This
week's style icon: Roland Barthes
The
winemaker's shirt embodies a contradiction. The winemaker himself
belongs to a priesthood largely unknowable to those who drink his
wine. His shirt, it will be readily admitted, is therefore a garment
whose sacerdotal power belongs to a whole typology of priestly
raiments, including copes, cassocks, wreaths, stoles, sacred threads,
birettas, clothing whose emblematic function serves both a reality
(the authority of a state religion) and a condition of submissive
dreaming, a
rêve
from which the element of transubstantion is never far.
As in a
dream, the priestly garment must be perfect insofar as it can never
be other than its perceived lineaments suggest: there is an
iconographic component in every button, every seam, in the way the
shirt hangs negligently and yet without apology from the shoulders of
the wearer (and what shoulders must they be, to sustain such an item
of clothing?). The psychology of the dream in itself repels the
secularization of the everyday.
This
is of course necessary, given the mythical status of the wine which
is being created. It is well known that wine, far from inheriting the
morphological birthright of a Proteus or a Zeus, has always created
the conditions in which its seemingly galvanic powers generate reversals or alternative modes of existence. When we drink wine, we
engage with an archetype whose singularity lies in its ability to
contain a multiplicity of outcomes: good cheer, aggression,
lacrimosity, invention, nostalgia, amorousness, candour, somnolence
and so on. Just as it inhabits two planes of existence in the ritual
of the eucharist, so it antithetically liberates and enslaves at the
moment of earthly consumption.
Capitalism,
on the other hand, insists that the image of the winemaker should
express not only a sense of ritualized condescension on the part of
the wearer, but of social communality, a sense that We're
all in this together
and that We
all drink wine because it is understood that it would be wrong not
to.
The morphology of the shirt therefore embraces a type of synesthesia
in which the sacerdotal garment elicits feelings of shared purpose,
of routine experience at the same time as it invokes the mystery of
the altar.
In photographs, the winemaker's shirt is not always
properly ironed; sometimes it is neatly tucked into the waistband of
the trousers, sometimes left outside, as if the wearer has been in
too much of a hurry to get to work to dress properly; sometimes the
shirt is clearly a business shirt casually opened at the neck (once
back from his business meeting, comfortably at the
locus
of his authority, framed by casks and stone floors, he can devote
himself to his calling)
in
order
to
evoke the human tensions the winemaker encounters every day.
But
what is more characteristic is the fact that we consume
the shirt at the same time as we consume the wine made by the
inhabitant of the shirt. It is a bourgeois necessity to appropriate
and envelop: the shirt becomes part of this process of consumption,
which is why so many winemakers submit to this iconographical
levelling, demanded by the business they work in. Without his shirt
(if such a condition were possible) the winemaker would merely be
another artisan; with it, he is elevated to the status of creator,
the shirt, as we have seen, endowed with true gestural significance.
This, then, becomes the contradiction: the winemaker's shirt endows
him with a mythical otherness at the same time as it renders him
indistinguishable from his peers; while simultaneously advertising
his sacrificial materiality, a materiality which is both necessary
for the gratification of his customers and for the process of
winemaking to be reborn, year after year.
Translation: CJ
Blimey! He also wrote this on wine. "Wine will deliver [the intellectual] from illusions; it will dispose of his intellectualism and make him the equal of the common man. By drinking wine, the intellectual regains his natural virility. He thinks it will help him to escape the curse which a century and a half of Romanticism continues to impose on the purely cerebral (we know that one of the myths of the modern intellectual is the obsession with ‘having it where it counts’). It’s a peculiarity of France, that this mercurial power of wine is never presented as its purpose. Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone. In France, drunkenness is a consequence, but never the aim. Drinking is seen as the stretching out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect. Wine isn’t only a potion, it is also the lingering act of drinking. The gesture itself has a decorative value and the power of wine is never separated from its modes of existence. Contrast this to whisky, for example – drunk because it has 'the most agreeable drunkenness, with the least painful consequences,' and the drink is reduced to an act."
ReplyDeleteIndeed! Mythologies!
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