Friday
Jul282006
Skull as fashion icon
Friday, July 28, 2006 at 13:21 
Yesterday's New York Times featured a Fashion & Style article about the mainstreaming of skulls, once an icon of the counterculture, pirates, a Catholic/Aztec holiday, and, er, paleontologists. I've always been delighted by skulls and I appreciate the fact that you can now find even more beautifully-designed items emblazoned with them. (Seen here, a Lucien Pella-Finet/Jacob Arabo watch with a pavé diamond face.) From the article: If it was not clear a year or two ago, when the skull motif cropped up on battered Herman-Melville-meets-Edgar-Allan-Poe T-shirts made by Rogues Gallery, on costly cashmere sweaters by Lucien Pellat-Finet, on the perforated uppers of the wingtips made by the men’s wear line Barker Black, it is now. What only recently seemed clever and stylish — I’m wearing a skull! I’m baaaaad! — has shifted into overdrive, if not overkill.
Beyond the sea of skull wear — belts, T-shirts, ties — there are umbrellas, sneakers, swimsuits, packing tape, party lights, even a skull-branded line of hand tools. One company has made a skull toilet brush and caddy (with a molded-plastic femur bone for a handle). This summer Damien Hirst announced that he will make a life-size skull, cast in platinum and adorned with 8,000 diamonds.
If it seems harmless, well, there you have it. With the full force of the American consumer marketing establishment behind it, the skull has lost virtually all of its fearsome outsider meaning. It has become the Happy Face of the 2000’s. When the mid-1980’s proto-Goth group the Ministry sang “Every Day Is Halloween,” this was not quite what they had in mind. Link
Reader Comments (3)
Two things happen here when you do stuff like this (intentionally or not): first it feels like all the cells in my body immediately explode apart into the vast universe like the Big Bang. Do you know what that's like? It's pretty dramatic, for one thing.
Secondly, I'm confronted with a choice of getting on my formless hands and knees, scouring the universe to recover the scattered bits and pieces, and reassembling them one by one, or, just floating here helplessly diembodied in the ether like Casper the Friendly Ghost.
I know you're loving this. I should learn not to visit this website.
Anyway, VERY cool blog! =)
See how scaterred I am?
Did you get my reference to 2001: a space odyssey when on my "Right Down the Line" video, I said the inner iris was cosmicly transcendent? (Dave's wild entry to Jupiter.) I know you said it's one of your favorite movies.
To be honest, I didn't realize I was referring to it until I watched the DVD today and saw where that came from. I was tripping on LSD the first time I saw it, in 1968. Thanks for keeping those memories alive!!!! Luv