came in the form of her simultaneously embodying and protesting the surrealist fetishization of madness, especially female madness. Inspired by Arthur Rimbauld’s definition of poetic creativity as the “derangement of all the senses,” Breton and his circle championed madness as an ideal source of art—the most authentic originator of visions merging the conscious and the unconscious, an experience that most could access only through hypnagogic hallucinations, or those sensations generated in the realm between waking and sleeping.[4] 

For male surrealists, women—especially the femme-enfant, the woman-child—functioned as muses for their artistic production. Women who were unrestricted by the bonds of rationality, however, were even more valuable for the inspiration they provided. Breton fantasized about the mad female medium in his surrealist romance Nadja, in which he revels in his female muse’s emancipation from logic, or what he terms “the most hateful of prisons.”[5] The eponymous heroine positions herself as “the soul in limbo,” and her liminality is both erotic and intellectually stimulating to Breton, who derives from their time together a theory of art anchored in instability: “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”[6] However, while Breton benefits from the supposed derangement of Nadja’s senses, she is left behind—committed to the Vaucluse sanitarium because, according to Breton, she lacked the ability to disguise her internal rejection of respectability with an outward display of “common sense” when necessary.[7] Launching into a diatribe against contemporary psychiatry, Breton posits that sanitariums generate mental illnesses and then punish individuals for having them. The power of his critique is diminished, however, when he uses it as justification for not investigating Nadja’s fate. Published in 1928, Nadja presents a problematic, overly simplistic, and exploitative vision of a transcendent female madness that would later be complicated by Carrington, who spent half a year interned against her will in an asylum in Santander, Spain.

“Clothing, as portrayed in Down Below and elsewhere in Carrington’s oeuvre, offers the ability to reconcile internal and external realities in a version of selfhood outside that envisioned by Western rationality — a self that is plural and interconnected with all matter: humans, nature, and machines.”

When Carrington’s wealthy and well-connected parents committed her, with the aid of the British consul, to the psychiatric hospital in Santander in 1940, she had recently escaped to Madrid with the help of Catherine Yarrow and Michel Lukacs, two of Max Ernst’s friends. Carrington had been living with Ernst in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, a village in southern France, developing her art there while also serving as muse and lover to Ernst, who was twenty-six years her senior. When war broke out in France, Ernst was imprisoned twice in internment camps. The first time, Carrington was able to leverage their connections to free him, but the second time she was unsuccessful. She began experiencing depressive symptoms that worsened as she was removed from southern France and transported to Spain by Yarrow and Lukacs. Along the journey to Madrid, Carrington began experiencing delusions, including the sensation that her mind and body were split and that she could not control her physical movements. By the time she reached her destination, her behavior was deemed erratic enough that she was hospitalized in Madrid and later transferred to an asylum in Santander run by Dr. Morales. There, she received multiple injections of the drug Cardiazol, a precursor to electroconvulsive therapy that induced violent epileptic fits. This harrowing experience, along with her eventual escape to Lisbon, Portugal, where she would meet her first husband, the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc, is recorded in Carrington’s memoir of institutionalization, Down Below, first written in 1942 but then lost and ultimately dictated over a three-day period—August 23–26, 1943—translated, and published in the February 1944 issue of the surrealist magazine VVV.

Down Below is no romanticized account of mental illness like that found in Nadja. Marina Warner describes it as “an unsparing account of the experience of being insane.”[8] Susan Suleiman, author of Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, suggests that it “tries . . . to convey the experience of madness as it was lived, from the inside.”[9] Down Below does represent a mental illness as generating visionary insight that might give rise to creative genius, a problematic trope identified by Katie Rose Guest Pryal as the “creativity mystique” of mental illnesses.[10] At the same time, the memoir challenges surrealism’s cult of female madness through its use of bodily adornment to highlight the physicality of psychosis. Carrington’s attention to the embodied nature of her mental illness prevents it from being read solely as a creative fantasy—a pleasurable “voyage to the other side of reason”—but rather as an often traumatic experience that subjects the female patient’s body to the gaze, control, and exploitation of male authority figures, whether doctors or artists.[11] Clothing, as portrayed in Down Below and elsewhere in Carrington’s oeuvre, offers the ability to reconcile internal and external realities in a version of selfhood outside that envisioned by Western rationality—a self that is plural and interconnected with all matter: humans, nature, and machines.

In Down Below, Carrington details how her “body no longer obeyed the formulas established in [her] mind, the formulas of old, limited Reason.”[12] Experiencing a split between her body and mind that hampers her motility, which she terms being “jammed,” she cites the need “to liquidate [her] paralyzing anguish, then to seek an accord between the mountain, [her] mind, and [her] body”—between nature, mind, and body.[13] In response to her “jamming,” Carrington develops a “touch” language with animals, channels electricity between bodies, and communicates through vibrations. With her body transformed into a medium, she seeks bodily coverings that enable her to blur the boundaries between the different modes of experience she envisions herself as conducting: male/female, human/animal, sane/mad. Her normal clothing, however, is under lock and key, because the doctors and nurses force her to remain naked and powerless. As she describes her entry into the sanitarium: “they tore my clothes off brutally and strapped me naked to the bed. Don Luis [the head physician’s son] came into my room to gaze upon me. I wept copiously.”[14] This troubling image is rendered more heinous by the doctors’ forced injections of epileptic drugs and another solution that causes a large, painful swelling on her thigh, effectively immobilizing her, as well as by the sexual advances made by Don Luis, who “caresse[s] [her] face and introduce[s] his fingers gently into her mouth.”[15] If nakedness places her in a sexually, psychologically, and medically vulnerable state, then it makes sense that clothing, or some form of bodily adornment, would offer her the autonomy she craved.[16]

The Bed Sheet in Carrington’s Art and Writing: Canvas, Clothing, and Source of Freedom

In an effort to take back control of her body, she allies herself with nature and the cosmos through her adornment. The bed sheet, in particular, becomes a source of strength for her, for she imagines it as connecting her directly to the sky. In the Sun Room, for instance, she describes herself as “alone and naked, with [her] bed sheet and the sun—the sheet united to [her] body in a dance.”[17] The fabric of the sheet and the skin of her body are pictured here as merging not just into a cohesive material, but a liberating movement. Carrington explains, “I felt I was manipulating the firmament.”[18] Empowered by the bed sheet’s union with her body, she loosens herself from the bonds of a singular self and restrictive gender binaries, ultimately becoming “an androgyne, the Moon, the Holy Ghost, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora Carrington, and a woman . . . she who revealed religions and bore on her shoulders the freedom and the sins of the earth changed into Knowledge, the union of Man and Woman with God and the Cosmos, all equal between them.”[19] The bed sheet also enables her to transcend her painful embodiment, as it transforms the abscess on her leg into “a sun on the left side of the moon,” around which all her “dances and gyrations in the Sun Room . . . pivot.”[20] In Carrington’s narrative, the bed sheet “unjams” her by allowing for a fluid subjectivity.

So powerful was this article of bedding-cum-clothing for Carrington that, supposedly, “[s]he would attend parties wearing nothing but a bed sheet.”[21] It also served as a canvas for some of her paintings, linking adornment and art in a generative manner.[22] The figure of the bed sheet appears in her art as well. Ropa Vieja (1968) (see fig. 2) presents what appears to be either a hooded white robe or a bed sheet hanging on a clothesline, animated by a pair of eyes. Susan L. Aberth interprets this drawing as a self-portrait.[23] If we view it that way, it is significant that the clothesline reaches into the sky without terminating and also that the figure in the bed sheet is illuminated by a yellow hue suggestive of the sun. Provocative in its sensual associations while also veiling the body in its mantle, an item that is with us when we cross the threshold of wakefulness into sleep, the bed sheet serves as the perfect mock clothing for challenging rigid binaries and subverting the male gaze. It protects Carrington from the visual scrutiny of the male doctors and provides her with a medium for working through her notion of a porous and plural selfhood on the grounds of her very body. Art canvas and clothing, barrier and invitation, the bed sheet is the perfect vehicle for theorizing an expanded female subjectivity outside of the demands of patriarchal society and Western rationality.

Figure 2. Leonora Carrington, Ropa Vieja. 1968, watercolor, charcoal, and pastel, 22.4 x 17.7 in., private collection.

Clothing, Nature, and the Unfolding of Female Subjectivity through the Marvelous

In addition to the bed sheet, Carrington clothes herself with elements of nature while institutionalized. After she attempts to exorcise herself of one of the personages she believes to be inhabiting her, she comes across a tuft of reeds in a garden: “spontaneously, I called the place Africa and set to gathering branches and leaves with which I completely covered myself.”[24] This experience causes her to return to her room “in a state of great sexual excitement.”[25] For Carrington, the female body united with nature was a source of significant mental and emotional strength—a manifestation of the marvelous. As Pierre Mabille would argue in Mirror of the Marvelous: The Surrealist Reimagining of Myth, “the marvelous” is the point at which internal and external realities merge, where the individual can be fully himself or herself and yet also one with the entire world.[26] Although she would not have been able to conceptualize her experience through Mabille’s framework of the marvelous while in Santander, Carrington later found in this work a means of creating meaning out of her mental illness. Salomon Grimberg explains that Mabille’s book “provided for Carrington the only understanding she accepted as explanation of her recent incursion into madness—and of her life: a journey of marvelous interactions between dream and wakefulness, the interconnectedness between internal and external reality, of nature and the constant unfolding of oneself, internally and socially.”[27] 

In Down Below and other works, clothing functions as a means for women to accomplish this “unfolding of oneself” through nature, a process that reaches fulfillment not in the unified rational self but in a self that is interconnected with all matter. Make no mistake: this is no romanticization of psychosis. Carrington was very clear about the distress caused by the sensation of being inhabited by multiple personages. Where she found power is through the stability afforded her by a porous self in complete harmony with both the inner and outer world.

Carrington’s female protagonists and subjects often merge with the natural world through their bodily adornments, resisting boundaries between human and nature (whether animal or vegetation). In her short story “The Sisters” (1939), for instance, the vampire-woman Juniper is described using avian imagery: “Her body was white and naked; feathers grew from her shoulders and round her breasts. Her white arms were neither wings nor arms.”[28] In “The House of Fear” (1937–38), the protagonist attends a party hosted by the mistress Fear, portrayed as “look[ing] slightly like a horse, but . . . much uglier,” with a “dressing gown . . . made of live bats sewn together by their wings.”[29] In these grotesque and darkly humorous representations, the female body is transformed through its association with nature: the boundaries between clothing and skin fade, as do the distinctions between human and animal. Tara Plunkett explains that Carrington’s female-animal hybrids serve as a commentary on “woman’s perceived proximity to nature and the emergence of concealed animal instincts.”[30] By rendering them monstrous—and by blurring the lines between nature and material culture in her representation of bodily adornment as neither entirely skin, nor fully clothing—Carrington challenges the binaries that align woman with nature and man with culture.

“Connected to both artifice and life, channeling the innocence of childhood and the sexual awakening of maturity, merging interior and exterior worlds, Carrington embraces the hybridity of a selfhood enmeshed with nature and culture, disrupting hierarchical binaries.”

Carrington’s vision of the self unfolding through a nature always already imbricated with culture held particular relevance for her, as she perceived her spirit-animal to be the white horse. In Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1937–38) (see fig. 3), Carrington represents herself as seated below a rocking horse that is suspended in mid-air. The rocking horse’s lack of a tail seems to be completed by Carrington’s “wild mane,” linking her with the fake animal. A live white horse gallops outside the window, forcing a contrast between a freeing nature and an immobilizing society. This juxtaposition is complicated by the subject’s white jodhpurs, which cause the viewer to question whether she will ride the floating rocking horse inside or the live horse outside.[31] Connected to both artifice and life, channeling the innocence of childhood and the sexual awakening of maturity, merging interior and exterior worlds, Carrington embraces the hybridity of a selfhood enmeshed with nature and culture, disrupting hierarchical binaries.

Another painting in which Carrington unsettles the boundaries between human and nature—this time in connection with her experience of living with a mental illness—is En Bas (Down Below) (1940), one of three paintings she completed while in the psychiatric hospital (see fig. 4). This painting depicts a group of inmates posed for a portrait, with Carrington off to the side of the frame observing them ambivalently. Carrington is wearing a blue dress that is enveloped in flora. Her dress appears to join her either to a hedge with winglike structures at the top or an elaborate flower, as petals seem to emerge from the front of her dress. Directly behind her is her avatar, the white horse, which appears fixed in the hedge. Four fellow inmates—or are they, too, avatars?—recline on the ground. One is a naked half-human, half-bird creature with long white hair; feathers cover her body, suggesting a link to Juniper’s character in “The Sisters.” Another naked female appears monstrous in her green coloring, while a third displays a feminine lower body; uncanny, almost mechanical torso; and male head. The fourth figure, whose face is shrouded by a horned mask, wears a black corset and red thigh-high stockings. In this scene, the boundaries between clothing and skin are challenged—and with them, the divisions between human and animal, human and vegetation, human and machine, man and woman. En Bas asks the viewer to imagine how adornment can transform one’s relationship with their psyche and the external world. The answer, it seems, is that clothing can be liberatory—a means of achieving a cohesive, but not unified, selfhood through a multiplicity of identity expressions.

Figure 4. Leonora Carrington, En Bas (Down Below), 1940, oil on canvas, 15.75 x 23.5 in., Gallery Wendi Norris. San Francisco.

Carrington’s Post-Institutionalization Fashion: Theory and Practice

Carrington approached fashion as an entryway to the “marvelous” in her personal life as much as in her art. Grimberg writes of a time when, living in New York following her institutionalization, “she walked into a party wearing a dress she had made of old velvet curtains acquired in a junk shop and sewn throughout with small bells. . . Standing motionless for a moment, with a single movement of her hand, she let the dress slide off her shoulders to expose her naked body.”[32] Fashion was, for her, not about accommodating oneself to the latest trends, but a means of subverting societal expectations and using her body as an instrument to achieve a porous, but stable, subjectivity. 

She captures her attitude toward fashion in the 1950s short story “My Flannel Knickers”: “Once I was a great beauty and attended all sorts of cocktail-drinking, prize-giving-and-taking, artistic demonstrations and other casually hazardous gatherings organized for the purpose of people wasting other people’s time. I was always in demand and my beautiful face would hang suspended over fashionable garments, smiling ardently.”[33] The narrator’s “ardent heart,” which “beat[s] under the fashionable costumes,” causes her to gradually lose her ability to feign a smile within an inauthentic society.[34] Consequently, she loses her teeth, and the skin on her face even begins to sag and droop over the bones. The narrator manages to fix her face and teeth, but when she reenters society, she finds herself surrounded by a “jungle of faces, each ravenously trying to eat each other.”[35] The faces are divorced from their bodies, which seem petrified in “fashion:”

The bodies over which these faces are suspended serve as ballast to the faces. As a rule they are carefully covered with colours and shapes in current “fashion.” This “fashion” is a devouring idea launched by another face snapping with insatiable hunger for money and notoriety. The bodies, in constant misery and supplication, are generally ignored and only used for ambulation of the face.[36]

The image of faces suspended over bodily ballasts recalls both the mind-body split detailed in Down Below and the portrayal of Drusille in “The Sisters,” who describes her head as a “bier for [her] thoughts” and her body as a “coffin.”[37] In a world that forces women to sport a frozen smile, adorn themselves according to prescribed rules, and behave rationally despite the surrounding irrationality, the narrator of “My Flannel Knickers” exposes fashion for the monstrosity and distortion it inspires. 

Figure 5. Screenshot from The Mansion of Madness, dir. Juan López Moctezuma, 1973.

Figure 7. Screenshot from The Mansion of Madness, dir. Juan López Moctezuma, 1973.

Clothing, however, is not inimical to human existence. In fact, the bodies in this story are formed from a “cosmic wool”—on which the warring faces believe the narrator has a monopoly. For her part, the narrator believes that “anyone over the age of 40 should be quietly knitting a new body, rather than wasting the cosmic wool.”[38] Disenchanted with the faces’ dissociation from their bodies and obsession with embellishing them, the narrator ends up attacking a policeman. After being released from prison, she is installed on a traffic island in the middle of an intersection, where she becomes famous for her flannel knickers, which she washes daily and hangs on the traffic light wires to dry. Along with the knickers, she wears a gentleman’s tweed golfing jacket and gym shoes, a sight that draws people to view her like a museum exhibit. 

By knitting herself a “complete face and body,” the narrator achieves “three-dimensional life” and frees herself from the bonds of an inauthentic, face-eating society.[39] Like Carrington herself, the narrator cares less for maintaining a distinguished appearance than for dressing herself in ways that strengthen her mind-body connection, which also happens to be a human-machine nexus, as she has become an extension of the traffic island with its wires and automatic lights. In this story as in Carrington’s other work, sanity is not the product of a unified self with a rational mind directing a body; it is the result of a fluid selfhood that embraces the interconnectedness of all matter—a connection often achieved through the medium of clothing.

Although Carrington had recovered from her delusions by the fall of 1941, she spent the rest of her life concerned that she would experience another mind-body split.[40] Eventually turning to costume and mask design, it was clear that clothing retained its significance in her life, for it provided her with the ability to conceptualize and maintain a cohesive selfhood by blurring the boundaries between rationality and irrationality, male and female, human and nature. In the 1973 Mexican horror film The Mansion of Madness (La mansión de la locura), for example, Carrington designed costumes that resonate with her earlier artwork by traversing the boundaries between human and nature. A priestess, for example, wears a dress with sleeves that fan outward so extensively that, when her arms are outstretched, they resemble wings (see fig. 5). Lora Markova and Roger Shannon suggest that “Leonora Carrington’s personages . . . emerge in distinctive outfits that render the characters’ temperaments and spiritual states.”[41] In this case, the cult priestess is an inmate turned medium for Dr. Maillard’s (really, the inmate Raoul Fragonard’s) “soothing system.” A central symbol of the soul’s contention between madness and rationality, a fight staged on the outside of the human body as much as on the inside, the priestess appears on the cover of the American DVD. Her figure resembles that of the winged female creature in Carrington’s tarot card Wheel of Fortune (ca. 1955)—a half-human, half-animal creature with branches and leaves growing out of its head (see fig. 6). This imagery bears semblance to the headpiece worn in the film by Eugénie (see fig. 7), the real Dr. Maillard’s daughter, who pretends to have a mental illness in order to stay in the institution in which her father has been imprisoned. Carrington’s costume design for this film, with its allusive links to her art, unsettles the distinctions between sanity and psychosis, while empowering the female characters to control the gaze of the male patient-turned-doctor.

Figure 6. Leonora Carrington, Wheel of Fortune, ca. 1955, oil and gold leaf on board, 6 ¼ x 5 ½ in, Estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Carrington’s Fashion Legacy: Porous Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Couture

Figure 9. Brigitte Niedermair, photograph of Dior’s Esphyr look from its fall/winter 2020–21 haute couture collection, Dior.

Carrington’s use of clothing as a means of accessing the “marvelous” to upend the power dynamics at play on the female body, especially the mad female body, has inspired contemporary designers to create couture based on her transmedial oeuvre. Most recently, for its haute couture fall/winter 2020–21 collection, Dior drew inspiration from five surrealist artists, Carrington among them. Released in the thick of a global pandemic, this collection, according to creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri, was meant to use “mystery and magic” as “a way of exorcising uncertainty about the future.”[42] Le Mythe Dior, the short film introducing the collection, highlights Chiuri’s homage to Théâtre de la Mode, a traveling exhibition of clothing miniatures presented by top French designers in 1945 to reinvigorate French couture. Miniatures of Dior’s AW20–21 collection (see fig. 8) were also sent to their couture clients, for Chiuri recognized that despite the possibilities of the digital world, clothing has a materiality that requires people to feel the fabric and see the garment on the body. 

Dior’s surrealist-inspired collection has contemporary resonance beyond our longing for touch; it takes up questions that Carrington poses in her writings, artwork, and costume design about the relationship between the female body, clothing, and madness. The black shantung coat with hand-pleated ruffles and fringe, appropriately named “Leonor” (pictured top and center in fig. 8), draws power from its association with the black-winged women in Carrington’s costume design and artwork. The fullness of the coat is also suggestive of Fear’s dress (in “The House of Fear”) made from live bats, for as the model wearing it in Le Mythe Dior runs, it flutters as if made from myriad winged creatures. 

In the short film, the fantastic creatures who are given these pieces to try on—some nymph-like women, some animal-woman hybrids, some woman-flora hybrids—are portrayed as coming more fully into themselves through their interaction with the clothing. For instance, the woman whose hair grows into tree branches disengages from the tree-man with whom she is entangled to adorn herself in look 34 of Dior’s AW20-21 collection (pictured bottom left in fig. 8). This dress features an embroidered bodice that resembles a lattice of greenery, which partially exposes the breasts, and a skirt with leaf-like shadowing accomplished through delicate patchwork. The clothing does not change the women, who return to their original environments; it empowers them to experience the “unfolding of the self” characteristic of the marvelous. It harmonizes their internal and external states, makes visible the fantasies and desires of the unconscious, and brings the women more fully into relationship with their natural surroundings. Wearing look 34, the tree-woman returns to her nook in the tree and reunites with the tree-man, but her gaze, which meets the camera directly, suggests full autonomy and self-awareness. Dior’s fashion shifts the power dynamics typically governing the female body so that women are not subjected to the objectification of the male gaze, but rather direct the gaze to meet their whims. This is no fashion that covers a body-ballast divorced from one’s head; this is a fashion that celebrates hybridity, as the Esphyr look—a black tulle dress whose skirt features prints of Carrington’s tarot cards (see fig. 9)—attests. Continuing the legacy of Carrington’s art, writing, and costume design, this is a fashion that helps women achieve a more cohesive self by embracing a plural identity, free from binary divisions and conducive to a spirit of play.

Figure 8. Adrien Dirand, photograph of a trunk of miniature mannequins wearing pieces from Dior’s fall/winter 2020–21 haute couture collection, Dior.

Dior Autumn-Winter 2020-2021 Haute Couture

Jammed in Lockdown: Disrupting the Hegemony of the Rational through Fashion

In a world turned upside down by a pandemic that has alienated us from our own and others’ bodies and “jammed” women, in particular, by forcing them to police fragile boundaries between their public and private selves, it is no wonder that Carrington’s brand of surrealism has surfaced in couture to empower women by promising release from the hegemony of the rational. While Carrington certainly never would have championed mental illnesses as a source of enlightenment or artistry—in fact, she challenged the cult of madness established by male surrealist figures that romanticizes women who live with a mental illness—she found in clothing a means of facilitating a cohesive selfhood that is not dependent on the Western ideal of the rational unified self. Her representation of bodily adornment undermines hierarchies that disempower women, particularly female patients and survivors of the psychiatric system, such as mind/body, male/female, and culture/nature. In her engagement with the marvelous, Carrington invites us to consider how what women wear can help them more fully embrace the complexity of their identity—the multiple roles they negotiate daily—and leverage it to their advantage.

Notes

1. Octavia Bright, “Reconsider the Lobster: The Enduring Symbolism of the Humble Crustacean,” Elephant, Elephant Art, August 22, 2019, https://elephant.art/reconsider-lobster-enduring-symbolism-humble-crustacean/.

2. Margaret Price, “Defining Mental Disability,” in The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 298, 299. Other terminology catalogued and explored in Price’s chapter include “psychiatric disability, mental illness, cognitive disability, intellectual disability, mental health service user (or consumer), neurodiversity, neuroatypical, psychiatric system survivor, [and] crazy” (298). For more on the debate over the benefits and drawbacks of the rhetoric of neurodiversity versus that of mental illness, see Aaron Rothstein, “Mental Disorder or Neurodiversity?” The New Atlantis 36 (2012): 99–115, accessed April 22, 2019, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/mental-disorder-or-neurodiversity.

3. Peter Beresford, “‘Mad’, Mad Studies and Advancing Inclusive Resistance,” Disability & Society 35, no. 8 (2020): 1339, accessed March 14, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2019.1692168.

4. Letter from Arthur Rimbauld to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871, in Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, rev. ed., trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 377.

5. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 143.

6. Ibid., 71, 160.

7. Ibid., 139.

8. Marina Warner, introduction to Down Below, by Leonora Carrington (New York: New York Review of Books, 2017), xxiii.

9. Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 171.

10. Pryal notes how the rhetorical figure of the “creative genius” with a mood disorder causes “some patients . . . to avoid treatment altogether, fearing that any treatment will stifle their creativity.” See Katie Rose Guest Pryal, “The Creativity Mystique and the Rhetoric of Mood Disorders,” Disability Studies Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2011), http://ssrn.com/abstract=1906838.

11. Warner, introduction, xxiii.

12. Leonora Carrington, Down Below (New York: New York Review of Books, 2017), 9.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 28.

15. Ibid., 56.

16. Achieving this autonomy also required Carrington to rid herself of Ernst. As she says, “‘I understand, I must kill him myself,’ i.e., disconnect myself from Max” (13).

17. Ibid., 44.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 45.

20. Ibid.

21. Harriet Kean, “The Naughtiest High Society Artists,” Tatler, Condé Nast, November 13, 2017, https://www.tatler.com/article/naughtiest-posh-painters.

22. See, for instance, Summer (1941), a collaboration between Carrington, Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Roberto Matta painted on a 7’ x 12’ cotton bedsheet. 

23. Susan L. Aberth, “The Chthonic Realms of Leonora Carrington,” Museo de Mujeres Artistas Mexicanas, MUMA, n.d., https://www.museodemujeres.com/en/exhibitions/469-leonora-carrington-en.

24. Carrington, Down Below, 56.

25. Ibid.

26. Pierre Mabille, Mirror of the Marvelous: The Surrealist Reimagining of Myth, trans. Jody Gladding (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2018), 34.

27. Salomon Grimberg, “Traveling Toward the Unknown: Leonora Carrington Stopped in New York,” Woman’s Art Journal 38, no. 2 (2017): 12, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26430757. It was also Pierre Mabille who encouraged Carrington to undertake a rewriting of Down Below after the original manuscript had been lost, and she dictated this second version to Mabille’s wife, Jeanne Mégnen.

28. Leonora Carrington, “The Sisters,” in The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, trans. Kathrine Talbot and Anthony Kerrigan (St. Louis, MO: Dorothy, 2017), 91.

29. Leonora Carrington, “The House of Fear,” in The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, trans. Kathrine Talbot and Anthony Kerrigan (St. Louis, MO: Dorothy, 2017), 37.

30. Tara Plunkett, “‘Melusina after the Scream’: Surrealism and the Hybrid Bodies of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 95, no. 5 (2018): 497, https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2018.1497341.

31. Carrington was known for wearing riding pants on a regular basis. As artist Hedda Sterne recalls, “She was simply the most beautiful creature, she went around in jodhpurs and boots—nobody was doing that.” Hedda Sterne quoted in Grimberg, “Traveling,” 6.

32. Grimberg, “Traveling,” 7.

33. Leonora Carrington, “My Flannel Knickers,” in The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, trans. Kathrine Talbot and Anthony Kerrigan (St. Louis, MO: Dorothy, 2017), 158.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 160.

36. Ibid.

37. Carrington, “The Sisters,” 96.

38. Carrington, “My Flannel Knickers,” 160.

39. Ibid., 161.

40. Grimberg, “Traveling,” 9.

41. Lora Markova et al, “Leonora Carrington on and off Screen: Intertextual and Intermedial Connections between the Artist’s Creative Practice and the Medium of Film,” Arts 8, no. 11 (2019): 10, doi: 10.3390/arts8010011.

42. Stephanie Sporn, “Dior’s Spellbinding Couture Collection Channels Female Surrealist Muses and Artists,” Galerie, Hudson Publishing LLC, July 10, 2020, https://www.galeriemagazine.com/dior-couture-collection-2020-surrealist-art/.