What is vulgar? These days a certain president-elect comes to mind. But there’s more to it than the gilded rooms at Mar-a-Lago. The word’s many meanings and many forms are at the heart of “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined,” an expansive exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London. The show takes shape around eleven categories of vulgarity conceived by writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, like “Puritan,” “Impossible Ambition,” and “Showing Off.” Each is explored through clothing, shoes, and texts spanning the eighteenth century through the present.
At first glance, several of these items are not obviously vulgar—a prim twentieth-century Christian Dior cocktail dress, for example—while others flaunt their vulgarity with bedazzled, slinky, excessive fervor. But to call something vulgar may say more about oneself than the thing in question, Phillips argues. One employs the word, he writes, to “reassure oneself of one’s own good taste” and to reaffirm “the fact that there is such a thing as good taste, and that it protects us.” [...]
Though not explicitly included as one of the exhibition’s organizing categories, pleasure is a central theme. We see this in Vivienne Westwood’s playful “Eve” bodysuit, adorned only with a gleaming mirrored leaf affixed to the crotch, and her “Watteau” evening gown, displayed with a white leather glove poised to slip off the mannequin’s arm at any moment. The play on Genesis and the subversion of opulent eighteenth-century dress both sit just on the edge of propriety—they are just an apple’s bite or a glove’s drop away from the overt, vulgar display of money or sex.
