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Author interview How to wear


Dressing for pleasure F


Christobel Kent on the erotic power of the veil and Susanna Forrest on signalling sex through clothing


rom the trembling bride to the novice nun to the widow at the graveside, a veiled woman is the object of perennial


fascination. To suggest that our interest in her is anything but sexual is purest nonsense: she asserts her chastity while insinuating its opposite. When a white-clad virgin raises the layers of tulle at the altar and offers herself to her husband for a kiss, the congregation emits a collective sigh at the glimpse this scene affords into the marital bedchamber – and who has not contemplated a widow in full shoulder-length mantilla, without harbouring thoughts of what erotic violence might have


12 The Amorist May 2017


brought her husband to his end? But if the formal veil is provocative enough, the secular veil – birdcage or half-face, net, tulle or lace – that’s worn just for kicks, takes the sexual tension up another notch. Marlene Dietrich’s Shanghai Lily, the celebrated ‘coaster’ in von Sternberg’s 1932 Shanghai Express pairs her black fishnet veil with a feathered cape, an exquisite masked predator. Meanwhile Faye Dunaway’s tormented degenerate in Polanski’s Chinatown wears hers so as to conceal and seduce at once: it hides her eyes while offering her incomparable mouth. And Sandra Milo as Carla the archetypal mistress


in Fellini’s 8 ½ first appears in white-veiled fox hat, prancing into her lover’s marriage with the frankest of intentions. It is the subtlest kind of bondage, a delicate tracery of bars across a woman’s caged cheekbones that suggests a quite delicious restraint and confinement, a siren plea for rescue. And if, once sprung from her pretty prison, she bites the hand that saved her, no-one can say he wasn’t warned. CK


W


hen I was a teenager my granny gave me a single pearl earring. She had lost the other, and thought


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