The Power of Sartorial Transformation

The Scarlet Pimpernel 1982
omg you guys this movie

Last night I re-watched the 1982 TV movie adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel, with Anthony Andrews and an absolutely magnificent Jane Seymour. I’m pretty sure we had that movie on VHS when I was growing up, because I know every scene by heart and could almost recite the dialogue, even after all this time. Ian McKellan (before he had a “Sir” to his name) turns in a masterful performance as the deviously twisted Chauvelin. So, if you have a chance to watch it, please do. It’s a lot of fun. It has everything: romance, intrigue, spying, feats of derring-do, clever witticisms, sword fights, dashing heroes and lovely damsels, and a dash of politics.

As an adult, however, I also can’t help noticing how incredibly conservative (in the sense of preserving older, status quo values) and classist the viewpoint of the film is. It portrays the aristocrats in an unfailingly positive light, while commoners and revolutionaries are ugly, stupid, and/or cruel. Aristocrats are, by their very nature, gallant, noble, good-looking, and, of course, well-dressed.

In this world, it is dress that functions as both the indicator of “goodness” as well as the passport between classes, and dress plays a similar and even more significant role in the politics of The Kingsman, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Some spoilers ahead.

i mean look at that lace cravat. LOOK AT IT.
i mean look at that lace cravat. LOOK AT IT.

The hero of the Scarlet Pimpernel is Sir Percy Blakeney, Baronet. He is not only the richest man in England, but also, and not coincidentally, the best-dressed. He is an early personification of that classic British figure, the dandy (embodied in real life infamously by Beau Brummell). He is specifically a sillier subset of the dandy, a fop. People don’t take him seriously because he appears to care too much about trivial things, like the lace on his cuffs. That, of course, is part of his disguise. In fact, he is deadly serious and he proves that dressing oneself is also of supreme importance. He is the prototype upon which a long line of superheroes are modeled, those badasses who use their appearance to disguise their abilities. Think of Clark Kent in his nerdy glasses: the point is not that the glasses actually disguise his face, but they indicate that Clark Kent is the sort of man who needs to wear glasses. The glasses proclaim him to be a nerd and, by implication, a coward, and therefore the exact opposite of Superman. Batman is a direct descendent of the Scarlet Pimpernel — playboy by day and shadowy costumed avenger by night.

the lady knows how to wear a hat
the lady knows how to wear a hat

Who gets to join the elite league of the Scarlet Pimpernel? Marguerite and Armand St. Just are commoners, but they pass into honorary aristocratic status by their well-groomed appearance (and in Armand’s case, by his association with Marguerite and later, his deeds.) They are far too good-looking to be part of the Paris rabble. Marguerite is an acclaimed actress, noted as the the most beautiful woman in Paris, and is also praised for her exquisite taste. In other words, she knows how to play the part with precision. She becomes an aristocrat by marriage to Sir Percy, and thereafter gives up her plebian Republican sympathies.

Chauvelin is an interesting case because he is a respectable middle-class man by birth and by profession, one of the power brokers of the French Revolution. Robespierre himself trusts Chauvelin with key strategic objectives. He invariably wears sober black, signaling that he is a serious, intellectual man with no time for fripperies and frivolities. (This is, of course, historically accurate.) He is concerned with the future of the country, with matters of life and death. And yet Chauvelin will never be on Sir Percy’s level, because he does not know how to tie a cravat. This is played for laughs in the film, and yet it underscores the vital importance of such sartorial details when it comes to being accepted by those who hold power and prestige.

The film doesn’t ever question the premise that birth and breeding are innately superior. Morality is aligned, in this world, with title, wealth, and beauty (as embodied by the lovely Marguerite.) The final duel between Sir Percy and Chauvelin (because of course there’s a duel!) has the English baronet using his foil to strip Chauvelin’s clothes off him, reducing him to the man of impoverished morals that he is.

The idea of using dress to pass into an elite class is even more explicit in The Kingsman, which I also watched recently. The Kingsman purports to be, in part, about challenging the old school British class system but in fact the film’s values uphold it, in much the same ways that the Scarlet Pimpernel does.

kingsman_promo

This is a bit of a digression, but I’ll just say that I really, really wanted to like this film. It seemed as though it would be exactly the kind of movie I love: kinetic, witty, over the top, with sly references to spy action movie tropes. You know, like Hot Fuzz, which was an awesome film. But the movie falls flat on so many levels, one of which is the symbolism of the clothing. The film pretends to question the assumptions that The Scarlet Pimpernel makes, but you’ll quickly realize, by analyzing its symbolic use of clothing, that in the end The Kingsman is just as classist and conservative as the 1982 film.

So first, you have Colin Firth looking absolutely smashing in a bespoke suit, swanning around like he’s all that and a side of chips, which, let’s be real, he is. I could have just watched him beat up guys with his umbrella for days. He is the Sir Percy Blakeney of the film — the secret superhero who looks like a dandy and fights like a ninja. He’s a true gentleman. He’s got the posh accent and the posh accessories, and his organization is modeled after the most elite cabal of all — Camelot’s Knights of the Round Table.

There’s a scene of Sir Colin (I can’t remember the character’s name so I’m just going to call him Sir Colin) chiding a bunch of working class toughs with the admonition that “Manners maketh man.” He then proceeds (quite rudely, really) to beat them all up, all the while looking absolutely impeccable with nary a wrinkle in his gorgeous suit. That quote, by the way, is not Shakespeare (we’ll get to that soon) but the motto of two colleges at Oxford founded by William of Wykeham in the 14th century. The phrase is based on earlier sources, but Wykeham adopted the phrase as his family motto and placed it on his coat of arms. It’s significant that Sir Colin uses this quote because once again, it underscores his public school poshness and suggests that he attended Oxford, as did all men of a certain class (who didn’t go to Cambridge, that is).

Wykeham

 

Our young hero Eggsy is one of the working class, but his father was secretly a “knight,” a compatriot of Sir Colin’s and a member of the elite cabal. This plays very nicely into the trope of the secret son of an aristocrat (remember this because it will come up again!) His father was already elevated into the “nobility,” as it were, or perhaps had always been of that class and had married beneath him. In any case, Sir Colin feels responsible for the boy and essentially adopts him, bringing him into the special world of the Kingsmen.

kingsman shop

The induction ceremony begins, symbolically, at the Savile Row tailoring shop which is part of Sir Colin’s cover. Thereafter, the clothes play an integral part in defining Eggsy’s progress. As a trainee, he wears a tailored plaid jumpsuit, sort of a cross between functional and elegant. He wears other functional gear for specific missions. The moment of his greatest triumph is that Cinderella scene the movie promised us from the very beginning, when Eggsy dons the raiment of a Kingsman and becomes a prince.

Now, a brief word about the intersection of race and class. The good guys in the Kingsmen are a bunch of white upper class men. Sir Colin, to his credit, notes the lack of diversity in their recruiting, but his solution is to select a white working class man who is the son of a former member. So… baby steps? I guess? Anyway, nepotism aside, let’s look at the villain. This is where shit gets really fucked up.

The villain is (predictably enough) a self-made man, an internet billionaire who also happens to be black, and speaks with a slight lisp. He is a champion for reversing the devastating trajectory of climate change afflicting the planet. So… the most evil guy in the world of The Kingsman is a black scientist with a speech impediment who graduated from MIT and is working to fix climate change. His henchman is a disabled woman of color (the actress who plays her is French-Algerian). So, the ONLY people of color in this film are bad guys. Um, okay.

spike-lee__131201203431
NOT Samuel L. Jackson.

Lets get to the clothes. The villain is consistently dressed in attire that seems cribbed off a toned-down interpretation of hip hop culture mixed with American nerd, with a dash of African pride (he wears beads at certain points.) The look is very clearly modeled off Spike Lee, down to the New York Yankees baseball cap and little round glasses.

sam-jackson-kingsman1
valentineValentine (the villain — I had to look up his name since I kept thinking of him as Samuel L. Jackson) favors colors like orange and purple and fuschia — colors a British gentleman would not be caught dead in — and wears ball caps pretty much all the time. He likes color-co-ordinated layers and high top sneakers, as well as the occasional track suit.

In short, his style is not unlike Eggsy’s when we first meet him. Eggsy also wears a modified hip hop style, with a cap tilted off-center, trainers (in his case, Adidas), and athletic jackets. He even sports a pendant, echoing Valentine’s beads. They are both men of the street, both men who have raised themselves up. But while Valentine stays true to who he is, Eggsy is yearning to leave that working class persona behind and become someone else.

There’s an interesting transition moment when Sir Colin, Eggsy, and Valentine are all at the Savile Row tailoring shop, the cauldron of alchemical transformations.Eggsy is in his street duds — he is not yet a full Kingsman, and his clothes reflect his origin. Valentine is in the process of getting kitted up to attend the Ascot. He wears the requisite penguin suit, but still sports his ball cap. He’s simply aping the manners of British high society, it’s implied; the fact that he’ll never be one of them is subtly reinforced visually by the fact that he is black, and by his symbolic ball cap. Sir Colin helpfully tells him he’ll need a top hat to complete is outfit, reminding us once again that in spite of all his money, Valentine will never really belong with men of Sir Colin’s calibre.

Eggsy, on the other hand, will. Just like Marguerite, he is plucked from the streets and transformed through good tailoring into a Kingsman, in part because he already has the requisite looks (he’s good-looking and white) and also because of his lineage (his father was a Kingsman). Eggsy abandons his own unique sense of style and gratefully submits to the rigor of proper English upperclass tailoring. This is where the movie expresses some cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, we’re supposed to celebrate that this “regular joe” was able to make it into the elitist circle of power, beating out the other, highborn candidates. And yet he decides to completely erase his working class background, essentially becoming the son of Sir Colin and his successor, bedding a royal princess to seal the deal. The events play very closely to the trope of the hidden princess in disguise (like Cinderella) waiting for her true nobility to be recognized.

Eggsy even quotes Sir Colin’s “manners maketh man,” as he prepares to beat up some of his old neighborhood toughs, completing the circle. Eggsy’s now been fully gentrified, to the point of adopting the school motto for a college he never attended. This is a classic payoff scene which is meant to illustrate Eggsy’s character growth. He’s come full circle, you see, and is now able to take on Sir Colin’s role down to every detail. The scene, however, reveals regression rather than progression of the character. Eggsy merely steps into Sir Colin’s role, changing nothing, perpetuating the same system.

Remember I told you we’d come back to the trope of the secret son of the aristocrat? Well, turns out that director Matthew Vaughn’s personal life embodies that trope. Vaughn was told that his father was the actor Robert Vaughn. At some point, there was a paternity test done which revealed that Vaughn is actually the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat. The director still uses the name Vaughn professionally, but has adopted his father’s name for personal use. The royal blond princess in the end is a stand-in for Vaughn’s wife, former supermodel Claudia Schiffer, who is sort of a celebrity royal in our modern times.

It’s interesting and significant that the movie uses the Wykeham quote instead of Shakespeare’s, because you could argue that the latter is more relevant. Commonly paraphrased as “clothes make the man,” the original is: “The apparel oft proclaims the man.” The Kingsman is far more about apparel than manners, after all. The manners exhibited by the purported good guys are, frankly, appalling; it’s the clothes, and the clothes alone, that lend any dignity to who they are as people. It’s the clothes that make this film fun to watch. However, the Wykeham quote was chosen deliberately — not only because of its association with Oxford, but also because the film tries to make more of clothes than is actually there. The film attempts to align good tailoring with actual moral, well-mannered conduct. And in that, it falls into the same trap that the Scarlet Pimpernel does. Clothes do not make the man; they tell us what he thinks of himself.