Revolutionary Nostalgia: Retromania, Neo-burlesque, and Consumer Culture 1787693465, 9781787693463

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REVOLUTIONARY NOSTALGIA Retromania, Neo-Burlesque and Consumer Culture

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REVOLUTIONARY NOSTALGIA Retromania, Neo-Burlesque and Consumer Culture MARIE-CÉCILE CERVELLON AND STEPHEN BROWN

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2018 Copyright © Marie-Cécile Cervellon and Stephen Brown, 2018 Reprints and permissions service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Author or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78769-346-3 (paperback) ISBN: 978-1-78769-343-2 (E-ISBN) ISBN: 978-1-78769-345-6 (Epub)

CONTENTS List of Figures

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Preface: Retromania in Retrospect

ix

Introduction 1.  Welcome to Wonderland

3

Section I: Past and Present 2.  Borne Back Ceaselessly

13

3.  Wheel Meet Again

25

4.  Come the Revolution

39

Section II: Focus and Findings 5.  Burlesque in Brief

55

6.  Considering Consumer Culture

67

7.  Fans of Freedom

79

Section III: Context and Concepts 8.  Ghost Dance Stance

111

v

Contents

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9.  Retro Rising Redux

125

10. Dancing is Life

139 Conclusion

11. At the Hop

155

Appendix 1: Definitions of Nostalgia

167

Appendix 2: List of Informants

169

References

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Index

207

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3 Figure 9.1 Figure 10.1

David’s Oath of the Horatii (1784) Krystie Red Sugar Looks Back Follie Follies Poster Cherry Lyly Darling in Glamorous Fur Florence Agrati as Lady Flo Bambi Freckles’ Dangerous Femininity The Angel of Burlesque David’s The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (1789)

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x 73 75 86 87 97 130 151

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PREFACE: RETROMANIA IN RETROSPECT Magnifique. Merveilleux. Incroyable. Such were the superlatives that greeted the star of the Salon of 1785. JacquesLouis David’s Oath of the Horatii, an arresting oil painting of Ancient Roman fealty, completely captivated the crowd, the critics, the cynics, the courtiers and commoners alike. Even the connoisseurs who complained about its technical infelicities conceded that David’s stupendous canvas was an astonishing work of art, an outstanding work of art, an unforgettable work of art, a revolutionary work of art (Brookner, 1980). According to Thomas E. Crow (1985) – albeit many artworld authorities disagree (Roberts, 1989) – Jacques-Louis David’s extraordinary exhibit was in fact a pre-revolutionary work of art. That is, a prescient presentiment of the political, social and economic cataclysm which engulfed France four years later. It was a portent of the convulsions to come. It contained, Schama (1989, p. 174) contends, all the ingredients of revolutionary rhetoric – patriotism, fraternity, martyrdom and brutal defiance – though whether these attributes were imparted with hindsight or recognised at the time of the Oath of the Horatii’s unveiling, remains an open question. What is incontestable is that the artist was a quarrelsome rebel, a congenital renegade, who repeatedly refused to follow the officious dictates of the Académie, an institution whose

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arbitrary rules, authoritarian ordinances and absolutist ethos were the Ancien Regime in miniature (Roberts, 1989). His great canvas was flagrantly oversized. Flouting convention, it was shown in Rome beforehand. It arrived irresponsibly late for the Parisian Salon. It overturned the precepts of best painterly practice, both stylistically and compositionally. And, as if that weren’t enough, it depicted an entirely imaginary, ‘essentially nostalgic’ scene for which there was no proper historical precedent (Brookner, 1980, p. 31). But, it was miraculous. It still is (Fig. 1). The Oath of the Horatii seized the past, shook the present and shaped the future. David indeed played a prominent part in that future. He was the foremost artist of the French Revolution. Apart from The Death of Marat, The Tennis Court Oath and his brutal 1789 canvas, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies

Fig. 1  David’s Oath of the Horatii (1784)

Source: Marie-Cécile Cervellon (taken in the Musée du Louvre, Paris)

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of his Sons (which was even more of a harbinger of the horrors to come than his Horatii), he was an active Jacobin, a garrulous member of the National Assembly, an unapologetic signatory to Louis XVI’s death warrant and the creative genius behind several spectacular ceremonial occasions (such as The Festival of Unity and Indivisibility) that took place as the Terror wreaked havoc and Madame la Guillotine went about her blood-soaked business. Granted, David wasn’t the first to embrace neoclassicism, which ruthlessly swept aside the rococo overkill of Watteau and what have you. But, he went way, way beyond ‘imitation’ of the ancients, as Winckelmann recommended (Jones, 2018), and radically reinvented tradition. He performed what Walter Benjamin (1973, p. 253), arguably the most creative cultural critic of the twentieth century, would later describe as a ‘tiger’s leap’ into the past that explodes the continuum of history (Lehmann, 2000). Considered today, The Oath of the Horatii is an early example – arguably the quintessential example – of la mode rétro (Guffey, 2006). For contemporary marketing and consumer researchers, like ourselves, retro products and services are characterised by a combination of the old and the new. Typically, this comprises an old-fashioned form, style or setting combined with bang up-to-date performance, technology or functioning. The on-going Star Wars saga, for example, is built on a 40-year-old film that is set a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) and where every episode comes complete with state-of-the-art special effects, as well as new plot twists and story lines. Each release, what is more, is accompanied by a worldwide outbreak of retromania as the franchise’s longstanding fanbase faces Force-feeding once more. The pandemonium that accompanied Jacques-Louis David’s ancient Rome-evoking masterpiece, a revolutionary and revelatory work of art, which was simultaneously backward-looking and ahead of its time, may or may not have

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been the first recorded instance of consumer retromania. But, as this book shall show, there’s no shortage of retro a go-go nowadays. Revolutionary nostalgia, à la David, is not lacking either, though the notion might come as a surprise to those old-school scholars who consider nostalgia ‘inherently reactionary’ (Bonnett, 2017, p. 7). As Benjamin (1979) observed about Surrealism, the most avant-garde artistic movement of his day, ‘revolutionary energies inhere in the outmoded’ (Eiland & Jennings 2014, p. 491). That’s equally true today. For our part, we firmly believe that artworks – be they J.-L. David’s, J. J. Abrams’s or André Breton’s – provide unparalleled insights into the character of popular culture, consumer society, the human condition, if you will. Without getting too precious about it, we concur with Ezra Pound’s claim that poets, painters and playwrights are the antennae of the human race (Gay, 2007) and with an eminent consumer researcher’s statement that ‘you can learn more … from a reasonably good novel than from a “solid” piece of social science research’ (Belk, 1986, p. 24). Works of art may not ‘tell the truth’ in any veridical sense. However, in today’s post-truth world of fake news, alternative facts and so forth, the ultimate truth is inaccessible anyway. Artworks offer an attractive alternative to standard social science research techniques. Hence, we regard retromania and revolutionary nostalgia through the lens of neo-burlesque, a reinvented performance art that is flourishing in France, Britain, America and elsewhere. Each individual chapter, furthermore, will be introduced with the aid of an appropriate exemplar drawn from diverse domains of popular culture, past and present. We also aim, in accordance with the artistic idea that the manner must reflect the matter, to communicate our findings, our feelings and our facts in a way that reflects the spirit of the things we’re writing about. Neo-burlesque is irreverent, fun, cheeky, ribald and obstreperous. We can’t promise all of

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that, but we’ll do our best to ensure, in the words of cultural critic Craig Brown (2018, p. 14) – discussing Cohn’s classic book about the early years of rock and roll, Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom – ‘that language should go in tandem with its subject’. If, in short, you’re looking for sober scholarship, circumspect commentary or carefully qualified conclusions, bail out now. There is one area, though, where we remain strictly conventional. Namely, with regard to the content of this preface. The primary purpose of a preface is to explain why the authors undertook the work that’s about to unfold. Prefaces, by convention, are both written last and pertain to the prehistory of the project. In our case, Marie-Cécile was very much the prime mover. A life-long lover of vintage fashion, she spent many a happy hour browsing through the flea markets of Paris, Les Puces de Saint-Ouen in particular. While there, she found herself increasingly drawn to the neo-burlesque subculture, whose affiliates shopped in much the same places and were equally enamoured with vintage merchandise. As a marketing professor specialising in luxury brands and second-hand fashion, Marie-Cécile was no less conscious of the enormous store luxury labels set by their illustrious heritage and whose archives are regularly raided by in-house design teams seeking inspiration for forthcoming collections, cruise shows, magazine spreads and suchlike. Stephen is a lapsed postmodernist who passes himself off as an academic specialising in consumer research, specifically the subdiscipline colloquially known as CCT (consumer culture theory). Drawn to the irreverent and retrospective wings of postmodern thought, epitomised by Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, respectively, Stephen has written a number of papers on retro marketing, retro branding and retromania more generally. He has also written several less than bestselling novels, which are still available from all good charity

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shops, used bookstores and Amazon Marketplace emporia. They are well worth 0.01 p. of anybody’s money. In our field of marketing and consumer research, academics are increasingly expected to specify precisely who did what in co-authored research publications. The division of labour was very clear cut in this instance. Marie-Cécile initiated the project, collected the data and gathered all the accompanying photographs, videos, archival material, etc. Stephen wrote the text in consultation with Marie-Cécile, and with the expert guidance of the editorial and copyediting team at Emerald, Philippa Grand, Rachel Ward and Rajachitra Suresh in particular. We are very grateful for their assistance, as we are to our informants, who allowed us to include excerpts from the interviews conducted by Marie-Cécile. The photographic agencies Emmanuel V. Photographies, 2shadowland, Mickaël Rius Photographies and Vincent SAB Photos kindly granted permission to reproduce their portraits of Cherry Lyly Darling, Lady Flo, Bambi Freckles and Krystie Red Sugar, respectively. Neoretro produced the poster of Follie Follies, which features in chapter 6, courtesy of Florence Agrati. Hilary Downey of Queen’s University, Belfast, was responsible for the Angel of Burlesque artwork in Chapter 9. Thank you, all. This book is dedicated to Marie-Cécile’s daughter, Ava Marie des Lys, and her mother, Gabrielle (a.k.a. GaBichette). Stephen Brown and Marie-Cécile Cervellon July, 2018

INTRODUCTION

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1 WELCOME TO WONDERLAND

When Burlesque was released in November 2010, the omens for the movie were favourable. Starring Cher and Christina Aguilera, the would-be blockbuster was set in the ever-popular world of the performing arts and told the timeless tale of a talented small-town singer who makes it big in show business while learning life lessons along the way (Bloom, 2010). Better yet, the classic rags-to-riches narrative was conveyed with a production budget of $55 million, which filled the screen with incredible costumes, stunning dance routines and lashings of retro razzle-dazzle (Armstrong, 2010). Best of all, Burlesque was in tune with the zeitgeist, surfing the wave of a nostalgia-freighted art form that had surged in popularity during the first decade of the twenty-first century, when emancipated women embraced the traditional strip-tease and rebooted it as ‘neo-burlesque’ (Blanchette, 2014). The movie, unfortunately, underperformed at the box office. Within two weeks of its Thanksgiving-timed release,

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Burlesque had fallen from the top 10 and quickly disappeared thereafter. If far from a catastrophe, Steven Antin’s frills- and feathers-filled film was closer to a turkey than a triumph. The principals were panned for their pedestrian performances; the clichéd storyline was ridiculed for its obvious debt to Coyote Ugly, hardly the most female-friendly source material; and, as if that weren’t enough, the content was condemned by some members of the neo-burlesque community, who considered it a cheesy caricature of their subversive subculture. It failed to connect with those it aimed to attract and whose good wordof-mouth would have helped greatly. Despite Stanley Tucci’s wonderful, world-weary one-liner when Cher gives Christina Aguilera a job in her cheap ’n’ cheerful burlesque club – ‘Welcome to Wonderland’ – more than a few movie-goers spurned Stanley’s salutation. You’re welcome to it, they collectively replied. Don’t curtain call us; we’ll curtain call you. The wondrous welcome, however, was delayed not denied. Antin’s wannabe blockbuster may have been insufficiently feelgood for audiences struggling with the financial fallout from the Great Recession, but Burlesque is enjoying a happy ever afterlife on DVD and Netflix, where Aguilera’s decorous dirty dancing, Cher’s moonstruck attempt to turn back time and Tucci’s reprise of his droll role in The Devil Wears Prada, has been elevated to the dizzy heights of camp classic, guilty pleasure and, arguably the ultimate cinematic accolade, so-bad-it’s-good. If not exactly Rocky Horror, Showgirls, or Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Burlesque has been redeemed, reclaimed and reassessed. In keeping with its retrospective subject matter, and reincarnated plotline, the movie has made a comeback, a welcome return on investment.

BACK TO FRONT Burlesque’s afterlife, admittedly, cannot be divorced from the nostalgia-rich conditions that prompted its production in the

Welcome to Wonderland

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first place. The so-called ‘nostalgia boom’ that characterised the late 1990s – and that many believed was an artefact of the millennial transition (Naughton & Vlasic, 1998) – is still going strong. Twenty-one years ago, the celebrated stand-up comedian George Carlin (1997, p. 110), since deceased, pointedly remarked that: America has no now. We’re reluctant to acknowledge the present. It’s too embarrassing. Instead we reach into the past. Our culture is composed of sequels, reruns, remakes, revivals, reissues, re-releases, re-creations, re-enactments, adaptations, anniversaries, memorabilia, oldies radio and nostalgia record collections. Incessant commemorations also attracted Carlin’s ire. ‘Who gives a fuck’, he continued, ‘about Bugs Bunny’s 50th birthday’, or Lassie’s 55th, or the Golden Jubilee of Gone With the Wind, or the start of the Korean War or the fact that Bambi has also reached the big 50? Shit, I didn’t even like Bambi when I was supposed to, how much do I care now?’ (Carlin, 1997, p. 111). Carlin’s incorrigible comments are no less true nowadays. Whether it be award-winning television shows such as Poldark and Peaky Blinders, or the return of old favourites like Red Dwarf and Will & Grace, or the inexorable rise of vinyl records, vintage fashion and venerable fragrances (e.g. Roger & Gallet’s Aura Mirabilis) or latterly relaunched motor vehicles like the legendary Vauxhall Viva and the muscular Ford Mustang, or consumers’ seemingly insatiable penchant for old-fashioned skateboards, surfboards and skis, or the ceaseless cavalcade of reunion tours by once rebellious rock bands that reform for one final payday (or two or three or four or more, depending how the gigs go), there’s no lack of retro consumption, nostalgia marketing and throwback branding

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bouncing around (Baird-Murray 2017). ‘The past’, Aspden (2013, p. 12) avers, ‘is a time whose time has come’. Even contemporary politics is caught up in – and can’t escape from – the coils of ‘nostalgic nationalism’ (Kuper, 2017, p. 5). Donald Trump is determined to make America great again. Ditto Macron’s France. Brexiteers seek to reinstate Britain’s ‘island nation’ status. The Chinese, Indian and Russian leaderships aim to recapture the glories of the national heretofore, as indeed do those of Islamic State and al-Qaida. According to Hamid (2017, p. 2), contemporary political rhetoric is deeply steeped in neo-nostalgia, where ‘leaders seek a return to imagined past greatnesses that were usurped by foreign invaders, colonisers and barbarians’. As per Carlin’s pre-posthumous profanities, commemorations too are two-a-penny. This year’s alone include Votes for Women, Karl Marx’s bicentenary, the birth of the Big Mac and jumbo jet, Hugo Ball’s daring Dada Manifesto, Mary Shelly’s imperishable Frankenstein, Alfred Hitchcock’s towering Vertigo, Van Morrison’s immortal Astral Weeks, the Armistice of 1918, the student uprisings of 1968 and, perhaps most importantly from our perspective, the 150th anniversary of the arrival of burlesque, which is conventionally dated to the scandalous New York debut of Lydia Thompson’s British Blondes in September 1868. More later…

BACK ATTACK Such is today’s appetite for retrospection that it won’t be too long, surely, before we start commemorating the nostalgia boom of the 1990s. The recently announced reformation of the Spice Girls is a lip-synched whisper in the wind (Sinclair, 2018), as is the re-release of the Nokia 3310,

Welcome to Wonderland

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which comes complete with irksome ringtone and Snake, its original 1970s-style video game (Burkeman, 2017). Zadie Smith’s latest novel is likewise set in the mid-1990s, a time when Britannia was cool and ‘optimism infused with nostalgia’ prevailed: The boys in our office looked like rebooted Mods – with Kinks haircuts from thirty years earlier – and the girls were Julie Christie bottle-blondes in short skirts with smudgy black eyes. Everybody rode a Vespa to work, everybody’s cubicle seemed to feature a picture of Michael Caine in Alfie or The Italian Job. It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place. (Smith, 2017, p. 88) There is, though, one crucial difference between nostalgia then and nostalgia now. Back then, nostalgia was nugatory. Characterised by excessive sentimentality and woebegone moping around, it was regarded as the signature ailment of maudlin baby boomers and reactionary right-wingers (Bonnett, 2010). Twenty-one years later, nostalgia is generally considered healthful, wholesome, a very good thing and, not unlike the initially reviled Burlesque, something that pretty much everyone experiences, enjoys and benefits from (Adams, 2014). As Cher warbled at the time, ‘You haven’t seen the best of me’. It thus seems that, far from being a passing fad, an epiphenomenon of the millennium transition, the nostalgia industry is bigger and better and bolder than ever. It’s a mature market with propitious and profitable prospects. Almost 40 years after Fred Davis (1979) wrote the book on yearning for yesterday, the name of the game is earning from yesterday. Just ask ABBA, whose avatar tour is set to hit the road armed with two new songs, plus a sequel to Mama Mia! in the

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multiplexes. Money, money, money, here we go again. My my, buy buy, how can we resist you? As if that weren’t enough to be getting along with, it seems that those opposed to the nostalgia bonanza can’t help revelling in the thing they’re condemning. In Retromania, a 500 page diatribe about contemporary pop music’s addiction to its past, Simon Reynolds (2011) lovingly lists the rampant retrospection in manifold fields of popular culture. After dealing with film and theatre and fashion and television and revived West End musicals, he waxes lyrical about retro toys, retro gaming, retro food, retro interior design, retro candy, retro ringtones, retro travel, retro architecture and retro advertising, such as the recent reuse of Heinz’ much-loved slogan from the 1960s, ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’. But strangest of all, he gasps, is the demand for retro pornography…

BACK TRACK Reynolds doesn’t mention burlesque, though we’re not complaining. This book comprises an overview of recent developments in yesteryearning, yesterearning and yesterlearning. Its centrepiece is an empirical study of a neo-burlesque community in France, a community of fun-loving, liberationseeking women whose pastime is not only being commodified by the malefactors of multinational capital, but also being condemned by fourth-wave feminists who regard neoburlesque as just another twist in the tale of female oppression (Ellen, 2018). Far from being a form of false consciousness, we show that neo-burlesquers find freedom through falsie conscientiousness. Short and sweet, Revolutionary Nostalgia comprises three sections of three chapters each, plus an introduction and conclusion. The first section, Past & Present, sets out the

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necessary background, with chapters devoted to nostalgia, retro and the resurgence of insurgence. The second section, Focus & Findings, is our centrepiece. It devotes one chapter to the rise and fall and rise again of burlesque, another chapter to our empirical research approach – a three-year period of ethnographic immersion – and a culminating chapter where the findings of our study are spelled out. The third and final section, Context & Concepts, is more speculative and somewhat discursive, inasmuch as we reflect on ways and means of conceptualising neo-burlesque, nostalgia and retro marketing more generally. These comprise considerations of hauntology, post-postmodernism and matters metaphorical, all of which are tied together in our conclusion. Before stepping lightly on to the dance floor, however, a word regarding positioning is in order. This book is written with a readership of consumer researchers and marketing specialists in mind, specifically those who subscribe to the precepts of CCT (consumer culture theory). Our findings, though, are likely to be of (at least some) interest to sociologists, anthropologists and historians, as well as women’s studies, media studies and cultural studies scholars and students. Ditto the neo-burlesque community, whose irreverent ethos has inspired our rambunctious writing style. This is no po-faced tome on an ancient art form, much less a reverential treatise regarding neo-nostalgia and the retro revolution. It is, rather, a fun-first, frolic-filled, fantasy-fortified trawl through the fishnets, feather boas and firmly held feminist convictions of the neo-burlesque community. Flagged in the preface, but here stated formally: our style reflects the content. We subscribe to the view, forcefully put forward by Fred Davis (1979, p. 29) in Yearning for Yesterday, ‘The nostalgic experience can only be grasped through some such medium as music, dance or poetry and possibly through painting and some kinds of photography’.

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BACK AND FORTH Although dance is our principal delivery mechanism, novels can be pretty useful as well. Consider Michael Crichton’s (2000, pp. 360–361) prescient comments in Timeline, a topselling techno-thriller written at the turn of the millennium, when contemporary retromania was getting into gear. Seeking investors for his quantum leap time-machine, a Steve Jobs-type tech savant practises his super-slick sales pitch: ‘We are all ruled by the past, although no one understands it. No one recognises the power of the past’, he said, with a sweep of his hand. But if you think about it, the past has always been more important than the present. The present is like a coral island that sticks above the water, but is built upon millions of dead corals under the surface, that no one sees. In the same way, our everyday world is built upon millions and millions of events and decisions that occurred in the past. And what we add in the present is trivial… The invisible rule of the past, which decides nearly everything in life, goes unquestioned. This is real power. Power that can be taken and used. For just as the present is ruled by the past, so is the future. That is why I say, the future belongs to the past. Almost 20 years on, there is no stopping nostalgia. It is now our ‘dominant cultural force’ (Lyne, 2016, p. 8). Or so it seems. How come?

SECTION I PAST & PRESENT

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2 BORNE BACK CEASELESSLY

‘Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!’ Thus speaks F. Scott Fitzgerald in his imperishable novel The Great Gatsby. Thus also speaks Maureen Corrigan in her study of Gatsby’s cultural significance. Timed to coincide with the release of Baz Luhrmann’s film of Fitzgerald’s most famous work – the fifth such adaptation – Corrigan (2014) shows that Gatsby is not only the quintessential American novel, but also a tour de force of nostalgia-imbued storytelling. Apart from the plot, which peels back the falsified past of former bootlegger Jimmy Gatz, she reveals that many readers go back to Gatsby again and again and again. A book that improves with rereading, and improves further still with rerereading, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece functions as a mnemonic for more than a few people. It transports them back to the days when life lay in front of them, when their hopes and dreams were diamonds as big as the Ritz and when the green light beckoned them ever onward, ever upwards. And having been borne back ceaselessly into the past, re-readers return

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refreshed, renewed, reinvigorated and ready to beat against life’s swirling current once more. The Great Gatsby’s centenary is only a few years away and presumably the razzamatazz that surrounded Luhrmann’s take on the text will pale beside the nostalgia-fest to come. However, Corrigan’s cultural history also shows that Gatsby’s iconicity is a recent phenomenon. Fitzgerald’s novel didn’t sell well to start with. It was dismissed as inconsequential by many Jazz Age book reviewers and deemed ‘a dud’ by most, not least L. H. Mencken (Sutherland, 2013). So raucous were the raspberries that even the author lost faith in his pièce de résistance. Far from being the pinnacle of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career, it marked the beginning of the end, the summit of his slippery slope to an early grave. It was only when the novel was issued to doughboys during the World War II – in a handy pocket edition, perfect for reading between battles – that its ascent commenced. It hasn’t stopped since (Kay, 2013). Nowadays, moreover, Gatsby is not just a novel. It’s a library. Thousands of books about the book have been published: guides to, commentaries on and investigations of, Corrrigan’s among them (Sutherland & Connell, 2012). Then there are the unauthorised sequels and prequels and spin-offs (such as Netherland, Black Money and Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter), and book club editions and illustrated editions and preliminary editions (such as the Trimalchio first draft, much revised). From John Grisham’s (2017) Camino Island, a bestseller whose plot hinges on a Fitzgerald manuscript stolen from Princeton’s Firestone Library, via Sarah Churchwell’s (2014) theory that The Great Gatsby was inspired by a real-life double murder in New Jersey (which took place in 1922, when Fitzgerald was working on the novel), to the vast repository of term papers and examination answers and doctoral dissertations that fill the physical and virtual storage space of educational institutions worldwide, where it is not

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just a set text but a set-in-stone set text, The Great Gatsby has done more for the shelving industry than just about anything, bar IKEA.

WHAT IS NOSTALGIA WHEN IT’S AT HOME? If nostalgia were a novel, it would be the Gatsby of the humanities and social sciences. The exact same evolutionary trajectory, from benighted to beneficent to bountiful, is readily apparent. Although some authorities argue that Homer, Hesiod and the Holy Bible represent the loci classici of nostalgia (Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, & Routledge, 2006), the condition was first formally identified, and named, in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Basel-based medical student (Anspach, 1934). Back then, the word nostalgia referred to an acute form of homesickness. Swiss mercenary soldiers were particularly susceptible to the affliction, the symptoms of which included floods of tears, a haggard countenance, obstinate silence, loss of appetite and, on occasion, sudden death (Tannock, 1995). Recommended treatments ranged from returning to one’s homeland, though the application of remedial leeches, all the way up to being buried alive (in order to discourage cowardly malingerers). However, as Starobinski (1966) reveals in his genealogy of nostalgia, the word gradually shed its geographical connotations and took a temporal turn instead (Boym, 2001). Reimagined as a psychological rather than a physical condition – longing for childhood not homeland – nostalgia was considered neither chronic nor fatal. It comprised, rather, wistful or mournful memories of an idealised past, a rose-tinted stroll down memory lane (Belk, 1991). It was a dewy-eyed, sepia-hued stroll, according to psychiatrists, that had its roots in childhood screen memories (Hirsch, 1992), and involved

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fleeting yet powerful feelings of regret, which were simultaneously pleasurable and painful. Or, as Howland (1962, pp. 198–199) eloquently observes about the bittersweet nature of nostalgia in a wonderful (if less than gender-neutral) reflective essay: It is one of the most astonishingly powerful of all the emotions, and also one of the most remarkably delicate. The smell of a pine forest, a picture of an old church, or the sound of a piano in an adjoining room may bring back recollections so profoundly moving that they even make a man forget for the moment where he is. It is then that he discovers to his chagrin how fragile a thing the nostalgic feeling can be, and how quickly profaned simply in the attempt to put it into words. It bruises easily, like a flower whose petals disintegrate to the mere touch. Some poets, authors, artists and musicians have mastered the skill of preserving and communicating the feeling of nostalgia without violating it. We should learn from them. Despite Howland’s urging, the psychotherapeutic community proved reluctant to learn from the F. Scott Fitzgeralds of this world. Although nostalgia was far from neglected by incumbents of the ivory tower, its study long languished within the social sciences (see Batcho, 2013). As far as the humanities were concerned, the sentiment was deeply reactionary, irredeemably retrogressive and inexcusably right-wing. It was ‘dysfunctional’ (Wilson, 2005, p. 7). It was ‘pathological’ (Tannock, 1995, p. 455). It was ‘bad, bad, bad’ (Scanlan, 2004, p. 4). It was a ‘political offense of the first order’ (Lasch, 1991, p. 113). It was ‘a frighteningly antifeminist impulse’ (Doane & Hodges, 1987, p. xiii). Until recently, Bonnett (2010, p. 3) observes, ‘one could say almost anything about nostalgia, as long as it was damning’.

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WHAT’S NEW NOWADAYS? Damned for decades – even faint praise was deemed excessive – the dam has latterly been breached. According to Routledge (2016), it was only when social scientists realised that there was more to nostalgia than maudlin moping around that an increase in interest transpired. It was the contributions of the consumer research community, he further concedes, that triggered the latter-day tsunami of scholarship in social psychology. The landmark works of Baker and Kennedy (1994), Havlena and Holak (1991), Holbrook and Schindler (1989) and Reindfleisch and Sprott (2000), in particular, ‘shed light on the potential power of nostalgia’ (Routledge, 2016, p. 7). More importantly, it was consumer researchers’ revelation that nostalgia is a source of enormous pleasure – not just tearstained pain – that led to its beneficent rebranding and the subsequent surge in academic endeavour. Social psychologists may have been slow to embrace nostalgia, but they’ve made up for lost time. Experiment-led laboratory studies in the main, these have done much to transform researchers’ thinking about the condition (Zhou, Wildschut, Sedikides, Shi, & Feng, 2012). Far from being a negative state of mind, characterised by lachrymose longing and wistful reminiscence, nostalgia is now considered a potent psychological resource, a palliative that can assuage those who suffer from despair, desolation, depression, desperation, low selfesteem (Adams, 2014). Revisiting cherished memories repairs mood, raises spirits, boosts well-being, spurs creativity, combats loneliness and serves as a vital reminder that life is worth living (Routledge, Wildschut, Sedikides, & Juhl, 2013). Nostalgia, moreover, is a universal panacea, something that’s evident in every culture and nationality (Gebauer & Sedikides, 2010); is an everyday occurrence, something that most people experience on a regular basis (Wildschut et al., 2006);

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is socially, psychologically and demographically indiscriminate, something that affects all age groups, all genders and all personality types, some more than others (Hepper, Richie, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2012); and is something that has significant societal, managerial and policy-making implications, such as those pertaining to belonging (Loveland, Smeesters, & Mandel, 2010), charitable donations (Merchant, Ford, & Rose, 2011), money-mindedness (Lasaleta, Sedikides, & Vohs, 2014) and perhaps most pragmatically, in the creation of outpatient ‘reminiscence rooms’, which are fitted with period furnishings, vintage décor, antique knick-knacks, ancient radiograms, etc., and, early reports suggest, help relieve the ravages of senile dementia (Economist, 2018a). Social psychologists aren’t alone in their endeavours, however. As Niemeyer’s (2014) comprehensive review of the literature reveals, nostalgia is attracting the attention of anthropologists, sociologists, semioticians, ecologists, educators, psychotherapists, geographers, gender studies scholars, literary studies scholars, media studies scholars and cultural studies scholars, to name but a few (Radstone, 2010). Even historians, long the scourge of today’s olden age (Jack, 2017), are waking up to the fact that there’s more to life than the archive and that longitudinal studies of lust, disgust, regret, remembrance, homesickness and emotional affect more generally may prove deeply meaningful (Macintyre, 2016). The inevitable down side of this academic free-for-all is a great deal of learned disagreement and not a little conceptual confusion, especially regarding terminological and typological matters.

THE NAME GAME According to the Oxford English Dictionary, nostalgia is ‘sentimental yearning for a period of the past, a regretful or

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wistful memory of an earlier time’. However, that’s not the half of it. Because there are all sorts of nostalgias nowadays. More, in fact, than many lexicographers can meaningfully map. Thus, Davis (1979), a sociologist, distinguishes between individual and collective nostalgia. Turner (1987), another sociologist, draws a distinction between good and bad nostalgia. Jameson (1991), postmodernism’s prime mover, separates traditional nostalgia from neo-nostalgia. Grainge (2002), a media theorist, argues that nostalgic mood and mode are not one and the same. Samuel (2012), a social historian, regards retrochic and nostalgia as two radically different things. Ladino (2004), a lapsed ecologist, notes the difference between official nostalgia and counter nostalgia. Pickering and Keightley (2006), media studies scholars, do something similar with authentic and inauthentic nostalgia. Higson (2014), a film theorist, much prefers the terms modern and postmodern nostalgia. Turner (2008), a literary critic, makes do with metanostalgia and critical memory. Tannock (1995), a cultural studies authority, draws a line between nostalgias of retreat and retrieval. Wright (2010), another cultural commentator, writes that everyday and official nostalgia are right on the money. Dickinson (1997), a rhetorician, deems prosaic and exotic nostalgia rather more to his taste. Meanwhile Appadurai (1996), a social anthropologist, maintains that armchair nostalgia and commercial nostalgia are the banes of late capitalist society. Terminologically at least, nostalgia is teeming. So much so, that today’s ‘cocktail of nostalgias’ (Economist, 2018b) is slipping down into the semantic abyss identified by Starobinski (1966, p. 82), where a word ‘at the height of its power’ takes on so many meanings it becomes meaningless. Certainly, nostalgia seems to be suffering from what Strawson (2018, p. 131) calls the ‘reversify’ propensity, where terms come to mean the polar opposite of the original. Consciousness, for

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example Consumption, for another. Imagination’s a third. And while semantic inversions are unsettling for those who like their definitions neat and tidy – and stable – the nominative tumult is an indicator of the importance twenty-first century scholars place on nostalgia, as well as the enormous amount of consideration, contemplation, conceptualisation and categorisation the construct is generating. The ratio of heat to light, however, is moot. What we can say for certain is that there is no certainty, much less consensus, on what nostalgia is exactly. Dozens of definitions now exist. Dozens of very different definitions now exist, everything from ‘longing for what is lacking’ to ‘a powerful stimulant to feel optimistic about the future’ (see Appendix 1). And, as if that weren’t enough, there are those who stress the significance of anticipatory nostalgia, where people look forward to looking back (Wilson, 2005), vicarious nostalgia, where people are nostalgic for pasts that predate them (Goulding, 2001), legislated nostalgia, where people’s recollections are regulated by autocratic authoritarian edict (Coupland, 1992), and postmodern ironic nostalgia (PIN), where contemporary society’s preoccupation with the past is deemed sufficiently daft to warrant irreverent comment (Edwards & Wilson, 2014). In this regard, The Onion warns that America’s stockpile of pasts is rapidly running out and that rationing may be required. Reynolds (2011) fears that epochs past are encroaching so fast upon the present that an apocalyptic temporal implosion is imminent. Liddle, writing in 2004, anticipates a situation where decades will be commemorated in I Love the Seventies-style TV shows even before they have elapsed (something that actually happened in 2008 when the BBC broadcast I Love the New Millennium!). And P. J. O’Rourke (2008), visiting Disney’s new and improved Tomorrowland – the theme park’s 1950s vision of the twenty-first century – finds that the update is closed for the foreseeable future.

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PIN AFORE So pervasive, indeed, is Postmodern Ironic Nostalgia that when a ‘do you remember’ meme circulated widely in February 2012, opinion was divided on whether it was a tonguein-cheek lampoon or a plangent paean to the good old days: Congratulations to all my friends who were born in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank sherry while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos. Then, after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii and Xboxes, or video games, DVDs or colour TV. There were no mobiles, computers, internet or chatrooms. Parents didn’t invent stupid names for their kids like Kiora, Blade, Ridge and Vanilla. Our teachers hit us with canes, gym shoes and threw the blackboard rubber at us if they thought we weren’t concentrating. Our parents would tell us to ask a stranger to help us cross the road. (Bennett, 2012) Satires, spoofs and send-ups notwithstanding, even the most irreverent commentators would surely concede that Boym’s (2001) distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia is a significant contribution. According to Davies (2010, p. 265), indeed, it is ‘the single most influential recent intervention’. Rightly noting that nostalgia is a ‘notoriously elusive’ ‘ambivalent sentiment’, which ‘speaks in riddles and puzzles’, Boym (2001, pp. xiv, xvii) nonetheless argues for the

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existence of restorative nostalgia, characterised by a creed of hardcore conservatism and collective determination to restore an older order, to get back to where they once belonged. Such sentiments are evident in the recent rise of right-wing populism throughout Europe, where France’s National Front, Holland’s PVV, Hungary’s Jobbik, Austria’s Freedom Party, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Italy’s Northern League, Denmark’s People’s Party, Finland’s True Finns and Germany’s AfD are attracting ever more support, advancing in the polls and seizing parliamentary seats from the centrist liberal consensus. If not exactly back to the fascist future, it’s a return to the conservative worldview that nostalgia’s early critics condemned (Kuper, 2017). Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, is primarily a personal response to changed and changing circumstances. Characterised by reverie, rumination and rueful rejoicing, it revels in ‘the misty remoteness of the past and cultivates the bittersweet pangs of poignancy’ (Reynolds, 2011, p. xxviii). Essentially escapist and fantasy inflected, reflective nostalgia is often associated with – or initiated by – encounters with art, music or literature, be it Edward Hopper’s evocative Nighthawks, Bob Seger’s rousing Old Time Rock and Roll or rereading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vivacious tales of the Roaring Twenties. The key difference between restorative and reflective is that the former is communal and characterised by a single clear-cut narrative, whereas the latter is person specific yet multifaceted. Taken together, they indicate that ‘nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory’ (Boym, 2001, p. xvi). Influential though Boym’s conceptualisation has proved (it forms the basis of Wikipedia’s entry on nostalgia, for example), her dichotomy has not escaped censure. Apart from its reliance on old-fashioned binary oppositions – despite

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decades of deconstruction, many commentators on nostalgia, it seems, are nostalgic for dichotomies – it has been condemned for assorted empirical, conceptual and technological shortcomings (Bartholeyns, 2014; Niemeyer & Wentz, 2014; Sigler, 2004). Yet, for all its deficiencies, Boym’s (2001) book recapitulates and reinforces Davis’s (1979) seminal distinction between communal and individual nostalgia, as well as his elevation of artworks – the ‘music, dance or poetry’, mentioned earlier – over survey research as a source of insight into contemporary yester-yearning. Although Boym points out that when writing The Future of Nostalgia she was unaware of Davis’s dichotomy, her independent discovery/recovery of his conceptualisation is entirely apt. It suggests, does it not, that nostalgia is circling back on itself, starting to chase its own tail. All we need now is an ambitious medic who maintains that nostalgia is in fact a potentially fatal condition that can be only be cured by premature burial, remedial leeches or a city-break in the beautiful environs of Basel. Indeed, if the affliction necessitates a new name for rebranding purposes, Hofer’s the man to turn to. In addition to ‘nostalgia’, he coined two striking synonyms, philopatridomania and nosomania. Tough call.

A THING OR TWO For the time being, it is sufficient to note two things about nostalgia. The first of these is that a clear trajectory of development – from painful to playful – is discernible. For those of an alliterative bent, this can be summarised under the 4Ts of Trauma, when nostalgia was regarded as a deadly or debilitating disease, Triste, when it was considered a sorrowful emotional state, Therapy, when attention turned to advantageous aspects of the condition, and Travesty, when

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tongue-in-cheek irreverence took centre stage. And where it struts with impunity. The second noteworthy consideration is that all the clever theorising by learned academics shouldn’t blind us to the fact that nostalgia isn’t just about thought. It also involves things, objects, entities, items, stuff. ‘In the fabric of nostalgia’, Angé and Berliner (2016, p. 8) make clear, ‘physical objects play an important role’. As the many and varied tie-ins for Luhrmann’s Gatsby are testament – Art Deco jewellery, Jazz Age apparel, Prohibition Era cocktails and Charleston dance classes for our new Lost Generation – nostalgia is embodied in all sorts of wonderful things that shelter under the umbrella called ‘retro’.

3 WHEEL MEET AGAIN

When future documentary makers produce programmes about today’s obsession with yesteryear, they’ll have to select suitable video clips. A prime candidate for inclusion is the ‘wheel scene’ from the final episode of the first season of Mad Men, a multiple award-winning period drama which ran on AMC from 2007 to 2015. Set in a 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency – at the start of the fabled ‘creative revolution’ – the scene features Sterling Cooper’s star copywriter-cum-pitchman, Don Draper. The client is Kodak, who’ve come up with a brilliantly innovative product, a rotating drum for photographic slide projection. ‘So, what have you got for the wheel?’ Kodak’s executives ask. After a dramatic pause for thought, Don Draper answers with an anecdote about the ad industry’s early days and its conventional wisdom concerning technological breakthroughs. These, he says, are ordinarily sold on the basis of newness, improvement and something that’s significantly better than before. The aim is to create a gotta-have-it itch that

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consumers can only assuage by buying the ‘calamine lotion’ that is the new and improved product. He adds, however, that here is another way, an alternative way, a more subtle yet equally powerful way, of achieving the same end. That way is nostalgia. Rather than cast a glittering lure that consumers go crazy to swallow, nostalgia transports them back to a time when they were safe and happy and cared for and, in so doing, forges an intense, almost unbreakable bond between the product and the purchaser. Having captivated the Kodak people with this golden oldie approach to selling stuff – albeit one that is new to them – Draper continues with a pre-prepared slide show featuring sentimental, lachrymose and lump-in-the-throat photographic images of his formerly happy family (wedding day, small children, Christmas holidays, etc.). Kodak’s breakthrough device, he concludes (with just a hint of a catch in his voice), isn’t so much a space ship as a time machine: It goes backwards and forwards; it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels, round and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved. Needless to say, semioticians, historians and media studies scholars have had a field day with this so-called coup de metathéâtre (de Groot, 2015, p. 74). A nostalgic TV series (set in the 1960s), featuring a nostalgic product (who uses slide carousels nowadays?), featuring a nostalgic slide show (of Draper’s gone but not forgotten family background), featuring a brief history of both advertising techniques (its received wisdom and lure-casting lore) and nostalgia (‘in Greek, nostalgia means the pain from old wound’), it transports today’s clever, well-informed and advertising-savvy television viewers round and around and back home again to a place peopled by

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clever, well-dressed and clean-cut advertising executives keen to sell them stuff with wit and subtlety and sophistication and strokes of creative genius (Piersen, 2014). Yes, they concede, marketers were slime-balls back then, as now, but at least their sales pitches were worth attending to unlike today’s illtargeted algorithmic tide of spam, pop ups and cyber clutter (Auletta, 2018).

GO RETRO From our perspective, the most significant thing about Mad Men’s wheel scene is not its multiple layers of nostalgia, though that’s fascinating in itself, but the fact that it focuses on an object, a product, a piece of kit: the carousel. Kodak’s ‘wheel’ exemplifies the essence of retro marketing, where new state-of-the-art stuff is sold with the aid of an olde-tyme message, or narrative, or styling, or packaging, or logotype, or slogan or mascot (Brown, Kozinets, & Sherry, 2003). Or, as with today’s ripped, torn, faded and otherwise distressed jeans, the physical product itself is artfully pre-aged. The word ‘retro’ is almost as ambiguous as ‘nostalgia’, however. As Guffey (2006) explains in her exuberant etymology, the term has its origins in la mode rétro, an early 1970s coterie of French film critics, fashion designers and authors, as well as the space race of the 1960s, when reverse-thrust retrorockets rose to prominence. That said, the word has since been retrofitted to refer to pretty much any past-facing, backward-leaning and yester-pestering artefacts, from computer apps to kitchen appliances. The key consideration, Reynolds (2011) contends, is that retro refers to the recent past. What constitutes ‘recent’ is not made clear, unfortunately, and what was recent when Reynolds was writing is not recent now. Pace Hemingway, it’s a moveable feast.

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The upshot is that retro has become one among many commonly used words for ‘past-ness’ alongside classic, vintage, legacy, heritage, antique, authentic, traditional, quaint and, naturally, nostalgic. Although nostalgia is a somewhat sentimental emotional state, once deemed harmful now considered helpful, the term is often loosely applied to objects, devices, gadgets, etc. (Bach, 2016). That is, to things that induce nostalgic feelings, emotions or sensations among consumers. Cross (2016, p. 11), for example, refers to four forms of nostalgia that are rooted in objects and experiences because ‘people have long needed material and sensuous markers to get in touch with their social and family heritages’. The most meaningful of these, he maintains, is ‘modern consumerist nostalgia’, which inheres in everything – cars, clocks, cupcakes, cufflinks and cookware – and represents a reaction against ever-accelerating ‘fast capitalism’ (Cross, 2016, p. 10). Rather than regard retro as a synonym for nostalgia – or seek to be more specific about the precise span of Reynolds’ ‘recent’ past – a better way to think about it is that one word refers to stuff, the other to sentiment. Whereas nostalgia is principally concerned with thoughts, retro primarily pertains to things. As Wilson (2005, p. 110) makes clear, after noting antiques’ ability to trigger feelings of nostalgia, ‘of course the objects themselves do not possess nostalgia; rather, the individual imbues the objects with meaning such that nostalgia is evoked’. Literary critic Linda Hutcheon (2000) elaborates: Nostalgia is not something you ‘perceive’ in an object; it is what you feel when two temporal moments, past and present, come together for you and, often, carry considerable emotional weight … it is less a description of the ENTITY ITSELF than an attribution of a quality of RESPONSE.

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Exponents of Object Oriented Ontology, admittedly, might balk at Hutcheon’s all-caps comments (Harman, 2018). The distinction between entity and emotion, between thoughts and things, is not clear-cut. But it is sufficiently clear-cut for present purposes, not least because we live in a world that is not only stuffed with stuff but where ‘the global production of stuff continues to increase’ (Miles, 2018, p. 109). Whether it be food, fashion, furnishings or fountain pens, sunglasses, scooters, speedboats or swimsuits, toys, trams, tattoos or telephones, hats, haircuts, holidays or housewares, cameras, cosmetics, cocktails or computer games, there’s hardly a product category that hasn’t had a retro makeover (Economist, 2014). Almost every car manufacturer has a retro-auto in its line up (the Fiat 500, the BMW Mini, the Chevy Malibu, the Aston Martin Lagonda). Practically every sportswear seller has reissued items from its commodious back catalogue (Adidas Originals tracksuits, Nike Air Max sneakers, Lacoste Retro Stripe running shorts). Just about every fast-moving consumer good with a long-tailed marketing legacy has either disinterred its former logo, or resurrected long-dead taglines, or rebirthed half-forgotten mascots, or exhumed an earlier package design (e.g., Coke’s classic glass bottle, the Tetley Tea Folk’s comeback or KFC’s incontestable contention that it’s ‘Finger Lickin’ Good’).

RETROCOPIA Even tech, of all things, has taken a retro turn. Apart from Throwback Thursdays and Flashback Fridays and Instagram’s sepia-hued filters that artfully age new photographs (Bartholeyns, 2014) or give video clips a scratchy, shaky, ­ Super  8 sensibility (Sapio, 2014), the incomparable Apple Inc. has been retro from the get-go (Lashinsky, 2012).

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It ­consistently wraps its state-of-the-art products in an attractively retrospective aesthetic: consider the Star Trek-ish iPads; consider the Art Deco-ish iPods; consider the pastel-coloured hippie-chic iMacs; consider the iconic TV ad, 1984, which evoked George Orwell’s 1940s vision of a totalitarian future; consider the seminal ‘Think Different’ campaign featuring monochrome images of venerable iconoclasts like Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Samuel Beckett, etc. Apple, in short, has been backing into the future since forever and a day. The very name of the organisation, which simultaneously alludes to the Garden of Eden, Newton’s discovery of gravity and The Beatles’ legendary record label, attests to its retro-orientation from the outset, as does the plethora of antiquarian icons on iOS11 – steampunk Settings, Filofax-format Notes, Safari’s old-school magnetic compass, Facetime’s prehistoric movie camera and more. It is in the cultural sphere, though, where retro is most rampant. The multiplexes are replete with prequels and sequels and remakes and reboots of bygones-based blockbusters (Star Wars, Wonder Woman, Tomb Raider). Today’s totemic television series are exploiting all our yesterdays like there’s no tomorrow (The Crown, Stranger Things, Call the Midwife). Broadway musicals are knocking them dead with back from the dead re-productions (Carousel, Hello Dolly, My Fair Lady). London’s theatreland is awash with revivals, re-stagings and reinterpretations of canonical classics (Brief Encounter, The Birthday Party, Lady Windermere’s Fan). Music continues to march to the old-time beat (recent comebacks include ELO, Kim Wilde and Simple Minds), as well as the necro-retro rhythm of dear departed superstars like Elvis, Michael Jackson and Roy Orbison (who are on tour once more as holographic projections). Fashion has recalled the 1960s more than 60 times since the swinging started, or perhaps it just feels that way (Ellison, 2015).

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The literary world is likewise looking to the past for inspiration. Every imaginable historical epoch has a killer thriller series, or several, set therein (the Elizabethan era alone boasts Sansom’s Shardlake, Clements’ Shakespeare and Parris’s Bruno series, among others). Long-dead authors like Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming and P. G. Wodehouse are adding to their oeuvres (with the aid of estate-appointed imitators). And contemporary novels, such as those of the mega-selling Lee Child, are not only written in a good old-fashioned hardboiled style (with echoes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain), but also rely upon one of the most primal, time-tested plots (a stranger comes to town). As if that weren’t enough, his indefatigable protagonist (Jack Reacher) occasionally interrupts the fisticuffs to pass irreverent comment on retrospective consumer culture: The guy from Palo Alto … rode with Westwood, to catch up on old times, and Reacher and Chang followed, in a Town Car all their own. The guy’s house was a 1950s box remodelled in the 1970s to look like the 1930s. Reacher figured it had a triple layer of ironic authenticity all its own, and was therefore worth more than all the money he had made in his life. (Child, 2016, p. 378)

RETROTOPIA Researchers too have taken a past times turn, most notably those who concentrate on cultural contexts and concepts. Music, movies, motor cars, magazines, museums and monarchies have all been painstakingly investigated, as has retro TV, food, literature, poetry, photography, perfume, smartphone apps, computer gaming and more besides (Hamilton, Edwards, Hammill, Wagner, & Wilson, 2014). Advertising,

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retailing and branding are not lacking in retroactive research either (Lindstrom, 2012). Golden-oldie advertising has been studied like it’s going out of style (Marchegiani & Phau, 2012). The genealogies of past-powered brands, including Guinness, Coca-Cola, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniels and the British royal family have been carefully unpacked and repackaged (Holt, 2004, 2006; Otnes & Maclaran 2015; Simmons, 2006). Madison Avenue’s myth-manipulating activities, as well as consumers’ adaptation of immemorial archetypes for personal identity purposes, have been scrutinised by marketing scholars and management consultants both (Randazzo, 1995; Thompson, 2004). Business historians have likewise revealed that all manner of management fads, from disruption to crowdsourcing, are if not quite wine in old bottles, conceptual counterparts of fashion designer Paul Smith’s ‘classics with a twist’ (Bayus, 2012; Weich, 2013). Above and beyond the sectoral and scholarly aspects of retromania, there’s a spatial element as well. Much thought has been given to ‘retroscapes’; that is, geographically circumscribed sites or settings where an atmosphere of yesteryear obtains (Maclaran, 2003). These range from twee-topian tea shops that sell Earl Grey, Lapsang Souchong, Victorian sponge cakes and hot buttered crumpets in an ambiance of Art Deco elegance (Hamilton & Wagner, 2014), through festival shopping malls like London’s Covent Garden or Sydney’s QVC, where old buildings have been repurposed for rinky-dink retailing emporia selling retro knick-knacks and bijou bibelots from aeons ago (Hudson, 2013), to entire sectors of cities – old towns, historic quarters, museum districts, etc. – such as downtown Las Vegas, where the Golden Nuggetised Fremont Street Experience complements the almost-ancestral Strip lined with retro casinos evoking Ancient Rome (Caesars Forum), Ancient Egypt (Luxor), Medieval England (Excalibur), Third Empire France (the Paris) and Prohibition Era Big Apple (New York, New York).

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Olde-tyme open-air museums and heritage attractions, including Colonial Williamsburg, Plimoth Plantation, Blists Hill, Beamish, St. Fagan’s and Skansen, are no less commonplace (Goulding, 2001), as are Disneyesque theme parks, where Main Street USA (which is loosely based on Walt’s boyhood home town) established the template for Busch Gardens, Virginia, Aladdin’s Kingdom, Doha and many other olden-aged tourist traps, both real and imaginary. George Saunders’ (1996, p. 10) CivilWarLand is an abject case in point: When visitors first come in there’s this cornball part where they sit in this kind of spaceship and supposedly get blasted into space and travel faster than the speed of light and end up in 1865 … When the tape of space sounds is over and the walls stop shaking, we pass out the period costumes. We try not to offend anyone, liability law being what it is. We distribute the slave and Native American roles equitably among racial groups. Anyone is free to request a different identity at any time. In spite of our precautions, there’s a Herlicher in every crowd. He’s the guy who sued us last fall for making him hangman. He claimed for weeks afterwards he had nightmares. He’s suing us for fifty grand for emotional stress. Whenever he comes in we make him sheriff but he won’t back down an inch.

RETROYOYO Time was, what’s more, tends to come and go. In addition to the annual peak at Christmastime, when Coca Cola reminds sentimentalists that Holidays are Coming once more, secular

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surges in nostalgia-induced retrospection are evident. Reynolds (2011), for example, reports that there is a 20-year cycle in the music business – and the cultural industries, full stop – where sounds of the 1960s are revived in the 1980s then rerevived in the 2000s. He also admits that it’s not so much a rule of thumb as sticking a licked finger in the air and working out which way the blowing-in-the-wind wind is blowing. Brown (1999), by contrast, believes that retro rises and falls in accordance with the cultural equivalent of the long-term Kontratieff cycle, plus periodic epi-cycles. He describes a high tide in heritage during the 1970s, when many historic preservation societies were established, numerous past-pastiching postmodern architects turned their backs on glass-and-steel modernism and some of the most successful retro movies of all time – American Graffiti, The Godfather and The Last Picture Show – made waves at the box office. The 1930s too were awash with yesteryearning: Frank Capra’s wonderfully wistful films, Aaron Copland’s neo-folk music, Henry Ford’s historic Greenfield Village, Frank Lloyd Wright’s bucolic Broadacre City, Howard Johnston’s retro-styled nationwide hotel chain and innumerable food brands, such as Hoffs comestibles, that promised a taste of good old-fashioned home cooking, just like grandma used to make. So popular indeed were period pictures and cinematic costume dramas that the studio chiefly responsible was routinely referred to as Nineteenth-Century Fox (Kammen, 1991). In France, furthermore, the 1890s were brimming with, and submerged by, an inundation of neo-medievalism (Emery & Morowitz, 2003). Holidays to honour Joan of Arc and Roland (of Roncevaux) were celebrated; pilgrimages to medieval monasteries were de rigueur throughout society; novels with medieval themes sold by the bushel, as did those of Rabelais; reenactments of medieval celebrations like the Feast of Fools were wildly popular occasions; authentic medieval artefacts, more

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than a few of which were fake, were put on display at fairs and festivals; and dilapidated medieval buildings were refurbished in the exaggerated Gothic-with-added gargoyles style associated with Viollet-le-Duc (of Carcassonne, Pierrefonds and Notre Dame fame). Montmartre cabarets with neo-medieval décor were particularly popular with the paying public, not least Le Chat Noir, which not only featured chansonniers and numerous Old French speakers, but also boasted Les Escholiers, an avant-garde theatrical troupe whose repertoire was inspired by the imperishable 15th century poems of François Villon.

RETROTYPES Retro, to be sure, doesn’t just span space and time. It comes in several separate forms. There are variations on the basic theme, formally defined by Brown et al. (2003, p. 20) as ‘the revival or relaunch of a product or service brand from a prior historical period, which is usually but not always updated to contemporary standards of performance, functioning or taste’. The new VW Camper Van, for example, looks very similar to the hippie-wagon of the 1960s, but it comes with ABS, flower power steering and, presumably, the very latest emissions-evading software. The early learning Ladybird books, beloved by generations of British children, have been rewritten as a series of kiddie guides to adult aliments, activities and misdemeanours such as hangovers, barbeques, hipsters, sickies and so on (postmodern ironic nostalgia has a lot to answer for). Nowadays, naturally, even the most advanced electrical equipment is replete with back to the future bells and whistles. These include ‘artificial shutter-snaps on digital cameras, USB keyboards masquerading as typewriters, iPod docks dressed as jukeboxes, iPad cases distressed to look like literary collectibles’ (Lowenthal, 2015, p. 53).

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Although it covers much of the scope of retro, Brown et  al.’s definition is rather restrictive. As Hallegatte (2014) notes, their insistence on up-to-date technology alongside old-style aesthetics excludes an awful lot of yester-style stuff and erstwhile-imbued whatnots. To this end, she draws a distinction between brand revitalisation, where old-established brands are brought bang up to date, and retrobranding, where brand new brands are liberally coated with spray-on legacies. Dion and Mazzalovo (2016) similarly specify three categories of ‘sleeping beauty brands’ such as Moynat, a dormant luxury label successfully revived by LVMH in 2010. Cantone, Cova, and Pierpaolo (2018) likewise record that Alfa Romeo’s Giulia, exists in two contrasting retro-auto configurations, which they term revenant and revival. Helpful though such clarifications and categorisations are, they can obfuscate rather than clarify. Just as innumerable types of ‘nostalgia’ now exist – and just as copious contiguous neologisms, including ‘deja new’, ‘neostalgia’, ‘pastmodernism’ and ‘newstaglia’, continue to proliferate – so too ‘retro’ is susceptible to subdivision and sub-subdivision and subsub-subdivision and so on and on and on. A scholar’s work is never done. For the purposes of explication, nevertheless, four rough and ready categories of retro products and services can be tentatively identified. Relics are authentic antiques, such as a vintage Chanel dress or a 1947 Lambretta scooter, which may have been repaired or refurbished but are basically the genuine article. Reproductions are modern copies of the original Chanel or Lambretta made to the same specification and using much the same materials, perhaps with a couple of tiny twists or tweaks (e.g., to make the scooter legally roadworthy). Revivals are old-established, often iconic brands like Polaroid, the Mini Cooper or Penguin sportswear that are not only brought back from their beauty sleep but are given

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a makeover, a facelift, an injection of branding Botox. Replicants are completely new products like Benefit Cosmetics, Bailey’s Irish Cream or Hollister casual apparel that come complete with an ersatz heritage, phony genealogy, bogus backstory – whatever you want to call it – which conveys the impression of past-ness. They look old, they feel old and they seem old. But they aren’t. Certain cultural critics, needless to say, despair of such deceitful disingenuity. ‘A hundred years from now’, novelist Ewan Morrison (2012, p. 9) laments, ‘our grandchildren will ask: what was life like in your time? And we will only be able to reply that we spent our time fantasising of other times, and perhaps, shamefacedly: shopping’. In Hollister. Consumers like retro, though. The ersatzer the better.

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4 COME THE REVOLUTION

Nostalgia is all around. Retro rules the roost. The blast from the past is deafening. But when did the current boom begin? Was there an ahead-of-the-curve cultural catalyst, a leading artistic indicator, a pre-revolutionary harbinger, akin to David’s Oath of the Horatii, which antedated our heritaged age? What, if anything, triggered contemporary consumer society’s yearning for yester goods and services? Nobody knows. For more than a few film fans, though, James Cameron’s Titanic was the celluloid ship that launched a thousand past-time tchotchkes. His massively expensive, special effects-stuffed movie was widely expected to sink without trace after hitting the iceberg of audience indifference that had scuppered numerous nostalgic nautical predecessors, such as Lew Grade’s Raise the Titanic. Instead, it broke box office records worldwide, swept the boards at the Academy Awards and hinted that from then on it was full steam ahead for the heretofore. For petrol-heads and camshaft cognoscenti, by contrast, it was the Mazda Miata (a.k.a., the MX-5) that

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started today’s retro wheels rolling and accelerated the past to its present pole position. A brilliantly imitative echo of the iconic roadsters of yore, most notably the legendary Lotus Elan, the Miata was not only aesthetically appealing, but comparatively cheap to boot. It was perfect for middle-aged men without the financial wherewithal for a bright red, top-of-the-range, mid-life-crisis mobile like the peerless Porsche Carrera or the incomparable Ferrari Testarossa. More than that, it was the retro forerunner, alongside Nissan’s foresighted Figaro, of all the other throwback motorcars that decorate dealers’ forecourts nowadays. For popular music devotees, meanwhile, there is no consensus concerning the pre-millennial moment when retro recordings seized the day and never looked back. A strong candidate, however, is Weezer’s 1994 hit single, Buddy Holly, whose accompanying video comprised the perfect portent of pop music’s impending olden age. Directed by Spike Jonze, their state-of-the-art promotional video seamlessly inserted the fourpiece band into an old episode of Happy Days, where they play a gig in Arnold’s Drive-in, wow the crowd with the song’s toetapping chorus and get everyone up on the dance floor, even the way cool Fonzie (who performs a quirky Russian Kazatsky and steals the show). Jonze’s cutting-edge video, in short, placed a 1990s rock band singing about a 1950s pop star in a 1960s-set sitcom, which was broadcast during the 1970s and 1980s. Melding five decades into one dazzling, fun-filled package, the Buddy Holly video helped the band revolutionise popular music, as grunge made way for Weezer’s neo-emo.

THE PAST IS A PACKAGE HOLIDAY Regardless of the purported precursors, there are two incontestable aspects of consumer society’s rage for retro.

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Its ubiquity and longevity. The preceding discussions may have given the impression that contemporary yesteryearning is an Anglo-American phenomenon (the Mazda Miata, nota bene, was masterminded by renowned American car designer Bob Hall). But as Lowenthal (2015) makes clear in his review of all things immemorial, the nostalgia boom that’s behind the latter-day rise of retro this, retro that and retro the other is not confined the UK and the United States. From Finland to Fiji, it’s a world-wide sensation. Nostalgia, Bonnett (2016) likewise reports, is rampant throughout Asia. And Africa, Piot (2010) attests. The same is true, Angé (2016) says, of South America. Russia too, Groskop (2018) reveals, is revelling in its pre-revolutionary tsar power, when Peter was great and Catherine was greater. According to the Economist (2012, 2016, 2017a) nostalgia is particularly prevalent in Italy, Poland, Romania, Croatia and Japan, where the code of the Samurai is enjoying a new lease of life. Ditto the fervently forward-facing People’s Republic of China, whose ‘time honoured shopping mall’ in Shanghai sells nothing but pre-revolutionary clothing and cosmetics (Lowenthal, 2015, p. 38). Even Dubai, perhaps the epitome of glitzy, glamorous and go-faster nation building, has found time to renovate its old souks, ancient harbour and time-worn Tuareg encampment as twenty-first century tourist attractions. It is in France and Germany, though, that nostalgia booms loudest and retromania is roaring ahead. The former has seen an upsurge in, amongst many others, old-fashioned camping holidays (Sage, 2006), tours de France on boneshaker bicycles (Moore, 2013), historic theme parks like Le Puy du Fou that give Disneyland a run for its money (Adieu, Mickey), hit movies and graphic novels set during the delightful days of yore (Le Petit Nicholas, Gaston Lagaff and Spirou et Fantasio), glossy magazines like SCHNOCK, which revel in all things retro, and a president who presents himself as the political, if

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not the physical, reincarnation of Charles de Gaulle (Fenby, 2018). However, as Willsher (2018) shows, the head of state is increasingly portrayed as a long-lost son of the Sun King. L’Etat, c’est Macron. As we write, what’s more, the student-led événements of May 1968 are being re-enacted, with strikes, sit-ins, rallies, riots and, naturally, reverential television programmes about the glory days of soixante-huit, when France teetered on the brink of anarchy, the Situationists devised subversive détournements, a single-minded president sought to stand firm against the tide of turmoil and graffitied gable walls were plastered with posters insisting Il est interdit d’interdire (Hussey, 2018; Sage, 2018; Sheridan, 2018). The latter, incidentally, are now valuable collectibles, featuring in exhibitions and fetching top dollar (Rubin, 2018). The demand for demanding the impossible is insatiable and, presumably, the beaches under the cobblestones command an entrance fee (and come complete with sun-loungers). In Germany, meantime, the watchword was and remains ostalgie. A neologism which combines the German words for east (ost) and nostalgia (nostalgie), ostalgie pertains to a prolonged period of collective post-reunification yearning for the good old bad old days of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Originally confined to gone but not forgotten products and services, such as Spee detergent, Vita cola and the much-loved Ampelmännchen (little man) traffic sign, it has since metamorphosed into a complex process of communal and commercial mythmaking. According to Brunk, Giesler, and Hartmann’s (2018) empirical analysis, ostalgie has developed through four distinct phases: Heroes of Labour, where the alleged contrast between feckless easterners and feisty westerners figured prominently; Enchanted East, where the DDR was deemed a disappeared dreamland, a Prussian paradise lost; Comrades of Care, where the east’s caring

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collectivism was elevated above the west’s alienating individualism; and Pastoral Patriots, where the western profit-making mindset was unfavourably compared to the socialist ethos of humanistic progress and its overall quality of life. Or, as Lee Child’s Jack Reacher pugnaciously puts it, from an admittedly impolitic west German perspective: Reunification had been a strain. Economically and socially. And mentally. He had watched it. Like living a comfortable life in a nice little house with your family. And then a whole bunch of relatives moves in. From someplace where they don’t really know how to use a knife and fork. Ignorant and stunted people. But German like you. As if a brother had been taken away at birth and locked in a closet. Then in his mid-forties he comes stumbling out again, pale and hunched and blinking. A tough situation to manage. (Child, 2017, p. 154)

THE END IS SO-NOT NIGH Published in 2017, Lee Child’s Ossi-antagonising novel is set in 1997, when Cameron’s Titanic was sitting on the cinematic slipway prior to its launch into allegedly unreceptive multiplexes. Contrary to expectation, it triumphed. Equally contrary to expectation, the 1990s nostalgia bonanza is still going strong, as is the outpouring of retro goods and services. The longevity of what many regarded as a passing fad is perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the ‘retro revolution’. Twenty years ago, retro was widely seen as a side-effect of the fin de siècle, when societies are collectively inclined to look back briefly on the achievements and aberrations of the preceding century (Brown, 1999). That explanation, like the

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Titanic, no longer holds water. We are approximately 20% of the way through the twenty-first century and retro keeps on going and going and going like the Energiser Bunny doing an Old Father Time impersonation. Why? Why is retro still rocking and rolling? Why won’t nostalgia let go? Perhaps the most reasonable explanation for retro’s longevity is that the modern world has experienced a perfect storm of nostalgia-inducing developments (Hamid, 2017). Demographically, we have witnessed the ageing of the bulging Baby Boom generation, with the attendant tendency towards retrospection. Economically, the subprime earthquake of 2008 and its continuing fiscal aftershocks have destabilised many worried workers, who understandably pine for earlier times when pensions were secure, and jobs were for life. Environmentally, the increase in global warming, the destruction of natural habitats, the growing water shortage, the prospect of a plastic packaging apocalypse, and many more ecocatastrophes are of great concern to more than a few who fear for the worst while wondering if the worst will be worse than their worst imaginings. Technologically, our ever-faster fibred society, coupled with the fundamental lifestyle changes wrought by the FANGS gang (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Spotify), is enormously anxiety inducing for those left behind, the tech-laggards who yearn for the slower, simpler, less stressful times before digital dwarfed all and when analogue stood tall. Politically, too, the troubled times of the early twenty-first century – 9/11, 7/7, Islamic State, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, middle eastern turmoil, Europe’s immigration crisis, Brexit, etc. – have unsettled many who naively hoped that the new world order after the end of history would mean happily ever after. Although there is no shortage of societal ammunition that has served to arm the nostalgia explosion and add to the boom in retro products, practices, pastimes (and academic

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publications), they prompt an interesting question. Since nostalgia is now regarded as a Very Good Thing, something that’s beneficial and beneficent by and large, should we welcome the fact that the world is going to hell in a handcart? Because the badder the times, the better we feel. Research reveals that people wax especially nostalgic about times of privation, want, neglect, destitution, when we kept calm and carried on, when we were poor but we were happy (Hatherley, 2016; Wilson, 2005). But, it seems perverse to wish for the worst because they’ll be the best of times in retrospect. Ah, do you remember the good old days of global warming, melting icecaps and the Brexit debacle? This conundrum, we grant you, may be less significant than it seems, since the revolution in thinking about nostalgia has been accompanied by a turnaround in thinking about its triggers. Hitherto, the belief has been that nostalgia is a reactive phenomenon, a response to largely negative circumstances (growing old, economic duress, excessive speed of life, etc.). As Kammen (1991, p. 295) makes clear in his seminal study, Mystic Chords of Memory: Nostalgia is especially likely to occur in response to dramatic or unanticipated alterations, like a revolution or a civil war, a stunning transformation of the sort that rapid industrialisation brings, or the crumbling of a venerated value system, like revealed religion. However, nostalgia-induced retromania isn’t just a reactive response to troubled times. There’s a proactive dimension too. The staggering marketplace success of yester products like the new Fiat 500 or Smeg’s fifties-style refrigerator or Roberts’ redoubtable retro radio, has encouraged other entrepreneurs to follow suit. ‘If nostalgia sells, sell nostalgia!’ is the slogan du jour. This copycat effect, which is no less evident in

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academia where nostalgia is now a ‘hot topic’, is further perpetuated by the ‘mere exposure’ phenomenon, where the very presence of something increases its salience and makes it seem more significant than it is. Our capacity for reminiscence, moreover, has been immeasurably enhanced by the existence of illimitable on-line archives – YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, etc. – which are instantly, readily and, for the most part, freely available. Thanks to ample online aides-memoire, the past has never been so present. Or so plastic: On our dominant social networks we are pulled out of the present moment to constantly shape and examine and interact with carefully curated pasts. Through technology the past is made real to us in a way that it has never been before. I can see myself five seconds ago … and my first smile in my mother’s arms five decades ago, and I can sift endlessly through these past moments, commingle them with present choices and likes and filters, and craft new past-present hybrids, dancing across time. (Hamid, 2017, p. 2)

CRITICISING THE CRITICS Now, none of this means that the nostalgia assemblage is above criticism. Far from it. Cultural critics continue to castigate egregious ‘nostalgification’ (Angé & Berliner, 2015, p. 6), though they are inclined to do so in the flippant, funfilled manner of the PIN-heads mentioned previously. Thus, A. A. Gill (2010, p. 14), an esteemed television critic, makes mock of the BBC’s ‘directors-general of nostalgia’ who work in ‘half-timbered offices with welsh dressers and mangles and wood-fired ranges’ while commissioning ‘improving

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documentaries from a ledger’. Andrew Collins (2011, p. 64), a leading commentator on rock music, wryly observes that ‘if the past is a foreign country, many of us are on permanent vacation’. David Mitchell (2014, p. 39), the highbrow comiccum-columnist, derides today’s ‘derivative age’ where we’ve ‘haemorrhaged confidence in our ability to make new stuff’. Owen Hatherley (2016, p. 4), an urban design authority, postulates the existence of a clandestine Ministry of Nostalgia, akin to George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, that secretly conspires to perpetuate contemporary yestermania, not least with fashion-forward looks like ‘for men, moustaches and beards, sensible utility wear; for women, the semi-ironic sexualized style usually called burlesque’. Enjoyably impudent as Gill’s directors-general, Collins’s vacationers, Mitchell’s derivatives and Hatherley’s hipsterand burlesque-peopled imaginings are, they are symptomatic of an emerging tendency in cultural studies and the liberal arts, which treats nostalgia as a radical, critical and potentially transformative conceptual resource (Bonnett, 2016; Ladino, 2012; Radstone, 2010). The old idea, espoused by assorted postmodern theorists, that nostalgia is ‘a political crime’ (Scanlan, 2005, p. 46), that it represents ‘gangrenous passivity’ (Dames, 2010, p. 272), that it is nothing less than a ‘betrayal of history’ (Spitzer, 1999, p. 91), that it’s ‘a pitiful form of weak mindedness’ (Wright, 2010, p. 197), ‘an inhibitor to change and regeneration’ (Watson & Wells, 2005, p. 23), the ‘bête noire of cultural critics, sociologists and historians’ (Pickering & Keightley, 2006, p. 933), is increasingly being supplanted by the belief that nostalgia offers a platform for disruptive, subversive and liberatory thinking (Hamilton, Edwards, Hammill, Wagner, & Wilson, 2014). To this end, copious commentators are challenging the long-established belief that nostalgia is irredeemably and irrecoverably reactionary, as are left-leaning scholars in fields as

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diverse as history, human geography, ethnography, ecology, literature and linguistics (Niemeyer, 2014; Radstone, 2010). Women’s studies too is witnessing a transformation in thinking about the nature of nostalgia. Once, according to Fischer (2004, p. 92), feminism had ‘no tendency toward nostalgia, no illusion of a golden age in the past’. Today’s post- and fourthwave feminists beg to differ, however. Contemporary female identities embrace ‘the styles and politics of previous eras’ (Munford & Waters, 2014, p. 20); they are enchanted by ‘retro-nostalgic images’, such as those in the aforementioned Mad Men (Whelehan, 2014, p. ix); they lean towards New Traditionalism, where ‘the domestic sphere is rebranded as a domain of female autonomy and independence, far removed from its previous connotations of toil and confinement’ (Genz & Brabon, 2009, p. 52).

ANARCHY IN THE ARCHIVE Arguably the most extreme reaction to toil and confinement is found among anarchists, insurgents and revolutionaries. Although it has often been noted that nostalgia swells in the aftermath of revolutionary episodes, when unsettled people yearn for the former certainties of, say, Ethiopia when the Derg dictatorship was in charge (Economist, 2017b) or the old Yugoslavia seemingly unified under Tito (Boym, 2001), the mobilisation of nostalgia by revolutionary firebrands is equally evident. As Goldstone (2014) observes, weaponsgrade nostalgia made an appearance during the American War of Independence, at the height of the French Revolution, and in the heat of the Russian Revolution, to say nothing of England’s Glorious Revolution, Ireland’s Easter Rising, the Mexican revolution, the Iranian revolution, the so-called ‘colour’ revolutions of eastern Europe and assorted aborted

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revolutions, such as those of 1848. In the timeless words of Karl Marx (1983, pp. 287–288): The tradition of countless dead generations is an incubus to the mind of the living. At the very times when they seem to be engaged in revolutionizing themselves and their circumstances, in creating something previously non-existent, at just such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously summon up the spirits of the past to their aid, borrowing from them names, rallying-cries, costumes, in order to stage the new world-historical drama in this time-honoured disguise and borrowed speech. Thus Luther masqueraded as the Apostle Paul; the revolution of 1789–1814 camouflaged itself alternately as Roman republic or Roman empire and the revolution of 1848 could think of nothing better than to parody sometimes 1789 and sometimes the revolutionary tradition of 1793–1795. Technological revolutions too are impacted by ‘the shock of the old’ (Edgerton, 2008; Poole, 2016), insofar as innovative technologies often take the physical form of their predecessors. The first photographs aped paintings; early airplanes flapped their wings; electric light bulbs initially looked like gas flames (Benjamin, 1999). Cultural revolutions, similarly, are often Janus-faced, staring back to see ahead (Beckman, 2014). The modernist movement in art, music, literature, etc., which ostentatiously espoused the futuristic slogan Make It New, was in fact in thrall to yesteryearning; consider Picasso’s primitivism, Proust’s search for lost time, Stravinsky’s reinvention of Russian folk music or Eliot’s reimagined grail quest in The Waste Land (Gay, 2007). The first of these, in fact, was not only influenced by African tribal masks and the classical art of antiquity, but by David’s dazzling neoclassical

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canvases in the Louvre (Roe, 2015). What goes around comes around. As Cubism. Intellectual revolutions, big and small, are equally echoic, everything from the Protestant reformation’s determination to restore the purity of the early Christian church (Malia, 2006), though the endeavours of the Situationist International, which wished to return to the Edenic state that allegedly existed before capitalism (Reynolds, 2011), to transformative consumer research constructs like Service-Dominant Logic. Predicated on the eighteenth century physiocratic economics of Fredric Biastet, Service-Dominant Logic ‘harks back to pre-Industrial Revolution days, when providers were close to their customers’ (Vargo & Lusch, 2004, p. 12).

WOMEN OF THE WORLD, UNITE Revolution, admittedly, is a vast subject, where numerous theories of regime change obtain. These include Marxist theories, functionalist theories, mass society theories, psychological theories, structuralist theories and theurgic theories (Cohan, 1976; Dunn, 1972; White, 2016). There is no consensus, though, on the whys and wherefores of insurgency – why uprisings occur when and where they do – let alone an agreed general model of the revolutionary process. Though it’s not for want of trying (DeFronzo, 2014). Nor, for that matter, is there any unanimity about what a revolution is, exactly, or how revolutions differ in kind from rebellions, revolts, uprisings, overthrows, insurrections, secessions, coups d’état, states of emergency and resistance movements more generally (Selbin, 2010). That said, self-styled staseologists – theorists of revolution – appear to agree on three things. First, that nostalgia plays a notable part in the process. Tradition is mobilised, weaponised and reinvented by many revolutionary parties on many

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revolutionary occasions (Goldstone, 2014). Second, insurrections unfailingly draw inspiration from earlier insurrections (White, 2016). Prior uprisings are employed as templates for subsequent uprisings and legendary leaders like Wolfe Tone, Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara and Emiliano Zapata serve as anterior role models for those who follow in their footsteps (Malia, 2006). Third, women play a prominent part in the process (Ward, 2004). Although, as Selbin (2010) acknowledges, women frequently fail to recoup the emancipatory rewards that revolutions engender, they make mighty contributions along the way. From Boudicca’s revolt against ancient Rome, through Théorigne de Méricourt’s role in the French revolution, via Countess Markievicz and Basanti Devi’s dauntlessness during Ireland and India’s fights for independence respectively, to Celia Sanchez’s heroic behind-the-scenes leadership in revolutionary Cuba, women have been at the forefront of social and political paradigm shifts (Favilli & Cavallo, 2017). The same is true of science and technology (e.g., Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin and Ada Lovelace in radioactivity, DNA and computer science), the artistic avant-garde (Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist canvases, Lee Krasner’s Abstract Expressionism, Tracey Emin’s BritArt breakthrough) and intellectual ferment, be it existentialism (Simone de Beauvoir), postmodernism (Julie Kristeva) or contemporary anti-capitalism (Naomi Klein). ‘I wager’, White (2016, p. 198) confidently predicts, ‘that the greatest social movement of the future will be the fight for global matriarchy’. Subsequent developments suggest he isn’t far wrong (McKeon, 2018).

WHERE’S WALTER? Be that as it may, staseology’s three strands come together in Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary cultural criticism, specifically

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his theses on the philosophy of history. Inspired by a 1926–1927 visit to actress Asja Lacis in Moscow, then at the cutting-edge of revolutionary consciousness, he was struck by communist society’s continuing preoccupation with the past. Benjamin, accordingly, inverted Marx’s industrial-era argument that revolutions are the locomotives of history steaming fast forward into the future. He claimed instead that an ‘angel of history’ exists, an angel who stares fixedly into the past while being blown backwards into the future by a howling gale called progress (Benjamin, 1973a). Citing fashion-forward apparel and accessories as exemplars, he argued that couturiers’ feel for future trends is achieved by sudden Tigersprung (tiger spring) leaps into the past. Revolutions, he maintained, are impelled by a ‘retroactive force’, a mode of messianic redemption where the origin is the destination and historians are prophets. Lauding, likewise, the ‘incomparable scent of female collective for what the future holds’, he posits that progress is merely ‘immemorial antiquity parading as up to date novelty’ (Benjamin, 1999, pp. 25 & 64). Benjamin’s conception, in short, ‘uses nostalgia for the past as a revolutionary method for the critique of the present’ (Löwy, 2005, p. 2). As we shall see, few neo-burlesquers would disagree.

SECTION II FOCUS & FINDINGS

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5 BURLESQUE IN BRIEF

Roland Barthes, one of France’s foremost cultural critics, once wrote an essay on ‘the new Citroën’. First published in Les Lettres Nouvelles, a bimonthly magazine, the 1955 article did much to popularise his mythopoetic approach to cultural texts. In it, he suggested that the Citroën DS was simultaneously an ancient goddess reborn – as the French pronunciation of DS implied – and an exemplar of contemporary ‘neomania’, the futuristic ethos that characterised classic works of science fiction. Invoking Jules Verne, the pioneer of the genre, Barthes confidently asserted that ‘the Déesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus’ (Barthes, 1973a, p. 95). His Citroën, in short, was retro from the outset. It comprised an instant classic combination of futuristic technology, not least its miraculous rear suspension, and the adipose appearance of an ancient deity, a four-wheeled Venus figure. So quintessential indeed was the DS19 that it remained in production – practically unchanged – until 1975. Come 2005, however, Citroën’s conspicuous failure to compete in the retro-auto supermini segment, already brilliantly cornered by the BMW Mini, the Fiat 500, the New VW Beetle, etc.,

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moved the management to disinter their gone but not forgotten goddess. After testing the water as a will-we-won’t-we ‘concept car’, the DS3 was released in January 2010. Taking several styling cues from the original’s iconic exterior – the shark’s fin window pillars, in particular – it sold like crepe suzettes at Candlemas. The accompanying ad campaign, though, promoted Citroën’s retromobile on an ‘anti-retro’ platform. Featuring antiquated film clips of John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe denouncing nostalgia (‘live your life now’, advises the former; ‘because nostalgia isn’t glamorous’, the latter explains), the ads effectively declared that la mode rétro was not only dead and buried, but also that the reincarnated DS3 was living proof! This contrarian campaign, unsurprisingly, provoked much discussion. As both the brand name and its embodiment were ostentatiously echoic – the cabriolet even had a roll-top roof à la the 2CV – and the ads pressed two long-dead celebrities into active service, how could the DS3 be anything other than retro? When Lennon and Monroe urged viewers to live in the now, were they referring to the now then (1950s and 1960s, respectively) or the now now? Did they actually say that then or was it a deviously updated voiceover? What the heck was going on?

DON’T LOOK BACK For those of a marketing persuasion, Citroën’s campaign represents an obvious ad agency attempt to attract attention. The car, after all, was a belated entry into a crowded product category. The principal objective was to get people talking, build a bit of buzz, generate a modicum of merchandise-­ moving controversy and catch the eye of the self-­congratulatory

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ad  ­ industry.  To that extent, they succeeded. Latterly listed amongst the top 10 nostalgia-based advertising campaigns, Citroën’s anti-retro message ‘could arguably be considered a bit insulting to the memories of Lennon and Monroe, but for a small campaign, it is a smart one’ (Hemsworth, 2013). For French semioticians, on the other hand, anti-retro offered an opportunity to intellectualise about the Gallic equivalent of Mad Men’s carousel moment. According to Fantin (2014, p. 96), the ads were conceptually discrepant insofar as they provided ‘continuous references to the past’ while simultaneously ‘urging consumers not to use nostalgia as a crutch’ and therefore represented a twenty-first century version of the baroque. ‘Baroque’, she elaborated, ‘is defined by its inclination to illusions, contrasts and antithesis, representing the place where borders between opposite concepts vanish, where everything seems to be reconcilable: death and life, dream and reality, and of course past and present’ (Fantin, 2014, p. 97). Only a fool challenges French intellectuals channelling the restless spirit of Roland Barthes. But it is arguable that Citroën’s anti-retro campaign wasn’t so much baroque as burlesque. It was a spoof, a parody, a lampoon of archetypal car ads, which unfailingly feature gleaming machines accelerating along open roads in unspoiled countryside (or navigating the empty streets of a skyscraper-striated metropolis), coupled with a suitably uplifting strapline promising technological prowess, personal fulfilment and futuristic achievement. Instead, Citroën offered grainy monochromatic clips of dear departed icons whose asynchronous voiceovers (blatantly overdubbed by latter-day imitators) deliberately undermined the product’s principal selling point, as did its patently preposterous tagline, which disavowed the brand’s appeal. The ads succeeded through knowing negation, much like Ryanair, Marmite and Hollister, whose tenebrous retail store interiors

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attract rather than repel fashion-conscious consumers (Moon, 2010). Nothing sells like saying to customers, ‘don’t buy this’ (Brown, 2003).

BURLESQUE’S BEGINNINGS Burlesque, much like ‘nostalgia’ and ‘retro’ is a word of many meanings. According to Chaffe and Crick (2014), it is a caricature or parody of an extant work (or entire genre) of literature, poetry, film, music, television, theatre, opera (or, indeed, ad campaign). Rooted in the peripatetic commedia dell’arte tradition of improvised comedy performances featuring stock characters and situations – burla, in Italian, means mockery, a joke or prank – burlesque came to prominence in the seventeenth century when impertinent French writers like Paul Scarron and Cyrano de Bergerac published elaborate parodies of established literary genres. However, as Jump (1972) explains, a distinction is often made between high burlesque, where a trivial topic is treated in an exaggeratedly elevated manner (such as Pope’s comic epic about a haircut, The Rape of the Lock) and low burlesque, where lofty matters like royalty or religion are brought down to earth through ridicule (e.g., Butler’s celebrated send-up of born-again Christianity, Hudibras). Another distinction is often made between burlesques that spoof a specific target (such as parodies of Harry Potter or the Ladybird books mentioned earlier) and those that subvert an entire genre (Airplane!’s high-flying take-off of disaster movies, for instance, or Blazing Saddles’ bonanza of cowboy clichés, beans eating included). These dimensions, he adds, can be combined into a four-category classification of the literary form. But regardless of the precise distinctions between travesty, parody, mock-epic and the Hudibrastic

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modes of address, they have one thing in common: ‘Burlesque is mockery, it is joking, it is fun’ (Jump, 1972, p. 72). It is a continuation of the classical world’s carnivalesque traditions of Saturnalia, Bacchanalia, et al. (Ehrenreich, 2006). Or, as the Irish-American humourist P. J. O’Rourke puts it: ‘There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off’ (Economist, 2018c, p. 46). The connection between burlesque and undressing dates from the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the art form took on its contemporary connotations. Burlesque as we understand it today – that is, ‘a variety show featuring music, comedians and strip-tease’ (OED) – is conventionally dated to Ixion, Lydia Thompson’s landmark stage show, which debuted 150 years ago in September 1868. A hugely popular parody of an Ancient Greek epic, complete with bawdy gods, Amazonian march, and a tongue-in-cheek take on La Goulue’s legendary cancan (Allen, 1991), it premiered in George Wood’s Broadway Theatre, promptly scandalised post-bellum American society, and precipitated a major moral panic. The then nascent suffragist movement was especially outraged, loudly declaring that Ixion’s ‘atrocities … were inimical to achieving equality’ (Shteir, 2004, p. 30).

CAN CAN-DO With its echoes of dell’arte, traces of literary parody and Olympian British Blondes in seriously skimpy costumes – albeit their idea of skimpy is our idea of overdressed for the occasion – Thompson’s racy revue was antiquarian from the outset, a titillating throwback act. It was more than 25 years, however, before anything approaching nudity

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became the norm. The first burlesque show featuring naked flesh, Le Coucher d’Yvette, took place in Third Empire Paris, in 1894, at the Divan Japonais. Baring all soon spread to celebrated cabarets like the Moulin Rouge, Casino de Paris and Folies Bergère, then transferred to the United States in the early twentieth century, when showgirls performed raunchy comedy and strip-tease acts to workers engaged in the conquest of the west (Do Carlo, von Berlin, & LaMotta, 2011). As Allen (1991) reveals, classic American burlesque also drew sustenance from the minstrel, vaudeville and hoochycooch traditions and contributed, in turn, to the spectacular, showgirl-studded Ziegfeld Follies – and their innumerable imitators – which commenced in 1907 and became an annual event thereafter. From the Roaring Twenties onward, upscale burlesques were staged in North American cabarets and theatres, featuring superstar performers like Carrie Finnell, Sally Rand, Mae West and Gypsy Rose Lee, each of whom radically reinvented the scandalous art form (with tassel twirling, the fan dance, a scintillating shimmy and a Victorian revival act, respectively). The last of these, though, was much more than a return to Lydia’s original. Gypsy Rose Lee took the old art form to unimaginably new heights of depraved decorum. Yes, she stripped, but Gypsy’s strip was secondary to the tease, the patter and the self-reflexive stage routine (Frankel, 2010). This consisted of a lengthy poetic monologue on the private thoughts of the strip-tease artiste, which systematically mocked her chosen profession, her adoring audience, her on-stage persona and her contribution to American culture, both highbrow and low. She soon became known as ‘the literary stripper’ and whose company was sought out and cultivated by the country’s cultural elite, Aaron Copeland, Anaïs Nin, Carson McCullers and Louis MacNeice included. On top of that, Gypsy was an avid collector of avant-garde art, wrote numerous

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well-received articles for the New Yorker and penned an enormously popular if less than trustworthy autobiography, which was turned into a successful stage show, later a movie. A true revolutionary, she served as a trade union representative, supported the Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War, got grilled as a communist fellow traveller during the McCarthy era and, in a male-dominated, Mob-beholden industry, both formed and successfully managed her own burlesque troupe. Not unlike Madonna, perhaps her nearest contemporary equivalent, Gypsy was a proto third-wave feminist who used her allure for emancipatory purposes (Frankel, 2010).

GOING DOWN Gypsy was exceptional, admittedly. Because the Great Depression and its aftermath dealt a body blow to the traditional US burlesque circuit. Cabarets became more circumspect and chaste under the watchful eye of various vice-society reformers, such as turpitude-seeker-in-chief, John Sumner (Allen, 1991). This was the era of the Hays Code (which censored sexually charged scenes on the silver screen), of numerous high-profile obscenity trials (that of Ulysses being the best known) and, not least, of Fiorello La Guardia, the irascible mayor of New York who once described burlesque as ‘entertainment for morons and perverts’ (a pungent one-liner latterly quoted with relish). After the lows of the Depression, the art form didn’t fully recover until the mid-1950s, when a new golden age, featuring internationally renowned ‘bombshells’, including Betty Page, Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm and Lili St Cyr, dawned and detonated. With their ‘startling erotic quiddity’ (Shteir, 2004, p. 3), they rebooted burlesque for the Playboy generation and, in a predominantly puritanical post-war culture,

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provoked howls of outrage. These howls, much like Ginsberg’s obscene poem of the same name, only served to popularise the genre. They got people wondering what all the fuss was about and made them determined to find out. Citroën’s anti-retro aforethought. The golden age of Betty Page didn’t last, sadly, partly on account of television’s growing ascendency, which reduced the demand for live theatre, and partly as a consequence of an increasingly permissive society (Ferreday, 2008). The 1970s, in particular, proved to be a dark decade when hard-core pornography, live sex shows and full-frontal nudity in mass media not only upped the salacious ante but concomitantly diminished the public’s appetite for classic strip-tease. Dixie Evans (2004, p. x), a burlesquer who worked through the worst of the skin-flicked 1970s, puts it this way: For a theatre to hold on to the traditions – the bands, the big production numbers – and still make payroll and rent, while fewer and fewer people were coming out to fill seats, well, there was just no way. So the theatres closed and burlesque just sort of faded away. In its place, increasingly explicit performances began to replace exotic dance in the remaining clubs, and the suggestive yet comparatively wholesome legacy of burlesque was soon eclipsed by ‘amateur nights’, all-nude revues, and live sex acts on stage.

SHAKIN’ ALL OVER The genre, however, was brilliantly revitalised in the middle-to-late 1990s thanks to a number of female celebrities who revived Hollywood glamour through the Neo-Burlesque

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(or New Burlesque) movement, both in the United States (where Dita von Teese rose to stardom) and Europe (where Immodesty Blaize led the charge). According to Baldwin (2004, p. 28), the thing that triggered the big take-off was Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s ‘sanitization of the city’, a La-Guardian attempt to clamp-down on vice, sleaze and no-holdsbarred pornography in New York. This gave rise to a return of the repressed – return of the undressed, rather – in the glitzy, gleeful and glamorous form of neo-burlesque. Yet, irrespective of the underlying causes, it’s clear that burlesque is not only back with a bang, but also going from strength to strength on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, numerous upscale nightclubs (Va Va Voom Room), annual festivals (Tease-O-Rama), television programs (G-String Divas), Hollywood movies (Burlesque) and even an official Burlesque Museum (initially in Helendale, CA; latterly, Las Vegas), are now in existence, as is a symbiotic ecosystem of readily available accessories from saucy showgirl soundtracks to raunch-dance dedicated magazines (Baldwin, 2004). In France, furthermore, strip-tease classes have opened in many major cities, including Lille, Nice and Bordeaux; a number of annual events have been established by dance enthusiasts, such as the Paris Burlesque Festival; and, ever since the box-office success of the road movie On Tour (which features American neo-burlesque performers Mimi Le Meaux, Kitten on the Keys, Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, Evie Lovelle and Roky Roulette), the activity has featured regularly in women’s magazines like Elle and Vogue. Its many and varied adornments and accoutrements are on sale in copious boutiques, drugstores and e-tailing emporia. Although America and France have led the charge of feather boas and beribboned bustiers, neo-burlesque nowadays is a multinational phenomenon, with significant outposts in

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Canada, Australasia, Japan, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as amongst gay men (boylesque) and the differently abled (criptease). Today’s art form, furthermore, is not just a reverential revival of the golden age, let alone a drag act of itself (Shepard, 2005). There are three significant differences between burlesque now and burlesque then. First, it is a mass movement of enthusiastic amateurs and semiprofessional performers rather than the preserve of full-time showgirls. Even the semi-professionals, Peluso (2010) posits, typically spend more on their costumes than they earn from their performances. As a community, neo-burlesque is open, welcoming and inclusive. In the words of Tara Pontani, one of the World Famous Pontani Sisters: Part of the appeal of the burlesque world is that it’s open to anyone and anyone can get onstage if you put the time into a routine and put a costume together. It’s open and non-judgemental – it’s not like you have to audition for it. And that has really helped its growth and made it very attractive to people. (Baldwin, 2004, p. 32) Second, the community is a female enclave for the most part. From Ixion onwards, the industry was controlled, dominated and ruthlessly exploited by men like Lew Fields, Morton Minsky and Benjamin Franklin Keith. And, notwithstanding periods of universal appeal, it largely catered for a male audience. That is no longer the case. These days, women run the show, fill the auditoria and contribute the comedic element that is integral to the art form but was abandoned at male behest during deshabillé’s dark age: ‘Burlesque is often very silly’, says Miss High Leg Kick. ‘A sense of humour is vital to appreciate it. I’ll do a striptease starting in a wetsuit, for instance, or

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once, in front of a vast audience, I was given this long introduction, after which I did one kick, then left. Very cheeky, I know’. (Shepard, 2005, p. 29) Third, burlesque performances are much more eclectic than before. There are as many variations on neo-burlesque as there are neo-burlesquers and, whilst some argue that this represents a dismaying departure from tradition, burlesque has always been fluid, mutable, kaleidoscopic. Lydia Thompson, no less, once complained that contemporary burlesque (in the 1890s) was almost unrecognisable compared to that of the good old days (of the 1860s). Back then, it had more to do with quick wit than short skirts. The former, she said, had since fallen off, as had the latter…

BACK ON TOP Yet despite these differences, which Baldwin (2004) attributes to the diverse performance traditions, from swing to salsa by way of rockabilly, that now feed into neo-burlesque, most modern variants remain wedded to the nostalgic ethos, the retro allure, the fun-filled frolics of their old-school antecedents. This mentality is made manifest in today’s irreverent mash-ups with 1970s hard rock (Houses of the Unholy), classical ballet (The Burlesque Nutcracker) and Jazz Age jitterbug (Jo Boobs’ Black Bottom), among many others (Reighley, 2010). The milieux too evoke the good old days when ‘bad girls’ bared all: ‘Often staged in retro-styled venues, or actual old-time cabarets, neo-burlesque shows lure their spectators into a world of subdued lighting, draped in sumptuous, red velvet curtains, simultaneously evoking luxury and old-world glamour, combined with an all-consuming sense of nostalgia’ (Blanchette, 2014, pp. 159–160).

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Nostalgia, arguably, is the thing that holds the whole show together and provides a modicum of unity in diversity. Formally defined as ‘a nostalgic reworking of the striptease performances of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries’ (Ferreday, 2008, p. 48), neo-burlesque is nothing if not stuffed with tradition, brimming with bygones and gorged with heritage. As Gopnik (2001) dismissively declares, on studying the early emergence of the movement, ‘The New Burlesque? It’s nostalgia. Nostalgia is all it is. I understand it. But it’s nostalgia!’ Nostalgia, of course, was considered a Very Bad Thing back when Gopnik was waxing illiberal. That is no longer the case. What remains the same, however, is its central place in consumer culture. Retrospection may not be neo-burlesque’s raison d’être, but it is definitely de rigueur. The community thus offers ample scope for studying retro in situ and empirically examining Benjamin’s revolutionary historiography, where nostalgia for the past spurs sedition, inspires insurgency and rouses the rebellious. As Glazer (2005, p. 9) emphasises, ‘a radical, progressive nostalgia can become available and advantageous under specific social, cultural and performative circumstances’.

6 CONSIDERING CONSUMER CULTURE

The Greatest Showman shouldn’t have succeeded. A vanity project of Hugh Jackman’s, his $84 million musical was panned by the critics. It faced ferocious competition at the cineplexes, not least from Star Wars, The Last Jedi. And, it underperformed at the box office for the first four weeks, when new-release fever usually peaks. However, the allsinging, all-dancing, all-American retelling of the life of P. T. Barnum, the greatest impresario of the nineteenth century, gradually built up movie-goer momentum. Audiences loved its shamelessly sentimental storyline and happy-ever-after ending. Its catchy-chorus soundtrack struck a chord, especially ‘This is Me’, an anthem of personal empowerment for the oddity in everyone. Simultaneously set in the past and blessed with state-of-the-art special effects, as well as cutting-edge choreography, The Greatest Showman was a slow-burn retro blockbuster that earned more than $450 million worldwide. More than that, it was a retro blockbuster that became a repeat-business phenomenon much like Grease, Dirty Dancing, Billy Elliott and The Sound of Music. Not since Titanic,

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Usborne (2018, p. 5) states, has there been a film ‘with such staying power’. One of the reasons cinephiles returned so often, and the thing that turned The Greatest Showman into the greatest show of its type, was its re-release in a sing-along version (Oliver, 2018). With the song lyrics superimposed on the screen – plus a bouncing, bright red top-hat to help keep the audience in time – there was no reason not to join in. And, the reboot caught on. Consumers couldn’t wait to see it again and again, and participate in communal karaoke renditions of ‘Never Enough’, ‘From Now On’, ‘This is Me’ and all the rest. More than a few got into the spirit of things by dressing up for the occasion in trapeze artist, bearded lady or rococo ringmaster outfits. When Barnum’s beautiful daughters were on screen, everyone joined in with their joyful cries of ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’. As audience participation goes, admittedly, it’s not in the same league as The Rocky Horror Show, but it says much about the longing for togetherness in our atomistic consumer society. According to sing-a-long-a expert Ben Freedman: ‘People come to a singalong evening with family and friends. They are singing to each other as much as they are singing along to the film … We are collective people and this is about the joy of sharing’ (Usborne, 2018, p. 5).

SHARE AND SHARE ALIKE Sharing is central to nostalgia, as both Davis’s classic (1979) conception of communal nostalgia and Boym’s (2001) nearidentical notion, restorative nostalgia, bear witness. It is especially apparent in insubordinate, insurgent and insurrectionist forms of nostalgia, such as those reported in Zwingli’s early eighteenth century study (Ansbach, 1924). He records that the

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communal singing of Kühe-Reyen, an evocative, much-loved folk song, precipitated nostalgia-induced dereliction of duty among Swiss mercenary soldiers, as indeed did Dixie during the American Civil War. Glazer’s (2005, p. 37) study of the Spanish Civil War commemorations similarly shows that shared nostalgia and sedition are closely related and come together powerfully in performative cultural contexts: The veterans’ commemorative performances create a historically and emotionally resonant space, in opposition to the mainstream culture at large, where their radical politics may be celebrated. In this context, the veterans and their supporters can look to the past for what they lack in the present, seize it, and perhaps carry it forward. Nowhere is this tendency better illustrated than in Beckman’s (2014) cultural history of the United States, where practically every significant uprising in the cultural and political sphere has been accompanied by carnivalesque outpouring of past-inspired performance art. From the original Tea Partygoers in Boston, who attended the event in traditional Native American attire, via the G’hals and B’hoys of the Barnum-era Bowery, who dressed in old-fashioned outfits and indulged in recreational street-fighting, through the rambunctious Riot Grrrls of the 1990s, who proudly channelled the anarchistic spirit of snarling 1970s punk rock, to the Slutwalks of 2011, when women staged protest marches in 76 cities worldwide while proudly wearing their grandmothers’ miniskirts, a communal ethos of ‘joyous revolt’ is evident. It is equally apparent among latter-day social movements including Occupy, Direct Action, Earth First, Radical Faeries, Reclaim the Streets, Reverend Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping and, of course, CIRCA, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (Shepard, 2011). As Barbara Ehrenreich (2006, p. 259) makes clear in

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her history of social transformation through collective joy, Dancing in the Streets: Whatever its shortcomings as a means of social change, protest movements keep reinventing carnival. Almost every demonstration I have been to over the years – anti-war, feminist or for economic justice – has featured some element of the carnivalesque: costumes, music, impromptu dancing, the sharing of food and drink. The media often deride the carnival spirits of such protests, as if it were a self-indulgent distraction from the serious political point. But seasoned organizers know that gratification cannot be deferred until ‘after the revolution’. Neo-burlesquers may or may not qualify as G’hals in garter belts or Riot Grrrls wearing weapons-grade undergarments, let alone a fan-dancing offshoot of CIRCA (CarnalityInclined Retro-Costumed Anarchists). But one thing is incontestable. The art form’s exponents form part of a rebellious tradition where collective action looms large. Whether it be the indefatigable Ladies Land League in pre-revolutionary Ireland, the formidable Société des Femmes Républicaines of revolutionary France, the tenacious women behind the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (which fought for civil rights in the segregated States of America) or the prominent part played by the not-so-gentle sex in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010–2011 (Youssef, 2017), there is no denying that, when putsch comes to shove, women are a force to be reckoned with. Ehrenreich again, quoting Gutwirth (1992, p. 243), quoting Louis-Sébastien Mercier: The largely female crowd that marched on Versailles in 1789, which, legend has it, had been

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summoned by a little girl beating a drum, turned the return trip into a travelling celebration: ‘The fishwives seated on the cannon, others wearing grenadiers’ caps; wine barrels next to powder kegs; green branches attached to butts of rifles; joy, shouting, clamour, gaiety … noise, the image of the ancient Saturnalia, nothing could describe this convoy. (Ehrenreich, 2006, p. 188) In this regard, it is entirely apt that Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary criticism foregrounds the ‘female collective’. His magnum opus, what is more, comprised a vast historio-literary analysis of the Parisian shopping arcades of the nineteenth century, which functioned as a women’s refuge, an emancipated space, a temporary autonomous zone in Belle Époque France. And, although he didn’t study burlesque specifically, the preparatory notes for his sadly incomplete project show that cabarets, theatres and vaudeville were on his unfulfilled research agenda (Benjamin, 1999, pp. 919–921).

WILFUL WOMEN, TOGETHER FOREVER Researching a woman’s world requires appropriate methods; apposite approaches that are sympathetic with, and germane to, feminist thinking and gender politics more generally. According to Fischer’s (2015) cogent overview, there are three genderrelated research streams in marketing and consumer research: sex difference research, gendered experience coping research and market level gender inequality research. Arsel, Eräranta, and Moisander (2015) similarly identify three contemporary schools of feminist consumer research: liberal feminist, radical feminist and poststructuralist feminist. The present study, which strives to lift the veil on neo-burlesque consumption

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and reveal its nostalgic physiognomy, falls into the second category in both typologies. However, in keeping with Martin, Schouten, and McAlexander’s (2006) investigation of women’s participation in – and subversion of – a hypermasculine brand community, we adopt an eclectic, non-partisan approach that incorporates aspects of poststructalist, radical and liberal feminism, while taking account of sex differences, marketplace practices and latter-day developments in fourth-wave feminist thought (Maclaran, 2015). It is compatible, furthermore, with Bristor and Fischer’s (1993, p. 520) inaugural contention that ‘female experiences are at least an equally valid basis for developing knowledge and organizing society’. It foregrounds, following Catterall, Maclaran, and Stevens (2005, p. 492), ‘the “lived experience” of informants rather than “expert” interpretations of consumer experience’. And, it recognises, after Peñaloza (2000), that differences exist between men and women – albeit these are becoming ever more fluid in today’s trans-ient society – while simultaneously encouraging women to express themselves in a natural manner. Positioned as part of the CCT paradigm, which foregrounds naturalistic and interpretive research methods (Arnould & Thompson, 2005), our empirical study embraces – as per ethnographic precedent – both etic and emic perspectives. ‘The etic viewpoint’, Pike (1967, p. 37) states, ‘studies behaviour as from outside of a particular system, and as an essential initial approach to an alien system. The emic viewpoint results from studying behaviour as from inside the system’. Both perspectives are complementary and bring different benefits to bear on the inquiry. Our three-year ethnographic research programme thus began with non-participant-observation of the French neoburlesque community, originating from Marie-Cécile’s vintage collecting interests and fascination with the recent revival of retro style. Visits to vintage markets and stores, such as Les Puces de St Ouen, Marché de la Mode Vintage, Pooh

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Pooh Bee Doo and Feminisens, led to attendances at various burlesque events, cabaret shows and the annual Paris Burlesque Festival. These were supplemented with the viewings of recordings of classic and contemporary burlesque performances, ranging from Betty Grable’s landmark Pin Up Girl (1944), through the movie On Tour by Mathieu Almarich (2010), to cinéma vérité documentaries on neo-burlesque, most notably A Wink and A Smile by Deirdre Timmons (2009), which features ordinary women taking dance classes in Seattle. A second phase involved deeper immersion in the community, when Marie-Cécile joined several burlesque associations – Neo Retro, Be Burlesque, Tasseltease and So Nice Pin-Up – and participated in their workshops, classes and activities. Having established contact with the affiliated coaches and teachers, such as leading art director, performer and historian Florence Agrati (Lady Flo), famous burlesque artiste Cherry Lyly Darling, renowned cabaret performer and professor La Violeta and well-known make-up and hair-stylist Krystie Red Sugar (Fig. 6.1), interviews were arranged with three burlesque professionals, eight participants in strip-tease classes, three female fans of cabaret shows and two vintage

Fig. 6.1  Krystie Red Sugar Looks Back

Source: Vincent Sabatier, Vincent SAB Photos

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clothing retailers/designers with strong links to neo-burlesque. The aim was to attain a comprehensive understanding of the different participants in the neo-burlesque community: performer, trainee, spectator and retailer (Appendix 2). The interviews were conducted in the native language of the informants (French), adopted a semi-structured, open-ended, free-flowing narrative format and lasted from 30 minutes to three hours. The interview transcripts were read and re-read in several iterative cycles and, after a period of reflection, were allocated open codes in keeping with Spiggle’s (1994) seven-stage model of interpretive consumer research. Provisional categories, which were collapsed, recoded and collapsed again as analysis proceeded (Belk, Fischer, & Kozinets, 2013), primarily pertained to a series of existential selves that neo-burlesque women experience and express (cf., Jafari & Goulding, 2008); specifically, an empowered self, a naughty self, an authentic self, a feminine self, a corporeal self and an extraordinary self. These emergent themes resonated with Marie-Cécile’s lifeworld, where society’s normative expectations of women, wives and mothers weigh heavily. Subsequent member checks with, and feedback from, informants further indicated that such selves are not only repaired by participation in neo-­ burlesque, but also radically transformed: I come to these classes because I enjoy feeling the woman in me … Our society denies me the right to develop myself as a woman. These classes are my secret garden. I cultivate the best of me. (Barbie I Doll, 40s, account manager)

PREPARE FOR TAKE OFF These first- and second-stage findings led to two additional rounds of empirical research, phases three and four.

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Fig. 6.2  Follie Follies Poster

Source: Courtesy Florence Agrati for Neoretro Agency

The former comprised full involvement in the collective through regular attendance at strip-tease classes – once per week for a year – and performing on stage in a group show, Follie Follies (Fig. 6.2). This gave Marie-Cécile a unique opportunity to experience the emotions created by the gaze of spectators and helped minimise researcher ‘otherness’ (Madriz, 2000). Regular weekly interactions with professional performers, trainees and spectators permitted further informal

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data gathering, which was supplemented with photographs and videos of both trainees and professionals in rehearsal, as well as field notes in ‘reflexive journal’ format (Belk et al., 2013, p. 71). These data were sorted, sifted, compared, contrasted and triangulated with one another, as well as the transcripts from phase two. To ensure trustworthiness, further member checks were conducted in line with Bahl and Milne (2006), which led to re-interpretation of data on occasion: The ironic aspect of burlesque, the humour which characterizes our performances does not transfer enough in your notes. We do not take ourselves seriously. Humour makes our transgressive activities more acceptable. (Florence Agrati, aka Lady Flo, art director) The fourth and final phase comprised a separate analysis of the entire cultural text – a meta-dataset comprising transcripts, photographs, field notes, emergent themes, secondary literature, etc. – by Stephen, whose background is in literary/cultural theory and retro branding. This approach thus accords with Thompson and Hirschman’s (1995) early poststructuralist study of consumers’ body images and self-care practices, where another researcher of different gender, social circumstances and theoretical persuasion was recruited in order to help triangulate, re-evaluate and introduce a degree of ‘analytical distance’ from the data (Arnould, Price, & Moisio, 2006, pp. 107–108). Its ethno-literary fusion of perspectives, moreover, is equally compatible with the figurative, post-phenomenological procedures recommended by Moisander, Valtonen, and Hirsto (2009), where traditional ‘interview talk’ is analysed as a cultural text and careful attention is paid to language, metaphor and analogy more generally.

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Most pertinently perhaps, our study helps counterpoint the methodological orthodoxy of contemporary nostalgia research, which has been revolutionised by ‘Southampton School’ scholars employing quantitative research methods (Adams, 2014). For the most part, these comprise laboratorybased studies of experimentally manipulated hypothetical situations involving multiple-item questionnaires completed by convenience samples of student respondents, who are given course credit in return for participation. There’s nothing wrong with such studies, of course. They’re standard practice in cognitive and social psychology, as well as consumer and marketing research. But, the happy-clappy outcomes – nostalgia as a Very Good Thing – arguably underplay the irreverent, often rebellious ethos that collective contexts inculcate.

HOFER HOOFER TWOFER Although our approach runs counter to that of those behind the ‘revolution in nostalgia’, it helps focus attention on the ‘nostalgia in revolution’. Better yet, it is a distant echo of, and a retro return to, the very earliest empirical study, that of Johannes Hofer. In this regard, it is noteworthy that his cutting-edge work of medical science, as it was then understood, relied entirely on qualitative research methods; specifically, three short case studies, which were recounted in a narrative manner, not unlike twenty-first century consumer research in the CCT tradition (Arnould & Thompson, 2005). A second noteworthy aspect of Hofer’s inaugural analysis is that one of his case studies was a woman; a woman, what’s more, who was homesick for the verdant Alpine pastures of Switzerland. Although the post-Hofer literature emphasises

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uber-masculine military personnel – men-of-action heroes who wept buckets when far from home – and although nostalgia was later construed as pining for past time, not place, gender and nationality loomed large from the outset. The third intriguing thing about the physician’s dissertation is that art works are integral to its argument. Five pertinent poems were included in the essay and a piece of musical notation was incorporated when the thesis was republished by Zwingli in 1710. Art and nostalgia are of course intimately interrelated (Ruml, 1946), and while Lerner (1972) may be gilding the lily with his claim that all art is a manifestation of humankind’s nostalgic sentiments, art forms figure prominently in many analyses of nostalgia’s bittersweet allure (Davis, 1979; Glazer, 2005). So much so, Adams (2014, p. 29) says, that storytellers are tantamount to ‘professional nostalgics’. The present research programme is very much in keeping with Hofer’s heritage. It is qualitative; it is female-focused; it is geographically circumscribed; and it involves an art form whose origins not only stretch back to the spiritual rituals of pre-history (Driver, 2006), but accord with Davis’s (1979, p. 29) suggestion, noted earlier, that nostalgia is best grasped through music and dance. It also concurs with Duff’s (1972, p. x) conclusion that the ‘most sophisticated’ insights into revolutionary activities are found in works of literature, though he doesn’t specify which ones.

7 FANS OF FREEDOM

In the annals of crime fiction, The G-String Murders is less well known than The Maltese Falcon, The Murders on the Rue Morgue and Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? But it was a massive bestseller in its day (Symons, 1993). And not only on account of its dramatic opening scene where a dead body is found backstage in a burlesque theatre, strangled by her own G-string. It made waves because the author was none other than Gypsy Rose Lee, the preeminent strip-tease artist of the mid-twentieth century. Published by Simon & Schuster in October 1941, The G-String Murders received numerous favourable reviews, generated a fair amount of ban-this-book free publicity and, thanks to a carefully staged series of personal appearances by its glamorous, garment-shedding author, it outsold competitor books by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and analogous masters of the hard-boiled detective story. True, many cynical commentators wondered whether Gypsy wrote it herself or received assistance from a ghost-writer – the finger was once pointed at W. H. Auden – but there is no doubt about the book’s popularity and, moreover, p ­rofitability

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(Frankel,  2010). It was made into a very successful movie, The Lady of Burlesque, which was released in 1943, starred Barbara Stanwick and received an Academy Award nomination for its charming musical score, not least the striking signature number, ‘Take it off the E-string, Play it on the G-string’ (Shteir, 2005). The remarkable success of Gypsy’s novel was partly attributable to the novelty factor (a stripper writes!) and the author’s ever-entrepreneurial drive (she signed books in burlesque theatres across the nation). However, it was the realism of the story that really made the sale (Symons, 1993). The G-String Murders was as much an exposé of the backstage behaviours of the burlesque community as it was a well-plotted murder mystery. It was the author’s representation of the routines, the rivalries, the rehearsals, the repartee, the romantic liaisons, the raids by law enforcement, the restless relationships between performers, managers, musicians, stagehands, etc., and, above all, the remarkable esprit de corps among the burlesquers, that captivated the novel’s vast readership: Janine jumped up quickly. ‘You dirty stinker’, she said. ‘Since you started this mess that you call an investigation you’ve made one charge after another’. She glared at the uniformed officer. ‘You’ve been scaring everybody half to death with your beady eye’. The Sergeant had opened his mouth to speak but she used a hand to quiet him, a hand and her voice that was getting louder every minute. Yes, another thing. We may have our fights and all that, but they are between us! There isn’t anyone in this room that would tell on another if they thought it was going to hurt that person. We stick together, bejeesus! (Lee, 1941, pp. 90–91)

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Although the sequel to Gypsy’s novel, Mother Finds a Body, was less successful than the original, and although her subsequent, semi-fictional autobiography was an even bigger bestseller than G-String Murders (made into a blockbuster Broadway musical, Gypsy was filmed in 1962), the tradition she started continues to this day. The burlesque-dancer-asdetective genre is alive and kicking in the ‘Bureau of Burlesque’ trilogy of T.A. Dufficy (It Began With Burlesque; The Curious Case of the Stolen Stockings and Love, Lies and Nipple Tassels), as well as The Corpse Wore Pasties by Jonny Porkpie, the self-styled Burlesque Mayor of New York City. Immodesty Blaize, the legendary British neo-burlesquer, has likewise penned two ‘chick-lit’ bestsellers, Tease and Ambition, both set in the world she knows best. On top of that, there’s no shortage of self-published, burlesque-based erotica, to say nothing of serial killer thrillers (dancer in danger!), zombie strippers (shake that body, what’s left of it!) and even a commendable confessional novel about a merchantbanker-by-day-burlesque-dancer-by-night, who gets sacked for bringing the bank into disrepute. As the author points out, they did a pretty good job of that themselves (Sadler, 2013).

SHOW ME THE BENJAMINS If Walter Benjamin had set his debut novel – which was drafted but never written – in one of the cabaret dancehalls or vaudeville theatres he also intended to write about, the world’s view of the renowned cultural critic would be very different. As it is, retro-orientated consumer researchers must make do with Benjamin’s (1973a) final written document – and its assorted drafts – the sagacious Theses on the Philosophy of History.

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Unpublished during his lifetime, Benjamin’s (1973a/1940) essay blends biblical messianism and historical materialism. Rejecting the Marxist model of inexorable progress towards a preordained proletarian revolution – the steam-train metaphor mentioned in Chapter 4 – Benjamin (2003) says that the emergency brake should be engaged, and the locomotive thrown into reverse. Aptly described as ‘a nostalgic who dreams of the future’ (Löwy, 2005, p. 2), Benjamin notes the presence of the past in the present; contends that societies to come should be matriarchal, as they were in days of yore; and, whereas Marx made mock of revolutionaries who model themselves on the ancients, Benjamin believes that this is what allows them to leap dialectically towards a new dispensation. To Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. (Benjamin, 1973a, p. 253) Simon Schama (1989) concurs. Although the American War of Independence was a role model for many Gallic rebels, as was England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 (the centenary of which did not go unnoticed in Paris), by far the most important antecedents for the insurgent events of 1789 were classical Rome, ancient Greece and, in the twilight of the Terror, blood-bespattered Sparta. ‘The French Revolution’, he states unequivocally, ‘was obsessed with the model of the Roman Republic’ (Schama, 1989, p. 169). There was, he goes on, ‘a powerful bond of identification between ancient and modern republicans’, not least because ‘the age in which they lived corresponded to the worst excesses of gilded corruption decried in the Roman histories’ (Schama, 1989, pp. 170–171).

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When the neo-burlesque community is viewed through the billowing steam of Walter’s retro locomotive, the three revolutionary commonalities previously noted – nostalgia in abundance, echoes of anarchism and warrior women withstand – are not only clearly evident, but also work in carnivalesque combination. Consider Barbie I Doll. Surrounded by her collection of furnishings from the 1950s – furniture that has ‘soul’, furniture that ‘tells the story’ of its designers and former owners – Barbie embodies the insurgent spirit of ribald rebellion that is evident throughout the neo-burlesque collective. A key account manager in her forties, who works in a predominantly masculine corporate environment, she is acutely aware of the emancipatory battles of her feminist forebears: I am from a lineage of women who fought for the right to be considered equal to men. My grandmother resented that everyone would expect she would dress with skirts and wear make-up. She decided she would never live with a man. She wanted to be independent financially and emotionally. She was a pioneer in her time and was looked at negatively. Many twenty-first century women, Barbie continues, are in a similar situation. They are denied the right to express their femininity. They are required to rein in and tone down who they are. They are expected to avoid being provocative by, for example, wearing flat shoes rather than high heels and invisible makeup instead of extravagant maquillage. Neoburlesque, she firmly believes, provides an opportunity to fight back, a chance to fly the flag for femininity: I think that the revival of burlesque with burlesque workshops and shows, and women dressing in a

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provocative feminine fashion is a sign of rebellion. Women are still judged in France by the way they dress and behave. If you want access to the same jobs as men, you have to dress and behave as men. Having a feminine style is not respected. Look at women in politics. Feminism is not dead!

NOSTALGIA IN ABUNDANCE Neo-burlesque’s rebellious feminism through full-force femininity is characterised, more than almost anything else, by an artificially constructed appearance that harks back to the golden age of Hollywood glamour (Iley, 2008). Dita von Teese’s transformation from an ordinary blond girl with freckles, a self-confessed Plain Jane, to the glamorous, raven-haired reincarnation of a pneumatic 50s pin-up, illustrates both the call of the past and its recreation in the present (von Teese, 2006). As Sandrine stresses, neo-burlesquers take inspiration from mid-twentieth century icons like Marilyn Monroe and Mae West, formidable women who represent a radically feminine ideal of ostentatious voluptuousness: Marilyn is an icon. Bardot also. I admire these blonde and voluptuous women with a personality and a strong brain, who were using their body to manipulate both men and women. Everyone would think they were stupid. Did you notice that women who have shapes or who are fat are considered stupid? Even worse when they are blonde. I take advantage of my curves to achieve my personal objectives. Wryly characterised by Immodesty Blaize as ‘viewing the world through retrospectacles’ (Burlesque Undressed, 2010),

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nostalgia plays an important part in our informants’ daily round. Many community members employ old-fashioned, very formal, almost arcane language in everyday discourse. A rarefied level of locution known as soutenu, this includes quaint expressions like pécule (money), avoir le béguin (be in love) and silhouettes callipyges (shapely buttocks). ‘Several women’, field notes record, ‘enjoy using tenses not usual in contemporary oral French such as passé simple (preterit), nous fûmes and subjunctive structures. This represents the refinement and elegance of yesteryear French language’. Neo-burlesque’s nostalgic sensibility is further expressed in the costumes and accoutrements of the collective (Fig. 7.1). Footwear and hosiery are central to the community’s sense of itself (Belk, 2003), stockings, garters, corsets and vertiginous Louboutin stilettos above all. Bright red lipstick is no less integral to neo-burlesque’s retro aesthetic. In many ways, it’s its signature symbol (Ferreday, 2008). Whereas second-wave feminists sought liberation from lipstick – the scarlet tyranny of their Helena Rubensteined times – neo-burlesquers seek liberation through lipstick, a return to the red-doored arcadia of Elizabeth Arden (Woodhead, 2003). Individual variations notwithstanding, all burlesque looks combine crimson lips with pale powdered skin, often framed by old-fashioned hairstyles, such as the distinctive Victory Roll of post-war bombshells. The vocabulary of body movement is no less nostalgic (e.g. bump ’n’ grind), as are key components of stage costumes (fans, fishnets, pasties, nippies, etc.), as are grooming rituals (ostentatious application of fresh lipstick), as are annual ceremonies, (such as Tease-ORama), as are the pseudonyms adopted by burlesque dancers (Fig. 7.2), which often evoke the playful spirit of childhood, replete with sweet treats and candy kisses (Sugar da Moore, Bambi Freckles, Lady Strawberry, Mlle. Sweet Candy, Sucre d’Orge, Barbie I Doll).

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Fig. 7.1  Cherry Lyly Darling in Glamorous Fur

Source: Emmanuel Vaney, Emmanuel V Photographies

In this olden-time dream-world, Willson (2008, p. 156) wistfully observes, ‘when we go through the mirror, down the rabbit hole, we catch glimpses of flesh, exquisite costume, fairground attraction, pink candy-floss and cheeky anarchic fun, the technicolour world of Dorothy’s red shoes’. For many, neo-burlesque is akin to a caricature, a cartoon, a carousel

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Fig. 7.2  Florence Agrati as Lady Flo

Source: 2shadowland

and an evocation of infancy where inhibitions can be cast off and worries put on hold: I became interested in Burlesque pin-ups through cartoon girls, such as Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit. As a teenager I was a huge fan of women

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heroes, like Wonder Woman. When I am in the community, I am like in a cartoon. The traits are exaggerated. I am Alice in Wonderland. (Bambi Freckles, 20s, decorator and artist) Indeed, Bambi’s signature routine is a wonder in itself, not to say an eye-opener. For the Follie Follies celebration of June 2012, she staged a raunchy reinterpretation of the familiar childhood fable Little Red Riding Hood. At the climax of her act, the audience discovers that Bambi is in fact the wolf! As field notes reveal, her fantastic performance is extremely erotic and somewhat shocking, since Little Red Riding Hood finishes nude with a wolf’s tail inserted in a place that might come as a surprise to Grandma. Or, bring a blush to her cheek at least.

Variations on a Theme The nostalgia-mindedness of community members varies considerably, however. Stage performers and retro-style designers are more committed than most to times past. Florence Agrati, whose stage name is Lady Flo, has written a masters’ thesis on the history of burlesque and believes it is her duty to transmit the art-form’s traditions and philosophy. ‘It is not only about strip-tease’, she stresses, ‘it is an attitude about femininity, about beauty, about sexuality. It is anchored in the history of women and feminist ideology’. Armed with this emphatic attitude, Florence strives to inspire and encourage women who share her penchant for retro-fashions and retro-activities more broadly. Burlesque women tend to shop for vintage in specialised markets, are loyal to specialised stores and, more often than not, import antique pieces from the United States via specialist websites. They replicate the look of iconic historical epochs (the 1920s,

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the 1950s, etc.) focusing on the finest detail in clothing, cosmetics and coiffure: I was going to professional exhibitions and I was sick, season after season, to see more or less always the same stuff. One day, I discovered a stand with vintage pieces. I ordered for my boutique and it worked well. From there I extended the range. I sell authentic vintage as well as collections with a respect for both the style (vintage) and the spirit (ethical) such as for instance Brigitte Bardot line of clothes. I also design and produce my own line of 50’s clothes, based on drawings from the era and quality materials. (Chantal, 50s, retailer and designer) The irony, of course, is that in the burlesque world, which some consider superficial and fabricated, authentic items have extra-special status (Goulding, 2003; Grayson & Martinec, 2004). Community members are urged to choose vintage pieces or create them themselves when they are not otherwise available. This has given rise to a homespun, self-help and make-do-and-mend mentality (Reighley, 2010). Accessories and attire that cannot be sourced or borrowed are recreated with the aid of original drawings. Lingerie pieces in particular tend to be sown by hand from tissue paper templates or classic patterns. Other important accessories worn in private are the pasties (or nippies), which hide the nipples. Again, these items are home-made. Do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches also apply to make-up, where mixing powders into bespoke shades is commonplace (Blaize, 2010). Burlesque is the DIY of beauty and fashion. Women aren’t just doing it for themselves, they’re darning it as well (Ferreday, 2008). We are into authenticity. Yes, it might sound paradoxical but we are in search of authenticity.

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So whatever you cannot purchase ‘aged’, make it by yourself. (Cherry Lyly Darling, 30s, actress and teacher)

There’s No Place like TAZ That said, adepts of the art-form don’t just look back on past times; they seek out past places as well (Blanchette, 2014). One of our informants insisted on being interviewed in a 1950s-style retro diner in Nice, a theme restaurant based on the 1970s movie, Grease. Professional performers, such as La Violeta, often mention iconic Broadway cabarets in their classes and go out of their way to perform in legendary Parisian venues like Le Moulin Rouge, Le Lido, Le Lapin Agile and Belleville theatre. As field notes record: Most women plan to visit once in their lives these places, although they regret they are full of tourists and lack the spirit of yesteryear. Yet burlesque performers continue the tradition of naked French cancan dancers born in Pigalle and Montmartre … I stayed several times in the Pigalle-Montmartre area when in Paris. I noticed the reopening of restaurants and nightclubs in the very places that were emblematic of these periods, such as Le Chat Noir 1881 on avenue de Clichy in Pigalle, reopened a couple of years ago. Many esoteric legends are attached to this place which was visited by painters and poets such as Willette or Charles Cros. This fascination with retroscapes echoes the ethos of Walter Benjamin, whose masterwork consisted of a magnum opus on the outmoded Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century. Chock-a-block with discarded objects, abandoned gadgets

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and all sorts of antiquated consumer cast-offs including corsets, feather dusters and plaster-cast copies of the Venus di Milo, the arcades are ‘galleries leading into the city’s past … images in the collective unconscious in which the old and the new interpenetrate’ (Benjamin, 1999, p. 4): Often these inner spaces harbour antiquated trades, and even those that are thoroughly up to date will acquire in them something obsolete. They are the site of information bureaus and detective agencies which there, in the gloomy light of the upper galleries, follow the trail of the past. In hairdressers’ windows you can see the last women with long hair. (Benjamin, 1999, p. 204) More than that, though, the venues and locales which loom large in the neo-burlesque imaginary represent ‘temporary autonomous zones’ (TAZ). That is, safe spaces where insurgent thoughts are fomented, creativity is fostered and freedom is found for a while (Bey, 2003). In neo-burlesque’s case, of course, our raunchy revolutionaries occupy temporary erogenous zones...

ECHOES OF ANARCHY In his famous essay on strip-tease, Umberto Eco (1993, p. 28) argues that the performers and the audience are engaged in a salacious Socratic dialogue where ‘insatiable monsters’ (the dancers) make ‘the suggestion of a coitus that suddenly proves to be interruptus’, thereby ‘provoking in devotees a mystique of privation’. Roland Barthes (1973b, p. 91), by complete contrast, regards professional undressing as a spectacle based on fear, a sort of ‘delicious terror’, involving a remedial

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injection of evil into the social body in order to inoculate it from an infectious, possibly fatal, form of eroticism. Delicious or otherwise, monstrous or not, women have a long history of association with extremist movements. Fully one quarter of Russian revolutionaries in the nineteenth century were female and women made up approximately one third of the German and Italian red brigades during the 1970s (Townshend, 2002). From the perpetrators of the 1886 Haymarket bomb in Chicago (Marsh, 1981), through Cumann na mBan, Ireland’s freedom fighting feministas (Ward, 1995), via Islamic State’s suicide squad of fearsome female warriors (Smith, 2014), to the ‘revolution of women’ being fought right now in Tbilisi (Economist, 2018b), the so-called gentle sex ‘have been front-line actors … in terrorist operations’ (Townshend, 2002, p. 16). The delicious terror that neo-burlesque can induce – albeit in an existential rather than an extremist sense – is illustrated in Willson’s (2008) postfeminist critique, The Happy Stripper. It begins with a vivid description of her first frightening contact with the art form. Attending what she assumed was a radical work of pro-feminist performance art, Ursula Martinez’s Show Off, the author was confronted with a three-minute, full-on neo-burlesque routine, a demonstration of ‘unbridled femininity’ (Blanchette, 2014, p. 161) that catapults her into a maelstrom of confusion, uncertainty, fear and fury: My pleasure and anger came from suddenly feeling immersed in this tense, intense interplay between legitimacy and illegitimacy, danger and safety, pleasure and anger, liberation and vulnerability. I felt exposed and trapped, resentful of being lured there yet completely relishing the experience – shrinking into my seat yet urging Martinez on. (Willson, 2008, p. 2)

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The Boys are Backing Down Men too feel unsettled and threatened by neo-burlesque’s ‘dangerous femininity’ (Ferreday, 2008, p. 48). Emasculated on occasion. Several informants remark on the anxieties that arise as a result of inter-gender relationships. ‘Men are attracted to me’, one says, ‘but at the same time they are afraid. I know my look is an issue for many men. In social settings they dislike that I am the centre of attention’. Another concedes that: Many men cannot endorse women dressed like I do. When I entered in the restaurant many diners looked at me. It is not usual to see women with flowers in their hair in 2012. It could take time to find a man who could feel comfortable with me by his side. (Krystie Red Sugar, 40s, make-up and hair stylist) Yet another, one of the few female employees in a macho corporate environment, makes no apology for intimidating male co-workers with full-on femininity. She wears haughty high heels every day in order to look down on diminutive colleagues – literally – and demonstrate her domination of the situation. That said, expressions of fear-factor femininity are the exception rather than the rule. Yes, neo-burlesque could be construed as a terrorist cell of tassel-twirlers. But, if anything, the collective is more closely aligned with anarchists than urban guerrillas. The everyday reality of the anarchist movement, Ward (2004) argues, is far removed from the stereotype of mad bombers and crazed assassins. Anarchists reject external authority of any kind – be it political, economic, religious or ideological – and rejoice in self-help, mutual support and voluntary cooperation rather than interpersonal competition. Their ideal is a self-organising society, an arcadian,

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pre-capitalist idyll, where long-standing traditions are married with cutting-edge critical consciousness. According to Portwood-Stacer’s (2012) study of twenty-first century anarchists, the movement is characterised by a prelapsarian credo of sharing, recycling and DIY, a credo not dissimilar to that of the neo-burlesque community. Anarchism, moreover, is intensely echoic. ‘Everywhere in the world where anarchist ideas have arisen there is a local activist aware of the anarchist undercurrent in every rising of the downtrodden throughout history’ (Ward, 2004, p. 8). Or, as Margaret Marsh (1981) puts it in her study of female activists during the late nineteenth century, anarchism is preoccupied less by revolution than renewal, by a future return to the heretofore. Whereas socialists ‘wanted to destroy old patterns of thought and create a completely new society’, anarchists aspired to traditional forms of social organisation (Marsh, 1981, p. 152). Although anarchist icons like Helen Born, Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cheyne may not resonate with many neo-burlesquers in twenty-first century France – albeit Louise Michel, renowned heroine of the Paris Commune, surely would – they routinely look to role models from the past, seditious spirits such as Lydia Thompson, who not only scandalised post-bellum American society, but also purportedly publicly horsewhipped a prominent patriarch who’d unwisely cast aspersions on her artistry and femininity.

The Routine Aping the antecedent is equally evident in the community’s habit of paying homage to the stagecraft of its forerunners. Many of today’s routines involve allusions to, or reprises of, yesteryear’s pioneering strip-teases. Sally Rand’s famous fan

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dance is taught in most burlesque classes and included in introductory instruction manuals (Weldon, 2012). Dita von Teese (2006), furthermore, claims to be channelling the spirit of golden age dancer Lili St Cyr, who cavorted in a giant cocktail glass, just as Dita does today: Lola the Vamp’s … ‘performance of the fetish’ is grounded in nostalgia (including late 1800s Paris, La Belle Époque era of Le Moulin Rouge, vintage 1920s lingerie and the bacchanalian antics of Josephine Baker). Other burlesque artists reference the powerful personalities of the 1940s or 1950s such as Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner (Miss Immodesty Blaize) or the glamorous stars of the 1930s such as Sally Rand and Lili St Cyr (Dita von Teese). These artists invest the past with erotic possibilities for the future. (Willson, 2008, pp. 145–146) The professionals who run the dance classes likewise impart their knowledge, connoisseurship and painstakingly acquired historical lore to neophytes, who are expected to learn femininity and acquire the skills that have been forgotten in today’s fallen, unfeminine world. ‘We have lost our innate sense of being women’, one declares disdainfully, ‘wandering around in jeans and sneakers all in the name of women’s liberation!’ Without doubt, the heart of the burlesque belief system – the principal thesis in its philosophy – is the assumption that femininity can be acquired through training, practice and belief. Just as would-be revolutionaries assimilate techniques of civil disobedience (White, 2016), so too burlesque boot camps inculcate an ethos of sensual disobedience. Evening classes teach women how to construct their full-on feminine self: sitting on a chair with elegance, walking on heels with allure, seducing with one’s eyes, moving one’s hands with

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grace and, above all, undressing in an erotic way. The aim is to develop a personal, individualised sense of female selfexpression, known as ‘finding your trick’ (Baldwin, 2004; Weldon, 2010). This all-important gimmick may be acquired from past masters, popular culture, other people or indeed serendipitous incidents, what Benjamin (1973b, p. 166), borrowing from Baudelaire, terms ‘love at last sight’. For les anarchistes de l’amour, however, the source of inspiration is less important than its internalisation (Fig. 7.3). You might get inspiration from the burlesque scene or from movies. But, ultimately it is you, your rapport to your body, your understanding of the woman you are or want to become. You have to find your own tricks to seduce, what works for me does not necessarily work for you. (Cherry Lyly Darling, 30s, artist) One day I saw a woman in Leclerc supermarket. She was not beautiful and I am not sexually attracted to women anyway, but I thought: What a woman! She dared to be a woman. The allure does it all. From that day, I reconsidered the way I dress and move. I realized a woman can be feminine without being vulgar. (Muriel, 30s, computer programmer)

Self-Help Sisterhood To thine own self be true, says the Bible. But the church of neo-burlesque sees things differently. It is no exaggeration to state that many community members believe they have a double identity, a second self, whose subversive presence is made manifest in three main ways: first, by burlesquers’

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Fig. 7.3  Bambi Freckles’ Dangerous Femininity

Source: Mickaël Ruis Photographies

embrace of provocative pseudonyms, such as Agent Lynch, Juliette Dragon, Mara de Nudée (dénudée meaning nude), Scarlett Diamond, Lady Gala and Sugar da Moore (phonetically da Moore sounds like d’amour, meaning ‘of love’); second, by their unwillingness to undress for their partners, even in private (‘Do I show my strip-tease talent to my partner?

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No way!’); and, third, by refusing to bare all, thereby retaining control of the situation. Burlesque dancers rarely undress completely. Typically, they strip down to nippies and G-strings. Akin to the earliest strip-tease artistes, who emphasised the tease rather than the strip (Shteir, 2004), they usually leave something to the audience’s imagination. But, not always, as Bambi Freckles is testament. When asked, after her raunchy Little Red Riding Hood routine, what she was expressing during the performance, Bambi promptly replied: ‘I am red hair and I am perceived as a nice girl, kind of naïve, kind of childish…But inside I am a devil … This is the expression of my real self!’ Not every informant feels the same way, admittedly. Just as numerous brand subcultures comprise a spectrum of factions, where some see it as a leisure pursuit, others as a lifestyle choice (e.g., Belk & Costa, 1998; Martin, Schouten, & McAlexander, 2006; Schouten & McAlexander, 1995), the neo-burlesque collective is similarly subdivided. These differences, which are equally evident amongst anarchist, suffragists and similar revolutionary groups (Portwood-Stacer, 2012; Townshend, 2002), come to the fore over commodification. Burlesque is becoming a big business, largely on account of its co-option by conventional consumer culture. In keeping with McCracken’s (1986) model of cultural meaning transfer, which identifies fashion, design and the counter-culture as key conveyers of meanings to the mainstream, neo-burlesque’s rebellious allure is being embraced by the beauty and beverage industries (Blaize, 2010). Several haute couture houses have launched vintage inspired collections (Louis Vuitton, Miu-Miu) or recycled classic fabrics and designs (YSL, Dior’s revived New Look). Ralph Lauren sells retro pieces in his London and Paris flagships (Cervellon, Carey, & Harms, 2012). NARS lipstick names evoke golden age Hollywood movies (Blonde Venus, Shanghai Express). And Benefit cosmetics

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uses vintage and pin-up imagery on its retro packaging. Even Chanel anointed the movement when Karl Lagerfeld featured Dirty Martini, one of the community’s most pulchritudinous performers (Sterzemien, 2010), in a photo-shoot on the famous flight of stairs at the brand’s rue Cambon flagship store: https://vmagazine.com/article/v-legends-karl-lagerfeld/ Although more than a few community diehards are offended by the fashion industry’s exploitation of their subversion – or its imagery at any rate – most of our informants consider it a tribute to the collective’s creativity. They recognise that co-option carries a semblance of their ideas, their ideology, their looks, their lifestyle, to a much wider public and oppressed womanhood as a whole: The ’50s purists find it difficult to accept this usage of burlesque imagery. For instance, they find insulting that women would ape their style (makeup and hair styling) and that brands would be marketed retro. I consider that we cannot live in isolation. I find positive that our ideas and creations would be put forward and inspire the marketplace. (Krystie Red Sugar, 40s, hair and make-up artist) For many burlesquers, then, commodification performs an important and necessary social service, insofar as it offers a sanitised version of their ancient art form for women who feel put upon by patriarchy’s mores and morality. Burlesquecaparisoned brands help initiate a necessary debate on what is and what is not socially and sexually acceptable, just as Lydia Thompson’s British Blonde bombshells did back in 1868 when they unleashed the performance art’s anarchic power (Allen, 1991). More pragmatically, informants are delighted that the kit they require for their routines is readily available. ‘I’m psyched’, an American burlesquer freely admits, ‘that I can buy the things I like in Target’ (Baldwin, 2004, p. 44).

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WARRIOR WOMEN WITHSTAND Walter Benjamin’s concepts of history have caused much consternation among philosophers and literary critics (Eagleton, 1981; Löwy, 2005). Apart from the inscrutable utterances and semi-surrealist methodology, his abandonment of traditional dialectical argumentation for gnomic juxtapositions of ‘dialectical images’ makes ready comprehension less than easy (Buck-Morss, 1991; Eiland & Jennings, 2016). However, the ‘angel of history’ analogy, taken from a sketch by Paul Klee, captures Benjamin’s backward-facing worldview and desire to resist the full-force gale blasting society into an uncertain future. Benjamin’s gale does not blow steadily, though. The continuum of history is disrupted – exploded in fact – when innocuous abandoned objects, fashions, practices, etc., are rescued and reactivated for revolutionary purposes: Benjamin argued that within the superstructure there was a separate (and relatively autonomous) dialectical process that … developed not by burying the dead past but by revitalizing it. For if future history is not determined and thus its forms are still unknown, if consciousness cannot transcend the horizons of its socio-cultural context, then where else but to the dead past can imagination turn in order to conceptualize a world that is not yet? (Buck-Morss, 1991, p. 124)

Par tisans in Pasties Although it is easy to dismiss neo-burlesque’s revolutionary intentions as overambitious, as ridiculous, as a blend of Bump ’n’ Grind and the Angry Brigade, the women are resistance fighters of a sort. Consumer culture is not lacking in resistance

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movements, we grant you. Numerous studies have identified and inventoried all sorts of defiant activities, including boycotting behaviours, brand avoidance, market exit, voluntary simplicity and refraining from mainstream rituals like St Valentine’s Day (see Izberk-Bilgin, 2010). However, neoburlesquers – similar to Mountain Men (Belk & Costa, 1998) and vintage clothes aficionados (Goulding, 2003) – lavish time and money on past-times treasures while resisting the allure of the latest fads, fashions and fripperies. A passiveaggressive dialectic of avoidance and acquisition is evident. They resist, not by looking forward to the coming revolution, but by turning back to it instead (Boym, 2001). Dancers’ resistance is directed at several different targets. Foremost amongst these is mainstream femininity. Burlesquers reject contemporary femininity’s emphasis on understatement. They spurn normative versions of womanhood, which deem shameful the overt use of ‘provocative’ adornments. Notwithstanding some ambivalence about burlesque’s co-option by capitalism, many condemn twenty-first century consumer culture, which they call the McFashion or Kleenex economy, as well as the ‘me-too’ conformity of French ­womankind. Committed members of community wear stockings and garters as everyday apparel and adopt the radical reactionary attitude of 1950s Hollywood starlets, many of whom refused to abandon stockings and garter belts for the demure, decorous convenience of pantyhose. As one of our informants remarks, ‘I do not like the false natural of French manicure and nude make up. I find that vulgar in a way. I prefer genuine artificiality … and I wear false lashes all day’. This attitude parallels earlier analyses of belly dancers (Wort & Pettigrew, 2003) and big-but-bootylicious fashion bloggers (Harju & Huovinen, 2015). It is equally evident in African-American girls’ abomination of Eurocentric b ­ eauty ideals (Duke, 2002) and US students’ condemnation of

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i­dealised androgyne images portrayed by fashion magazines and catwalk models (Thompson & Haytko, 1997). As the reproduced poster for Follie Follies reveals (see p. 75), neoburlesque celebrates the pneumatic body, as did golden age burlesquers in days of yore. Just as the latter once boasted of their ‘Short Girls, Tall Girls, Fat Girls!’ (Shteir, 2004, p. 100), and just as Dirty Martini is often admiringly described as ‘an odalisque of operatic proportions’ (Caldwell, 2008), so too contemporary community members come in different shapes and sizes, mostly Junoesque, and assorted age ranges, from early 20s to 50 plus. However, they are as one in their execration of ‘official’ beauty standards imposed by fashion systems, and feel empowered accordingly. Our informants, in short, disavow haute couture ­houses who perpetuate the slim-wins ideology of thinness (see ­Venkatesh, Joy, Sherry, & Deschenes, 2010). They use their adipose bodies in an oppositional, emancipatory manner, much as plus-size consumers celebrate their size and standing as ‘fatshionistas’ (Scaraboto & Fischer, 2013), much as Goths do with their anything-goes gender-bending (Goulding & Saren, 2009), much as Twiggy in the 1960s overturned the then dominant ideal of voluptuousness (Thompson & ­Haytko, 1997), much as Lydia Thompson displaced the waiflike norms of American womanhood in the mid-nineteenth century (Allen, 1991). In their crusade against today’s slenderis-superior credo – widely associated with eating disorders and body dysmorphism – twenty-first century burlesquers look back with admiration towards big-is-beautiful bombshells like Marilyn and Mae. They see beauty where others see beasts. Whether it be an hourglass figure or a 24-­hourglass figure, all figures are fine for neo-burlesque: I saw on stage women with beautiful bodies and they did not communicate anything. When you

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see Dirty Martini on stage, you find her beautiful. She communicates with her body. She is radiant. As a show producer, this is what I am looking for, presence on stage … In our society where else are women with big bottoms having an advantage??? (Florence Agrati, aka Lady Flo, 30s, Art Director)

Patriarchy? Pah! Our informants’ hostility to contemporary femininity – and desire to restore the female heretofore (Boym, 2001) – is as nothing beside their detestation of androcentrism. In neoburlesque, the performance is not mounted for male wishfulfilment or sexual gratification. The live audiences in France and Britain both are overwhelmingly made up of women (Ferreday, 2008). Rather than pander to phallic masculine fantasies, burlesquers strip in order to subvert society’s staid sexual mores, stultified carnal customs and patriarchy’s penile preoccupations. When asked, in the film On Tour, ‘What is new-burlesque?’, Dirty Martini answers ‘Men do not control it anymore’. Women’s control of their world is central to the collective’s belief system. This control cannot operate without liberating oneself from male social constructions of beauty and femininity, and redefining womanhood in women’s words (Bristor & Fischer, 1993). Neo-burlesque not only represents emancipation from masculine conceptions of ‘the feminine’, but also a stand against women’s continuing submission to sexist societal norms: When I started to dress in vintage sexy clothes which reveal my body shape, I was fearing the comments of the macho men…But the bad comments came from the women. A couple of

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women in my neighbourhood told me I was dressing up as a prostitute … The problem is that women accept and worse, endorse, the mainstream male discourse equating femininity with sexual openness. (Marie, 30s, professor) Despite the insults of the unenlightened – not least Adam Gopnik’s (2001) snide observation that ‘new burlesque combines the tawdriness of topless dancing with the tedium of performance art’ – the community strives to gainsay patriarchy by ‘reanimating the glamour of an earlier age, a pre-feminist past’ (Munford & Waters, 2014, p. 26). It venerates the holy relics of stereotypical femininity denigrated by ‘frigid, goatee-stroking feminists’: girdles; garters; gloves; G-strings (Blaize, 2010, p. 134). Sexuality is power for burlesquers and, by using it to their advantage, they blunt the instruments and undermine the mechanisms used by men to subjugate women.

Censorious Counter-Revolutionaries Although neo-burlesque is part of a long tradition where women use nudity to defy oppression – Femen is perhaps its most extreme expression nowadays (Tayler, 2013) – freedom doesn’t come cheaply. Liberation begets a backlash. Resistance is resisted. Withstanding is withstood. According to Joan Acocella (2013), far from being a feminist enterprise that allows women to take pride in their bodies, neo-burlesque is plagued by performers’ embarrassing amateurism, lumpen dance routines and unsightly displays of ‘muffin tops, back fat, distended bellies, and … big bottoms’. Mainstream feminists, what is more, are unimpressed by the community’s critical credentials. They regard neo-burlesque as another twist

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in the tale of female oppression (O’Connell, 2003). It is false consciousness in fans, frills, fishnets, feather boas and false eyelashes (Ellen, 2018). Nadia Kane, a fourth-wave feminist stand-up, epitomises this attitude. Wide Open Beavers, her solo show at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, challenged the claim that there could ever be truly feminist forms of strip-tease, neoburlesque included. She did so by dressing up in eight layers of ordinary street clothing. These were slowly peeled off to reveal counterrevolutionary slogans – suitably picked out in sequins and diamanté – such as ‘equal pay’, ‘pubes are normal’ and ‘honk if you love feminism’ (Cochrane, 2013). It is undeniable, furthermore, that many burlesquers are fairly  well off and, notwithstanding the recent economic ­ downturn and its attendant anxieties, live comparatively privileged lifestyles. Although the community is open to all, most belong to the white, middle-class and heterosexual social groups that are reputedly overrepresented in consumer research (Maclaran, 2015). As if that weren’t enough, the community has been criticised by those it most valorises. As Regehr (2017) reports, ‘living legends’ often look askance at attempts to portray them as freedom fighters avant la lettre – as Amazons against androcentrism – especially during the sleazeathon 1970s, when it wasn’t so much ‘more strip, less tease as all strip and no tease’ (Evans, 2004, p. x). The legends, rather, were just trying to get by, earn a living, doing what had to be done to keep food on the table and body and soul together.

PIN-Money The irony, though, is that the foregoing critiques hardly compare to the movement’s intrinsic irreverence. Mockery,

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parody, scoffing, spoofing and postmodern-ironic-nostalgia (PIN) have been integral to burlesque from the outset, not least in its seventeenth century literary modes ranging from Travesty to Hudibrastic (Jump, 1972). Just as today’s trainees are exhorted to ‘show the girl’ – that is, to uncover and unleash the exhibitionist within (Ferreday, 2008) – so too they’re encouraged to ‘burlesque the girl’ by cocking a snoot at themselves, their practices and femininity more generally. This self-denigration, admittedly, is unevenly distributed across the community. An informant explained that whereas Dita von Teese stands for irony-free Hollywood glamour, Velvet Hammer represents a more serious strain of belligerent lesbianism. For the most part, however, neo-burlesque doesn’t take itself too seriously. The one thing that unites neo-burlesquers of whatever persuasion – and has done so since the days of commedia dell’arte – is ‘the satire, the low-brow kind of mocking’ (Ferreday, 2008, p. 58). When it comes to crafting a routine, Immodesty Blaize (2010, pp. 432–433) announces: ‘the shtick is as important as the strip’. Jo Whelan’s (2010, p. 18) instruction manual similarly stresses that ‘the most important element in burlesque is fun; if you are having fun the audience will feel it’. Fun, it is fair to say, is never far away. In much the same way as contemporary protest movements are characterised by a carnivalesque spirit – the Pussyhat Project that formed part of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington is a case in point – so the insurgents of neo-burlesque seek liberation through licentiousness. The community is committed to hedonic escapism. Field notes reveal that ‘burlesque is about talking, laughing, singing, dancing, acting and stripping on stage, in a nutshell and for real’. Filled with fantasies, feelings and fun (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982), liberatory moments of libidinous pleasure are among the most enjoyable aspects

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of neo-burlesque for its adepts (Blanchette, 2014; Ferreday, 2008). And, although such exaggerated and uninhibited activities may be shameful in a social climate that espouses asceticism, they are a necessary release, a glittering glimpse of good-old-days glamour, for performers and spectators alike. An attendee puts it this way: I would not strip myself. I am not interested either in contributing to this community, although I have friends in it. I like the atmosphere of freedom when I go to these shows. For instance, tonight, no one cares how I am dressed, how I dance; it is just pleasure. The show per se is a pretext to go out of our socially approved behaviours. Watching women transgressing the rules is encouraging to do so, at least for a short period of time. Then, I go back to everyday routine. (Audrey, 40s, housewife) There’s no doubt, what is more, that undressing in front of an audience, either in the context of a workshop or even more so on stage, is an emancipatory experience. All informants mention the exhibitionist thrill of going beyond the habitual boundaries of their everyday lives and revelling in the effects of their erotic performances on others. At one extreme, a neophyte reports that, ‘Tonight was my first show, my first strip in front of an audience. I had the feeling of being nude, but at the same time I felt secured and protected by the encouragement’. At the other extreme, Lady Flo repeatedly encourages her audiences – as witnessed during the Feria of Nice – to shout out as if they are experiencing an orgasm. At first a little puzzled by this erogenous exhortation, the women gradually gain confidence in expressing themselves vocally. Yes, yes, yes! One participant later mentioned that it should be introduced as a sexual therapy, to help women get more in touch with

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themselves. It’s a long way from Lydia, admittedly, but the line of descent is clear. Equally clear is the incontestable fact that neo-burlesque sets its face against the mores of contemporary society. It offers an alternative to the ideology of thinness. It fights for fatties’ right to party. Pulchritude is power: Modern glamour is the sleek, sexy aesthetic of technology. Everything from the ultrathin models featured on magazine covers to the tiniest cell phone to the most unobtrusive stereo speaker sets the pace and look of modern life. Burlesque glamour, on the other hand, is larger than life, filled with innuendo and coated with glitter. Burlesque offers something different than the standard massproduced culture. In burlesque, girls can have curves, often big curves. They can be loud and funny and still be sex symbols. The basic elements of burlesque are things that are missing from ordinary life. (Baldwin, 2006, p. 30) ‘Gypsy Rose Lee’, Baldwin adds, ‘must feel vindicated because as a form of entertainment the strip has never looked better or more appealing’. But, are the dancers deluding themselves? Holt (2002) contends that consumer resistance movements are futile – and ‘revolutions’ even more so – because recuperation by the mainstream is inexorable, irresistible, inevitable. Is the neo-burlesque insurrection doomed to fail? Possibly. But, as ever-pithy Jack Reacher puts it: ‘Like revolutions in a nation’s history, prison riots are rare. The conditions have to be right’ (Child, 2010, p. 223).

SECTION III CONTEXT & CONCEPTS

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8 GHOST DANCE STANCE

It is often said that Ireland’s Easter Rising of 1916, and the ensuing fight for independence, was inspired by poets and poetry. Certainly, the pre-revolutionary epoch was marked by a mighty Celtic Revival, where rhymesters like W.B. Yeats reimagined the myths and legends of the primeval Emerald Isle when the Sidhe sallied forth, CuChulainn conquered all comers and the spectral Slaugh haunted in packs. The reality, however, is that Yeats and his ilk came late to the party (Foster, 2015). It was a bohemian mix of playwrights and journalists and jobbing actors and eager educators – in short, a younger generation of radicals – who wrote the newspaper articles, published the samizdat pamphlets, staged the tableaux vivants and volunteered to teach the Irish language at Gaeltacht summer schools. Taking their cue from the antecedent uprisings of 1798, 1830 and 1848, this revolutionary generation gradually forged themselves into a formidable fighting force, where indomitable, emancipation-minded women of the Ladies’ Land League, Inghinidhe na hEireann and Cumann na mBan figured prominently (Ward, 1995). According to Foster, journalists, jobbing actors and so on not only played key roles in the drama that was performed 111

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over Easter in central Dublin, but also the military manoeuvres of the tyro rebels were frequently mistaken for street theatre. The rootin, tootin, revolver-wielding Constance Markiewicz was asked if she was staging a play for children and, on encountering a copy of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, a passing thespian thought it was a playbill. ‘After the inauguration of the revolution in 1916’, Foster (2015, p. 76) further states, ‘more than one commentator would point to the choreographed nature of the event … Those famous photographs of Dublin streetscapes shattered by rebellion look like a stage-set … of dramatic ferment’.

DOUBLE, DOUBLE When it comes to the twenty-first century nostalgia, the actor-journalist nexus is no less significant. Although academic researchers dominate the discourse on nostalgia, David Lowenthal’s (2015) voluminous literature review reveals that some of the cleverest and most incisive comments are the work of comic actors and newspaper columnists, such as George Carlin, Simon Reynolds, Rod Liddle or Caitlin Moran. The last of these, for instance, wryly imagines a theme park filled with dear departed retail stores from the 1990s, when retro was just kicking in: Now I’m forty and inclined towards nostalgia, I’d give upwards of £40 to spend a morning at a Nineties theme park, an average high street populated with ghostly recreations of now dead shops. Woolworths, C&A, Our Price. And people in charity-shop coats, leaving faint vapour trails of Jazz aftershave or Body Sop Dewberry in their wake. (Moran, 2015, p. 5)

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Better yet is an ‘obituary’ written by newspaper columnist Victoria Coren. When Past Times, a British retail chain that sold reproduction bric-a-brac from days of yore, finally shut up shop in 2012, Coren contended that the great British public had lost its appetite for yesteryear. Yes, certain unscrupulous people would continue to pander to sentimental American consumers – Downton Abbey, come on down – but only as a prelude to picking their pocketbooks. For the rest us, the olden age is over and out. Past Times is history: It could no longer flog us Henry VIII duvet covers, Black Death vitamin pills and King Canute Lilos. We stopped wanting salad servers in the shape of Florence Nightingale’s forceps. We became immune to the siren cry of: ‘You’ve seen Stonehenge – now get a tea cosy’. We don’t want the past any more. Here in Britain, we live in the now. (Coren, 2012, p. 42) Now or not, the columnist also notes that the Past Times website is still operational, while warning that its ghostly presence is profoundly sad to look at, somewhat akin to ‘snorkelling over the Titanic’. So much so, she already misses the dead parrot emporium and its not yet rigor mortised merchandise. ‘If they start selling sepia postcards of old Past Times shop facades, I’ll be buying’ (Coren, 2012, p. 42). Learned marketing academics might, of course, be inclined to dismiss Coren’s comments. Not only is nostalgia not waning but the principal reason Past Times passed over is increased competition for the retro pound. Specialist sellers of designer yesterwares, such as Kath Kidston and Orla Kiely, coupled with new and improved and more commercially minded museum shops, like the V&A’s copious cavernous retail operations, made life increasingly difficult for a chain whose revenue stream relied on Thomas Crapper soap dispensers and Good Queen Bess mouse-mats. Coren’s column,

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however, is a Hudibrastic burlesque – in the original literary sense – and its insight comes from negation, inversion and irreverence.

DEAD BRANDS WALKING Coren’s reference to Past Times’ ghostly website is also on trend conceptually. Ever since the financial crisis of 2008– 2009, when scores of chain stores went into administration and either died a death or returned as shadows of themselves (Blockbuster, Woolworth, Peacocks, Borders, Jaeger, Comet, Zavvi, MFI, Dolcis, etc.), there has been much discussion of ghost brands, vampire brands, zombie brands, invisible brands, Franken-brands, graveyard brands, doppelgänger brands and revenant retail operations, full stop (Walker, 2008). The talk is getting ever louder, furthermore, as a consequence of the incessant, app-driven, voice-activated amplification of e-commerce, streaming services, home-delivery facilities and so forth (Freund & Jacobi, 2013). The high street is a ghost town, the shopping centre a crypt. And, it’s not just retail chains or brands in the round. The component parts of big brands have become the zombie army of late (as in deceased) capitalism. Old slogans, past packaging and previously interred spokespersons, such as the Go Compare opera singer, are all around, going about their grisly business with a lurch and a shuffle. Advertising too is up to its neck in necro, as Pepsi’s 2018 Super Bowl commercial is testament. After the beverage brand’s crass attempt to capitalise on the social justice protest movement, when Kendall Jenner prevented an urban insurrection by the simple expedient of sharing a thirst-quenching soda with a handsome riot cop, the Super Bowl commercial celebrated the cola’s 120th anniversary with a nostalgic montage of its greatest advertising

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hits, which featured dead celebrity spokespersons like Ray Charles and Michael Jackson, as well as the gone but not forgotten DeLorean from Back to the Future (complete with flux capacitor). The ghost, it is fair to say, has become something of a goto subject for scholars, as has ‘monster theory’ more generally (Weinstock, 2013). In their insightful analysis of popular culture and feminism, Munford and Waters (2014, p. 20) maintain that ghost feminism rather than post feminism is the dominant logic nowadays. Rejecting Chesler’s (2005) influential contention that feminism is dead, they demonstrate that feminism is in fact undead. It is increasingly haunted by the spirit of the past. ‘Female identities’, they state, ‘ghost the styles and politics of previous eras’. Whelehan (2014, p. 29) concurs, claiming that popular culture’s... dewy-eyed nostalgia for times past – times which often predate the birth of those who seek to revive them – is not merely a benign exercise in creative misremembering but a politicised attempt to discredit feminism and derail any future attacks on gender inequality through the use of particular kinds of cultural capital and retro-chic.

GHOST OF A DANCE Munford and Waters’s critique doesn’t mention neo-burlesque. But, the art form is in their sights, if not the line of fire. Neoburlesque and analogous activities like pole dancing, belly dancing and bar-top dancing, are clearly suffering, they believe, from an extreme form of false consciousness (Brownie, 2017). From too much hair-spray, not enough hair-shirt (Dodds, 2013). In today’s disquieting world of rampant ‘retro sexism’

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(Munford & Waters, 2014, p. 28), where allegedly emancipatory carnality is complicit with old-school chauvinism (Gill, 2011), the neo-burlesque community ‘colludes in its own sexual objectification’ (Ellen, 2018, p. 23). It would do well to remember Goethe’s much-quoted comment in Elective Affinities, ‘none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free’. Following this logic, neo-burlesque is more than a manifestation of ghost feminism, it is the nineteenth century Ghost Dance reborn. In 1890, not long before Manon La Ville ‘spontaneously’ stripped naked at a Cleopatra-themed party in Montmartre (Shteir, 2004, p. 35) – and started the bare-all ball rolling – an apocalyptic cult swept through the Native American tribal communities of the Great Plains, the Lakota Sioux in particular (La Barre, 1972). A fin-desiècle reprise of several earlier outbreaks of ghost dancing, the participants believed that their ritual would result in the white man’s defeat, the return of the buffalo, the restitution of traditional tribal hunting grounds and the reincarnation of their noble warrior ancestors in an old world renewed. A circular dance in which women played a prominent part, the Ghost Dance was the last gasp of the defeated Native American nation and it ended, as did analogous episodes of ghost dancing throughout Africa, Indonesia, Melanesia and New Zealand (Ehrenreich, 2007), in broken hearts buried at Wounded Knee. Neo-burlesque is no wounded knee. Twisted ankle, possibly. Aching joints, probably. Hip replacement in later life, almost certainly. It is incontestable, however, that ghosts, spectres, phantoms, hauntings, shadows and grisly manifestations of the heretofore surround the reanimated art form. Consider Dita von Teese’s (2006) startling claim that she channels the spirits of golden-age burlesquers like the legendary Lili St. Cyr. In her empirical study of Canada’s neo-burlesque subculture,

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Blanchette (2014, p. 165) likewise describes the ‘strikingly uncanny’ experience of watching women shed their inhibitions, and outfits, in order to invoke the drag queen within. In her pioneering analysis of British burlesquers, Ferreday (2008) not only notes the disconcerting ‘invisibility’ of contemporary femininity, but also reports that performers are ‘haunted’ by performances past. In her first novel featuring neo-burlesque superstar Tiger Starr, Immodesty Blaize (2010) recounts the mysterious, otherworldly, dreamlike experience of putting on a stage show, My Bare Lady, and how the ghost of her grandmother, a golden age burlesquer called Coco Schnell, serves as an ever-watchful fairy godmother. And, who could forget the famous photograph of Dirty Martini on Chanel’s iconic stairway, which features a white-suited revenant of Coco welcoming the XXXL apparition?

RETRO MANES Nostalgia, Boym (2001, p. xvi) claims, ‘creates a phantom homeland’ that ‘breeds monsters’. It stalks modernity, Bonnett (2016, p. 4) adds, ‘as an unwelcome double’. It is a perpetual ‘presence’ that’s especially felt, Harper (1966) says, in the aftermath of trials, tribulations and travails. Ghosts haunt our findings too. There’s something spectral, is there not, about re-enacted routines, recreated costumes, replicated looks, styles, attitudes, everyday apparel, etc. The pseudonyms informants adopt and the stage personae they employ are apparitions of a sort. Long-dead legends like Marilyn and Mae are worshipped. Chauvinists, capitalists and crabbed feminists are demonised. Many speak of the otherworldly experience of stripping on stage. At the same time, however, they never strip naked, though nudity’s revenant presence shapes the proceedings. And then, of course, there are the raw

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recruits of Lady Flo who are urged to articulate that phantom orgasm… The ghostly girdle that encircles neo-burlesque is no less evident in the community’s haunted cultural hinterland. That is, their distant yet undead memories of the books, movies, songs, TV series and so on that fired their desire to dance, invoked the burlesquer within and they return to repeatedly, not unlike spirit guides at a séance. Cherry Lyly Darling seeks inspiration in Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino and Fritz Lang films, as well as John Houston’s classic Moulin Rouge. ‘I watch over and over again’, she confesses, ‘the Walt Disney movies of my childhood’. For Audrey, it is Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, Marlene Dietrich movies and Visconti’s The Damned that draw her back repeatedly. Muriel, meanwhile, is more of a Fellini fan, a Barbarella obsessive, a Brigitte Bardot aficionado, Et Dieu Créa la Femme in particular. Muriel, meanwhile, is even more enamoured by books, books and more books. As a teenager, she was fascinated by the eighteenth century. Anything written about Casanova or Marie Antoinette was consumed and re-consumed with relish. Bambi Freckles is no less fascinated by Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, as is Barbie I Doll with Nabokov’s Lolita, Woolf’s Orlando and Colette’s Claudine series. ‘I love to play the Lolitas’, she reveals, ‘I read the book when a teenager and several times since’. Bambi Freckles, admittedly, isn’t just a bookworm. A designer and artist in her twenties, she reveals that cartoon girls, such as Betty Boop, Jessica Rabbit and Wonder Woman, initiated her interest in Burlesque pin-ups. And Audrey, when not watching The Damned, found time for the Crazy Horse TV show, traditionally broadcast on New Year’s Eve. ‘It was the only day of the year’, she discloses, ‘I could see beautiful women, dancing, with beautiful bodies, naked. I was getting excited waiting for the final French cancan. Sadly, this yearly ritual is not on TV anymore’.

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For makeup artist Krystie Red Sugar, it’s the 1950s era music played and replayed by her retro-minded mother that was the key to her recruitment: My mother got stuck in the 1950s. When I was a kid, I was not listening to the music of my generation, or very little. At home it was Frank Sinatra, rock ’n’ roll and jazz and rockabilly. Most pin-ups I know have inherited their liking for retro music from their mother or grandmother or were initiated by relatives. My mother gave me the most beautiful vintage clothes and bags I have. Some of them pertained to my grandmother. Nostalgia is transmitted from generation to generation. However, it is Barbie I Doll, whose radical grandmother fought the good fight for feminism in days gone by, who best expresses the community’s revenant sentiment: When women undress, what they hide socially appear on the surface. Many of my women friends have a phantasm of femininity which they do not assume socially. Wearing seductive lingerie is the private expression of a femininity they are not selfconfident enough to display in public.

INCORPOREAL CONCEPTS Spectral smalls are one thing – ghosts of G-strings past, shades of suspenders to come – but when it comes to big ideas, it’s necessary to think outside the basque. And tempting as it is to return to the first principles and presiding philosophical spirits of the French revolutionaries, those who fought ferociously for a completely new historical dispensation, they

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too were in thrall to times past, eager to ‘commune with the ghosts of ancient Rome’ (Schama, 1989, p. 171). Instead, let’s turn to the leading latter-day thinker on matters hauntological, Jacques Derrida. A learned burlesquer, whose iconoclastic irreverence knew no bounds, Derrida was a demon deconstructionist. He made his name with radical re-readings of the western philosophical canon, re-readings which proved spinetingling for some and bloodcurdling for others. Despite these, he had long been haunted – taunted, rather – for his failure to engage with historical materialism. Faced, however, with Francis Fukuyama’s infamous yet influential claim that history had ended, communism had collapsed, and western capitalism had won the cold war, Derrida (1994) responded with Spectres of Marx. Written at a time when Marx’s intellectual legacy was at its lowest ebb, Derrida disinterred Highgate Cemetery’s most renowned incumbent, arranged an academic inquest and performed a forensic philosophical autopsy. Taking The Communist Manifesto’s iconic opening line as its point of departure, and refracting his reading though the ghost of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Derrida declaimed that, at a time when time is out of joint, western capitalism will continue to be stalked by Marx’s spectres and hauntology will supersede ontology as an existential cynosure. Conceptually, the power of Derrida’s (1994) phantoms inheres in their in-betweenness. Hovering betwixt existence and non-existence, absence and presence, visibility and invisibility, material and immaterial, surface and depth, nature and culture, and use-value and exchange-value, the ghost is a liminal thing that dissolves binary oppositions (such as those that haunt our understanding of nostalgia). As Weinstock (2013, p. 64) observes, ‘Ghosts … violate conceptual thinking based on dichotomous oppositions. They are neither fully present nor absent, neither living nor dead’. More pertinently,

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Derrida’s revenant (meaning ‘that which comes back’) blurs the boundary between past and present. It invokes the strange temporality of haunting, whereby ghosts function as a signifier of slippages between then and now, pre- and post-, the hitherto and whither. Part legacy, part prophesy, the spectre ‘begins by coming back’ (Buse & Stott, 1999, p. 10). That is to say, ghosts depart from the past and arrive in the present, often as portents of things to come. They involve a dual movement of return and inauguration, much like the retro brands described earlier. Although Derrida’s act of exhumation was denounced by high priests of critical theory – Negri (1999, p. 14) regards it as ‘a regressive step back’, Eagleton (1999, p. 84) pours scorn on an ‘embarrassingly egregious blunder’ – hauntology has been embraced by the laity. Spectral studies are making their presence felt in manifold fields of popular culture, including painting, photography, music, television, film and fashion, where la mode rétro obtains (Blanco & Peeren, 2013a). The enthusiasm is understandable, though, not only because the spectre provides a compelling metaphor that is relevant to contemporary retromania (Reynolds, 2011), but it also offers a conceptual framework that fits what we’ve found in the fans, frills and fishnets-filled world of neo-burlesque. As Fredric Jameson (1999, p. 44), formerly a harsh critic of deconstruction, freely concedes, ‘spectrality … opens up wholly new and unexpected lines of rereading’.

DERRIDA DENIED Yet for all the discussion it generated, Derrida’s hauntology suffers from three significant shortcomings. First, it is plagued by patriarchal presumptions. Dismissed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1995) as a how-to-read-your-father

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book, Spectres of Marx presents hauntology as a wholly masculine pursuit. Whereas, she suggests, Derrida plays Hamlet to Marx’s ghost, there is no place for Gertrude or Ophelia. However, subsequent studies, such as those of Munford and Waters (2014), as well as our own modest contribution, suggest that ‘categories of subjectification like gender, sexuality, and race can themselves be conceived as spectral’ (Blanco & Peeren, 2013b, p. 310). Second, his revenants are one-dimensional. They are spectral stereotypes, so to speak. They refuse to reflect the fact that ghosts come in many shapes and forms, which vary from place to place, culture to culture and, as Finucane (1996) records, through time. Ghosts have a genealogy, and geography, of their own. Some are silent, others speak when they are spoken to; some are invisible, others are all too apparent; some are frightening, others are frivolous; some are preoccupied with past injustices, others provide premonitions of things to come; some are companionable – the so-called grateful dead – others are cruel and unusual and duly punished with extreme prejudice (Clarke, 2013; Reece, 2012). Good ghosts, fun fetches, playful phantoms; it is this side of neo-burlesque where hauntology fails its conceptual audition. Third, it is noteworthy that the dead and buried deconstructionist doesn’t refer to spatial aspects of spectrality. Specifically, the haunted house. Phantoms are emplaced as often as not in crypts, cellars, caskets, cemeteries, crenelated castles and clearings in the woods, to say nothing of dungeons, staircases, churches, hotels, theatres, sailing ships (like the Marie Celeste), motor cars (such as Stephen King’s Christine), battlefields (Stalingrad, Little Big Horn, Culloden, etc.) and all sorts of other locales such as Limbo, Purgatory and, if Ghostbusters is any indication, the New York subway. Theme parks are not short of phoney phantoms either, everything

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from ubiquitous ghost trains and Disney’s haunted mansion to George Saunders’ (1996) fictional CivilWarLand. Neo-burlesque is not just a spectral but a spatially emplaced art form – opulent night clubs, spartan rehearsal places, crowded dressing rooms – and it is in this regard that Derrida’s hauntology falls especially short.

THE GRAPES OF WRAITH Luckily, there is another contender for post of hauntologistin-chief: Walter Benjamin. As Richter (2002) reveals, Benjamin’s writings are replete with revenants. From the spook he saw as a seven-year-old (‘a ghost that busied itself at a wooden frame from which silk fabrics were hanging’), through his teenage attempt to formulate ‘the laws of the ghostly’ (where the precocious brat distinguished between ‘spectral’ and ‘demonic’ historical epochs), past his enraptured reaction to Louis Aragon’s visionary surrealist novel Paysan de Paris (captivated, Walt could only cope with a couple of pages at a time) to his magnum opus on the Parisian shopping arcades, which is a ghost book in more ways than one (since the manuscript was lost in 1940, when Benjamin fled Nazi-occupied France), Walter’s phantasmagorical publications are populated by platoons of phantoms. In the Arcades Project, Convolute L, for instance, he recounts a dread-inducing dream: While I was in the company of a friend, a ghost appeared to me in the window of the ground floor of a house to our right. And as we walked on, the ghost accompanied us from inside all the houses. It passed through all the walls and always remained at the same height with us … The path we travel through the arcades is fundamentally such a ghost walk. (Benjamin, 1999, p. 409)

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On Richter’s (2002, p. 5) reading, the ‘entire movement through the arcades of Paris – the traces of the past and the future inscribed in them, the haunting speculations about modernity to which their seemingly endless rows of shop windows and subterranean catacombs give rise – can be conceptualised as … an uncanny stroll, a ghostly wandering in which nothing is what it seems’. The task of the reader, he concludes, is not to exorcise Benjamin’s phantoms but to embrace them and employ their spectral presence to help us better understand ‘the purgatory of consumerism’ (Parini, 1998, p. 72), where the ‘latest thing’ is the ‘always the same thing through and through’ and where fashion is ‘a form of compulsive repetition in the mask of novelty’. Retro redux, in other words. Walter Benjamin was not only a hauntologist before Derrida danced with the dead, but, if our neo-burlesque evidence is any indication, he was also a better ghost bustier than his deconstructive descendent. There’s no denying, though, Derrida’s (1994, p. 135) assertion that, ‘The spectral rumour … and the spirit of nostalgia cross all borders’. And, it’s not just geographical borders it crosses. According to Hofer of all people, nostalgia was caused by disruptive ‘animal spirits’, its sufferers possessed a lifeless, haunted countenance, and its symptoms included an eerie ability to hear voices or see ghosts (Boym, 2001). When burlesque, analogously, burst on to the American stage in the late 1860s, its exponents were denounced as demented degenerates who invoked the spectre of prostitution. As with wicked witches of yore, what’s more, false rumours of burlesquers’ untoward activities soon took wing. Lydia Thompson’s horsewhipping of a chauvinist critic never actually happened but she built it into her stage routine and it haunted her thereafter (Allen, 1991).

9 RETRO RISING REDUX

The queue stretched into the distance. Several hundred strong, it started at the Palace Theatre and snaked along Shaftsbury Avenue in London’s West End. This was no ordinary queue, however. It was a retro queue, a queue made up of Harry Potter fans. They were chanting. They were singing. They were eagerly awaiting the release of ‘Friday Forty’ ­tickets for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. More than a few of them – fully grown adults, let it be said – were wearing ­wizard’s hats, sporting runes-covered costumes and brandishing magic wands or broomsticks. Often both. Experientially, it was a midday throwback to the peak of Pottermania when countless thousands of young children worldwide queued outside bookstores at midnight, determined to get hold of the latest instalment of the spellbinding story of ‘the boy who lived’, a story that started way back in the dim and distant days of 1997. But this was September, 2016! The boys and girls who grew up with Harry Potter hadn’t grown out of it. They couldn’t get enough of it. They were desperately seeking more, more, more, notwithstanding the manifold movies, the DVDs, the audio-books, the illustrated editions, the theme 125

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parks, the tie-in exhibitions and the vast tide of tat – sorry, collectibles – that had washed over, and submerged, consumer society in the interim. Simultaneously old-fashioned yet bang up to date (i.e. set in the present day in a ‘traditional’ British boarding school), Harry Potter is not only the epitome of a retro product/ service, but it also spans the on-going ‘nostalgia boom’ first identified by BusinessWeek journalists Naughton and Vlasic (1998). The Mousetrap of the twenty-first century, The Cursed Child will run and run. It has opened on Broadway, to rave reviews, and an Australian production commences in early 2019. Potter pedants, admittedly, might feel inclined to point out that Cursed Child is a sequel, set in the distant future when Harry’s son Severus sets off for a rebuilt and rehabilitated Hogwarts. However, that distant future – as laid down in the final chapter of 2007’s climactic volume Deathly Hallows – is almost already in the past, not unlike those of Blade Runner, Back to the Future 2 and 2001: A Space Odyssey. On top of that, the ‘futuristic’ storyline of Cursed Child revolves around time-turner travel back to the good old days of Goblet of Fire when Cedric Diggory bit the dust. Or did he? In this regard, it’s worth remembering that the Potterverse is also in possession of a revenue-streaming prequel, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which is set in Prohibition Era New York and on the cusp of releasing its first sequel (of five, reportedly). As one movie reviewer pointed out about the initial episode, ‘Fantastic Beasts … is a nostalgic film about a nostalgic past, set in a world Harry Potter himself dreams about. It is womb within womb, within womb’ (Long, 2016, p. 12).

THE WOMB BOOM It thus seems that, far from terminating, the ‘nostalgia boom’ is proliferating. Its own heritage has a heritage and that, in

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turn, is a resource for the resourceful. The temporal apocalypse anticipated by The Onion, when the past catches up with the present, hasn’t come to pass. The past is a perpetual present, a gift that keeps on giving and growing and blooming and booming. Our retro condition isn’t so much manic as chronic, less a wave than a waterfall. So much so that the four-fold typology outlined in Chapter 3 has fallen behind the times. In addition to relics, reproductions, revivals and replicants, at least three more forms of retro are readily identifiable: retro-chrono, retro-combo and retro-proto. The first of these refers to a situation where several separate epochs, or chronologies, are in play at any one time, as in the case of Weezer’s Buddy Holly, which brings together the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, or the Terminator chronicles, which seem to have disappeared up their own temporal fundament with 2015s Genisys (albeit another iteration, complete with the original cast and James ­Cameron as director, is in the ‘I’ll be Back’ pipeline). Retro-combo alludes to a situation where numerous non-related objects or entities from the same epoch are brought together and combined with brio. Ready Player One takes place in a futuristic postcapitalist consumer society where the downtrodden masses spend their desolate days in a virtual digital world, OASIS, peopled by assorted popular culture characters from the video games, comic books and Steven Spielberg movies of the 1980s (aptly, Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel was brought to the screen by Spielberg himself). Retro-proto pertains to products or services that were retro to begin with, which are brought back periodically, and where each iteration adds another l­ ayer of brand new past-ness. The current state of the $25 billion Harry Potter franchise is a good example of retro-proto, as is the much-loved Morgan sports car company. From the very outset, its wooden-framed, open-topped, running boardsequipped motor vehicles looked like a World War I ‘flying

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machine’ (cf. the company’s winged logo) and its latest incarnation, an electric-powered three-wheeler with ‘wartimestyle’ headlamps that evoke the blackouts of the Blitz, takes its cue from the Aero Two of the 1930s (de B ­ urton, 2016). The distinctions between retro-chrono, retro-combo and retro-proto are not clear cut. But, the merest glance across contemporary consumer culture reveals that past-ness is proliferating. Retro nowadays isn’t so much a-go-go, as a volcano, a tornado, an inferno. Little wonder that leading management gurus advise companies to bring back old brands rather than create them anew (Johnson, 2018) and the ever-up-to-date Economist (2014, p. 76) now accepts that ‘the best way forward is backwards’. There’s a sweet spot, Thompson (2017) states, between convention and invention, familiarity and newness, heretofore and never-before, where innovation and renovation combine to trigger a cultural retroquake (Avatar is Pocahontas retold, Titanic is Romeo and Juliet revisited, Terminator is a robot Frankenstein). The avant-garde is aprèsgarde (Aspden, 2007). Retro-garde, rather. This backwards-is-forwards philosophy isn’t confined to objects, artefacts, stuff or even experiences. It’s evident conceptually as well. Noted in Chapter 2, numerous types of nostalgia have been identified – reflective, restorative, existential, aesth­etic, retreat, retrieval, etc. – and that list is far from exhaustive. Apart from vintage variants that we haven’t even considered, such as Davis’s (1979) celebrated distinction between first-order, second-order and third-order nostalgia, latter-day additions to the inventory include negative nostalgia (Wilson, 2005), sustainable nostalgia (Davies, 2010) and premature nostalgia (Child, 2017). In addition to the adjectival adjuncts, the noun itself has been transformed. As also previously noted, the meanings of ‘nostalgia’ nowadays – the ­definitions, the ­connotations, the associations, the overtones and so on – are very different from those of 20 years ago,

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let alone 50 or 100. And, although these antecedents may have been superseded, they haven’t gone away. Much like the Morgan motor car, meanings accrete, meanings accumulate and meanings multiply, they add to the noun’s semantic sedimentation.

POMO PICK ’N’ MIX As if that weren’t enough to be getting along with, there is no lack of alternative theoretical frameworks. We chose to view our findings through the theoretical lens of Benjamin’s (1973a) theses of history, partly because it hadn’t been previously employed by consumer researchers; partly because Benjamin was fascinated by the flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture; partly because he refused to follow the party line on Marx’s historical materialism; and partly because Walter’s angel of history, a 1920 pen-and-ink sketch by Paul Klee, looks a little bit like a brazen burlesque dancer making mock of Victoria’s Secret catwalk models, who are required to wear big white wings while strutting their stuff (Fig. 9.1). That said, Derrida’s (1994, p. 74) self-styled ‘onto-theoarchaeo-teleology’ would have worked almost as well as ­Benjamin’s theoretical armature, not least because his dissident Dada-esque attitude is very much in keeping with our informants’ irreverent ethos. As is that of Hakim Bey (1994), who believes that only play, physical contact and bodily sensations, such as those enacted in dance, can combat the ‘spooky’ commodification of avant-garde art. As indeed is the restless spirit of Marx, whose knockabout description of a dancing table in the famous first chapter of Capital is nothing if not a neo-burlesque routine in utero. It struts on stage, strips off the vestments of exchange value and exposes the use-value undies beneath. Karl Marx was the Billy Minsky of dialectical materialism.

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Fig. 9.1  The Angel of Burlesque

Source: Hilary Downey (after Paul Klee)

Derrida’s deconstruction may have had its day, but its ­phantom presence is felt in assorted ‘after theory’ alternatives (Nealon, 2012). Collectively known as ‘post-postmodernism’

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(Cova, Maclaran, & Bradshaw, 2013), these ideas come in copious shapes and forms. They include hypermodernism, ­Lipovetsky’s (2005) claim that we live in an era where consumption is all-consuming in almost every sphere of social life; digi-modernism, Kirby’s (2009) contention that popular culture is being radically transformed by the explosive growth of social networking, computer gaming, reality television and CGI-3D cinema; meta-modernism, Vermeulen and van der Akker’s (2010) mooted mode of neo-romantic discourse – already popular among architects, artists and ­ movie-makers – that oscillates between modernist enthusiasm and postmodernist irony; altermodernism, Bourriaud’s (2009) bold hypothesis that the void beyond the postmodern is akin to a cultural constellation, a conceptual archipelago, where multitudes of alternative aesthetic possibilities prevail; accelerationism, Land’s (2014) counterintuitive yet compelling suggestion that ever-faster consumption of post-­capitalism’s spectral commodities will hasten its inevitable collapse; and, perhaps the most retro-Derridean of all, McCarthy’s (2009, pp. 4–5) neo-absurdist notion of necronauticalism, whose provocative manifesto venerates: Not the Dorian Gray who projects such a perfect figure out into the world, but the rotting flesh assemblage hanging in his attic; not the Frankenstein who would, through his creation, see himself in the likeness of God, who stands like Caspar David Friedrich on high mountaintops to contemplate the sublime – but his morbid double who confronts him there with the reality of industry, the stench of meat-packing factories; not the imperial dreams in the head of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton but rather his blackened, frostbitten toes which … he and his crew were forced to

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chop from their own feet, cook on their stove and eat. Necronauts are the poets of the antipodes of poetry, artists of art’s polar opposite, its Antarctica. Yet, for all this ‘after-Theory’ afflatus, the post-postmodern condition is characterised by ‘re-turns’, by looking back to see ahead, by what the French call reculer pour mieux sauter. Whereas postmodernism was associated with ‘de-words’ à la détournement, deconstruction and delegitimisation, postpostmodernism is typified by terms of ‘re-making’ (Fjellestad & Engberg, 2012, n.p.n.): ‘Thus we remix, reconfigure, remediate, recombine, reorganize, reengage, relocate, recontextualize, reassess, reposition, remythologize, reconstruct, revoke, reconstitute, recollect, recast, rebrand, reframe, remap, revisit, repurpose, remobilize, rethink, reinterrogate, rearticulate, reconceptualize, recompose, reevaluate, redirect, rerun, renew, reconsider, reshape, refashion and even rehumanize’.

UPPING THE ANTECEDENT Another old idea that has belatedly broken into the citadel of marketing and consumer research is actor-network theory (ANT). Developed during the early 1980s by French philosophers of science Bruno Latour and Michel Callon – along with British sociologist John Law – and having successfully supplied ‘a basic toolbox for literally thousands of scholars in anthropology, ethnography and indeed every field in the social sciences’ (Harman, 2018, p. 108), ANT has latterly been embraced by consumer culture theorists. Alongside assorted sociological concepts such as Bourdieu’s distinctions, Giddens’s structurations, Warde’s practices and Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages (Arnould & Thompson, 2015), ANT is first amongst equals nowadays (Canniford & Badje, 2015).

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It doesn’t take a Latour to see that ANT is applicable to neo-burlesque. The art form’s emphasis on audience participation, personal appearance, persona creation, skills acquisition, fashion brand association, media outlet interest and all-round theatricality, not least how to move with poise, elegance, allure, etc., is closely akin to that reported in Parmentier and Fischer’s (2015) empirical study of America’s Next Top Model (for fashion show runways, where models strut with attitude, read neo-burlesque stage shows, where dancers strip with attitude). The maintenance of a highly heterogeneous actor-network involving elite runners and just-about joggers (Thomas, Price, & Schau, 2013) is also paralleled in neo-burlesque, where neophyte and semi-professional dancers bump ’n’ grind with very different degrees of expertise (and where all the fun of the fan echoes all the fun of the fun run). Furthermore, the enormous pride that some plus-sized customers take in their pulchritude – and lobby the thin-wins fashion industry to cater for their big’s-better needs (Scaraboto & Fischer, 2013) – is, if anything, even more apparent in the neo-burlesque arena. Extra meat on one’s bones means there’s more to shake, sashay and shimmy with sass and a smile. ‘This ain’t fat’, Candy Baby Caramelo boasts, while flirtatiously flaunting her hefty haunches, ‘it’s filet mignon!’ Every ripple, she adds, coquettishly caressing colossal love handles, ‘is a new adventure!’ (Blanchette, 2014, p. 175). The sheer heft of Candy Baby’s love handles and the capacious commodiousness of her costume, attest to perhaps the most pertinent aspect of ANT in relation to neo-burlesque. It sets very great store by inanimate objects and non-human entities (Harman, 2018). ANT is nothing if not m ­ aterialist. Flat ontology notwithstanding, it assumes that objects are far from prostrate. And whatever else is said about neo-­ burlesque, when it comes to stuff the art form is more stuffed than Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve. Whether it be fishnets,

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false eyelashes, f­eather  boas, figure-hugging corsetry or fat tubes of fake tan, there’s nowhere better to witness ANT’s ‘dance of agency’ (Epp & Price, 2010, p. 821). And, as for the props that form part of practically every dance routine, let’s just say that pole dancers have it easy by comparison. A short short-list of the stuff that neo-burlesquers employ in their acts includes whips, canes, scarves, gloves, umbrellas, balloons, bananas, chili peppers, champagne bottles, bubble baths, birdcages, parrots, pigeons, snakes, spiders, horses, handcuffs, ropes, roller-skates, pogo sticks, palm fronds, ­crucifixes, air guitars and giant vibrators.

OBJECT-ORIENTATED ODALISQUES Some objects, however, are especially esteemed. First amongst equals is footwear, high heels above all, Louboutin stilettos in particular: Louboutin shoes are a paragon of sexiness. Pigalle or Lady Peep models are classic in the burlesque community. Louboutin is associated with burlesque through his collaboration with Pigalle’s cabarets (Crazy Horse and Folies Bergère) and his muse Dita von Teese. Louboutin’s shoes make women feel confident and empower them. (Muriel, 40s, computer programmer) And that they most certainly do. One informant reflects on the fact that she wears haughty high heels every day in order to help her dominate and, moreover, intimidate male co-workers (‘I have a feeling of superiority, difficult to explain’). Another says that when not wearing heels she feels fragile, subordinate (‘just like when I was a kid’). When wearing stilettos, the opposite obtains. A synecdoche

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for supremacy, stilettos state that the boot is on the other foot. The Financial Times agrees: ‘stilettos project confidence, the sharp point of power that underpins a calm façade … A woman in a point is someone who means business’ (Ellison, 2016, p. 4). Compared to the difficulty of dancing in high heels, putting on lipstick may seem relatively straightforward. Lipstick, though, is no less iconic than the Louboutin stiletto – its ostentatious application is a technique taught in class – and, if anything, possesses even greater cultural value. Apart from the so-called ‘lipstick effect’, where sales soar in stressful times, and, of course, the ‘lipstick liberation’ strand of second-wave feminism (Scott, 2005), ruby red lips speak volumes about the nature of neo-burlesque and its opposition to natural cosmetic treatments. Even in its commodified form, lippy stands for seduction, emancipation, womanhood and the golden age of glamour. According to Marie-Cécile’s field notes: In times of economic and social distress, women have resisted oppression through colouring their face. During the second world war, lipstick was encouraged to keep women’s and soldier’s spirits up. Some colours of lipstick publicized included Victory Red by Elizabeth Arden and Tussy’s Fighting Red. The increased interest in burlesque and pin-up style over the last decade, and especially in France since 2007, parallels a deteriorating economic situation. Women put on a mask of happiness and frivolity to hide certain forms of distress. No object, though, more reflects the materiality of the movement than the fan (Weldon, 2010). Burlesquers are fans of fans; aficionados, in fact. Sally Rand’s fan dance of the early 1930s is regarded as a landmark routine and its rudiments are taught to today’s tyros. True, trainees work with much

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smaller fans than Rand’s gigantic feathered propellers, which require great skill and considerable strength to manoeuvre, and many performers make mock of the larger-than-life legend with tongue-in-cheek alternatives including hubcaps, dinner plates, electric office fans and so forth. However, using fans to reveal and conceal – little by little, more or less – remains the apex of the neo-burlesque art form, a sweeping, swirling and swooshing signifier of subcultural capital: Tiger knew now to step up the pace. She covered herself in fans of thick ostrich plumes and descended her plinth. Joined by a chorus of thirty flapping wings behind her she revealed and concealed her glorious hourglass figure, using the feathers to tantalize with the kind of expertise that made the enormous fans appear to be weightlessly and flirtatiously caressing her. In fact, they were excruciatingly heavy, with a twelve-foot wingspan. They often gave her cramps in her hands, but she would never let the audience see that. She rotated the fans in turn through the air above her head in seamless figures of eight, then drew them fluttering slowly over her form. She used them as majestic peacock tails, cheekily revealing her derrière, but always using one of the fans to carefully conceal the right parts, constantly teasing. Diamond powder shimmered in the lights as it fluttered from the feathers with each swish. The audience sat in awed silence. (Blaize, 2009, pp. 19–20) Fanspeak, furthermore, is an ancient language, one that was universally understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Back then, demure debutants made their feelings known with a quick flick of the wrist and snappy signal of fan semaphore: folded over the heart (you are my true love);

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pressed to the lips (you may kiss me); resting on the right cheek (yes, you can), resting on left cheek (no, you can’t); furiously flung to the ground by today’s trainees (fan dancing is a lot harder than it looks!).

ANT CAN’T Applicable though it is to neo-burlesque, ANT isn’t irreproachable. According to Harman (2016, p. 2), the concept suffers from its failure to account for objects’ relative significance, their symbolic specific gravity. It grants equal weight to ‘supersonic jets, palm trees, asphalt, Batman, square circles, the Tooth Fairy, Napoleon III, al-Farabi, Hillary Clinton, the city of Odessa, Tolkein’s imaginary Rivendell … since all are equally objects’. The neo-burlesque community, by contrast, clearly believes that some objects, if not more important, are much weightier than others, fans, footwear and full-on lipstick in particular. Additionally, ANT can’t adequately accommodate sudden or momentous change; specifically, transformational changes from one qualitative state to another. ANT’s major conceptual failing, Harman (2018, p. 111) claims, is its ‘excessive gradualism, its inability to distinguish fundamentally between trivial and transformative events’. It thus seems that whereas ANT can cope with ‘nostalgia’, as the construct’s meaning has gradually evolved over hundreds of years, it struggles with the notion of ‘revolutionary’ occurrences, be they political, cultural, social or technological. Metaphorically too, ANT fails to appreciate the full transformational power of figurative thinking – that is, that something radically new can be created by an adroit analogy – even though ANT is itself a massive mixed metaphor, where flattening, entanglement, stabilisation, translation and overflow,

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to name but a few, rub shoulders with coupling, decoupling, territorialisation, assemblages, relationships, hybridity and black boxes. Even John Law (1991, p. 11), one of the ANThill’s foremost architects, concedes that ANT it is ‘a powerhouse of difficult and irreducible metaphors’. This is not a trivial foible, because metaphors matter.

10 DANCING IS LIFE

In mid-2008, just as the great banking meltdown liquidised Wall Street, the world economy was teetering on the brink of the abyss and the Occupy movement was rumbling in the tummy of the anti-capitalist community, a remarkable archaeological treasure trove was discovered off the coast of east Africa. Amazingly, it was none other than the fabled hoard of Cif Amotan II, a freed slave from Antioch who’d amassed a vast fortune in the first century of the Common Era. Incredibly, the recovered treasures comprised Cif’s entire collection of artworks, which were being transported to a temple in Aksum when a terrible storm struck the trading vessel. And all was lost. And all was eventually rescued, thanks to an anonymous artworld benefactor, who stepped in to finance the recovery of the wreck of the good ship Apistos. More than 100 monumental sculptures were painstakingly raised from the seabed by a crack team of marine archaeologists. Some figurines were intact, fortuitously. Others, regrettably, were badly damaged. And all, unsurprisingly, were encrusted with barnacles, petrified coral fronds and a cornucopia of undersea accretions (Cumming, 2017). 139

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Nine years later, in April 2017, Cif’s artworks were finally placed on display in the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, a commodious gallery owned by Francois Pinault, the CEO of Kering (a French luxury goods conglomerate whose stable of world-renowned brands includes Gucci, YSL, Balenciaga and Bottega Veneta). The anonymous benefactor behind the rescue operation was unveiled at the same time. Yes, it was none other than Damien Hirst, the middle-aged ‘bad boy’ of BritArt, whose commercial cachet coincidentally peaked in late 2008, when he famously sold £200 million of his own artworks in a special sale at Sotheby’s (on the very day that Wall Street sank into a sea of red). Astonishingly, several of the Cif’s supersized antiquities looked as though they had been inspired by Damien Hirst’s greatest hits (most notably, a tiger shark attacking Andromeda) and more than a few appeared to be modelled on strangely familiar Old Masters (Durer’s Hands, Caravaggio’s Medusa and William Blake’s Ghost of a Flea), as well as selected icons of the twentyfirst century popular culture. A sculpture of Aten, the ancient Egyptian giver of life, was the spitting image of Rhianna (no umbrella, however). A fearsome figurine of Kali fighting a Hydra was the double, near enough, of Katie Price (in all her double D glory). And, a statue of Cif himself was a certain BritArt bad boy holding the hand of a barnacled, be-coralled, brine-blemished Mickey Mouse (or, maybe, it was Minnie). Anagram aficionados also noted that, when unscrambled, Cif Amotan II reads ‘I am a fiction’. Apistos, the sunken trading vessel that miraculously managed to travel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean some 2,000 years before the existence of the Suez Canal, is Hellenic Greek for ‘unbelievable’ (Januszczak, 2017). TAKING THE APISTOS Arguably the reductio ad absurdiam of retro – past and present combined in a gigantic Bronze Age burlesque, where the

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Flea colossus alone is 18 metres tall – Hirst’s monumental Venetian exhibition was immediately dismissed as a monstrosity, an affront, a big bad joke. With titanic tropes and shipwreck similes much to the fore, it was variously interpreted as a metaphor for Damien Hirst’s scuppered career, for the foundering of the fatuous, flatulent and FFS artworld, for the capsized state of allegedly unsinkable late capitalism and, rather more charitably, as a clever comment on the elephantine commodification of contemporary consumer culture. For some, or The Guardian at any rate, it was a welcome return to form by the angry young man of the BritArt revolution whose supersized ideas subverted the ascetic aesthetic preferences of polite society. What goes around comes around, just like Damien’s spin art, death masks and denticular denizens of the deep (Cumming, 2017). In keeping with this ‘revolutionary’ analogy, which originally referred to the circular orbits of the planets in the Copernican conception of the universe (Jay, 2003), Hirst’s artworks circle and revolve in accordance with the cycles of capitalism and curatorship. One of the stars of the ‘unbelievable’ show, a gorgeous golden sculpture of the severed head of Medusa with gaping maw, serpentine hairstyle and the posthumous ability to petrify passers-by in awestruck admiration, later turned up at The Classical Now exhibition of March 2018. Devoted to the continuing interaction of classical and contemporary art, the show included Grayson Perry’s ancient Greekinspired vases, Pablo Picasso’s sketches of priapic Minotaurs, Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon rendition of the Parthenon, Yves Klein’s marble Venus in his signature shade of blue and Leo Calliard’s ‘Hipster in Stone’ series of Graeco-Roman statues draped in Nike tee-shirts, wearing Oakley sunglasses, clutching Apple iPhones, etc. (Squire, 2018; Wise, 2018). At the exact same time, Hirst’s own gallery in ­Newport Street featured Rachel Howard’s Repetition is Truth:

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Via  Dolorosa, a striking series of 14 enormous canvasses that combined the traditional Stations of the Cross with the cruciform, arms-extended posture of a tortured prisoner in Abu-Ghraib, whose photograph shocked the world in 2004. Repetition may or may not be truthful, as Howard’s artworks imply, but even in today’s purportedly post-truth world, retro fusions of old and new are everywhere, turning and returning, going round and around and back again. The revolutionary metaphor beloved by the ancients is, to paraphrase Hovis’s much-recycled advertising slogan, as good today as it’s always been. Except…

DAMIEN, WE HAVE A PROBLEM The problem with slogans like ‘as good today as it’s always been’ is that it’s not as good today as it’s always been. Incessant iteration atrophies. Constant recurrence results in ruination. And, analogies are not exempt. Metaphors, no matter how powerful, gradually lose their impact, their freshness, their life-force. Dead metaphors, Donoghue (2014, p. 55) explains, are ubiquitous, not least in mindless clichés that people parrot daily: clichés like, ‘the heart of the matter, in the fullness of time, the legs of the table, the heel of the hunt, comfort zone, brass tacks, the leaf of the book, picture of health, a wild-goose chase, presence of mind, creature of habit, towering oaks, wolf in sheep’s clothing, Freudian slip, nowin situation, toxic assets, push comes to shove or any of the thousands of such phrases – most of them metaphors – that were once in high repute’. So prevalent is this degenerative propensity that it is known as ‘the career of metaphor’, an apposite allusion to the length of its working life (Bowdle & Gentner, 2005). In essence, this describes how ‘A figure of speech that starts

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off striking soon becomes standard, then increasingly stale and, in the fullness of time, a stiff or deceased metaphor’ (Brown, 2008, p. 8). Marketing and consumer research, Kitchen (2008) likewise claims, is replete with long-in-thetooth analogies including the product life cycle, the wheel of retailing, marketing-as-warfare, relationship marketing, viral marketing, the marketing mix and many more besides. The latter-day embrace of actor-network theory, noted previously, is just the latest in a long line of borrowings from the metaphor bank of adjacent academic disciplines. The fact that ANT is a massive mixed metaphor, moreover, is neither here nor there, since grammarians’ longstanding jeremiad against mixing metaphors is losing traction, except among the self-appointed protectors of proper English. The problem, according to leading literary critic James Wood (2008, p. 155), does not lie with mixed metaphors, which often prove remarkably inventive, but with mixed clichés like ‘out of a sea of despair he has pulled forth a plumb’. Damien Hirst take note… Another example of a mixed up, arguably exhausted metaphor is the ‘wave’ trope that swells, surges and occasionally breaks over the women’s movement. First, second, third, fourth and so forth. For Lauren McKeon (paraphrasing Lisa Jervis) it’s time to take the fifth on the fourth: We’ve reached the end of the wave terminology’s usefulness. What was at first a handy-dandy way to refer to feminism’s history and its present and future potential with a single metaphor has become shorthand that invites intellectual laziness…. Categorizing feminism into waves flattens the differences in feminist ideologies within the same generation and discounts the similarities between different ones, all in one fell

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swoop…. When we buy into the wave theory, we forget common goals, like the fight for abortion rights, equal pay and ending violence against women. (McKeon 2018, p. 44)

WAVING OR DROWNING? Returning to revolution, it is a husk of a metaphor, a hasbeen. But, like all lexical husks, it can be filled anew. In an early study of the changing meanings of ‘revolution’, Dunn (1972) demonstrates that the construct has been variously construed in ecological (a growing plant), meteorological (thunderstorms, tornadoes), environmental (an uncontrollable avalanche), geomorphological (violent earthquakes), theological (apocalyptic millenarianism), theatrical (a tragedy in three acts), medical (diseased despots, duly euthanised) and, of course, astronomical terms. After careful consideration, Dunn (1972, pp. 255–256) concludes than the recreational trope of surfing best captures the experiential character of revolutions as they unfold: We may think of it aptly in terms of an individual riding the breakers, triumphantly poised at the crest of a surging wave … [However] most regimes are pounded helplessly on the sands or tossed vertiginously under the great waves. Breakers cannot be ridden for ever; the pace slackens, the board dips and the balance and mastery are gone. The establishment of such a degree of freedom and control in such a testing environment is at best a brief triumph of political athleticism. But that does not show that surfing is impossible or revolution is devoid of meaning.

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In fairness, Dunn (1972) accepts that tropification can get out of hand and he laments the fact that the many and varied attempts to encapsulate the character of revolution offer very little theoretical inspiration. They simply denude the descriptive resources of political language. However, Dunn was writing back in the early 1970s, when metaphors were generally regarded as ‘deviant and parasitic’ (Ortony, 1979, p. 2), as unnecessary poetic flourishes that reduce researchers’ ability to communicate clearly and concisely. Nowadays, analogies of all sorts are assumed to be central to the human condition, an ineradicable element of inter-personal communication, one of the mainsprings of innovation, and the taproot of creative ingenuity (Pollack, 2014). In the exuberant words of Geary (2012, pp. 3–4): Our understanding of metaphor is in the midst of a metamorphosis. For centuries, metaphor has been seen as a kind of cognitive frill, a pleasant but essentially useless embellishment to ‘normal’ thought. Now, the frill is gone. New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprisingly hidden and often oddball ways. Oddball or otherwise, metaphor is everywhere, not least in management speak where pushing the envelope up the flagpole of out-of-the-box thinking to the next level of the learning curve ball is an everyday occurrence, as are thought showers, open kimonos and deep dives (for low hanging fruit, presumably). It even forms the basis of ZMET, a proprietary ‘metaphor elicitation technique’, which has spawned two bestselling textbooks, numerous learned articles, and a busy US consultancy practice with licensees in eight countries including Brazil, Turkey, Australia and Japan (Geary, 2014).

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Metaphor, clearly, has come a long way from Strunk and White’s (1959) decree that fancy figurative language is best avoided by aspiring authors and would-be academics.

TINKERING WITH TROPES We too are a world away from Strunk and White. Because this book is riddled with metaphor, everything from its overarching revolutionary analogy to sentence-specific figures of speech (such as the suggestion that a text can be ‘riddled’ as if it had been machine gunned). At the chapter level too, tropes are evident, albeit some are more explicit than others. Chapter 1 is underpinned by the suggestion that the so-called nostalgia boom is a sociocultural time bomb that exploded towards the end of the millennium, the detonation of which continues to reverberate and shake the windows of the twenty-first century. Chapter 2 is predicated on the long-standing notion that nostalgia is a contagious disease, initially considered incurable, subsequently deemed pathological, thereafter treated as psychological and, rather more recently, regarded as something of a miracle cure. Chapter 3 anthropomorphically assumes that retro is akin to a living thing, a curious creature with a discernible life cycle that’s certain to expire shortly yet consistently refuses to pass over, let alone depart for the great beyond. Not unlike Mark Twain, the rumours of retro’s death have been exaggerated. Chapter 4 revolves around the revolutionary analogy that comprises the essence of this text. But, it circumnavigates an additional figurative issue as well. Namely, metonymy. Metonymy is a figure of speech where parts stand for wholes (Abrams, 1993). When car-owners refer to their ‘wheels’, dandies boast about their ‘threads’, athletic types are dismissed as ‘jocks’ or ‘Wall Street’ is used to mean the entire banking

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system, that is metonymy in action. And, Chapter 4 is based on the assumption that the revolutionary cell we’ve chosen to study can tell us something about revolutionary activities as a whole (and, analogously, that our neo-burlesquers are fairly typical of most neo-burlesquers). Moving swiftly on, if Chapter 5 had to be summarised in a single word, that word would probably be ‘undressing’ (Brownie, 2016). It peels off the various layers of meaning, from irreverent parody to insurgent pulchritude, that burlesque has lightly worn and occasionally discarded down the years. It also redresses the misunderstandings surrounding the art form, especially since its twenty-first century re-emergence: The question asked most often in the early days of the new burlesque was, ‘Are you a stripper?’ To which many answered an emphatic ‘No’. They were dancers, striptease artists, burlesque performers, but they wanted nothing to do with the term stripper … There’s a stark and distinct difference between the two types of stripping. There’s strippers and there’s humpers. Yes, they take off their clothes, but they hump poles, they hump laps, they’re humpers, they’re not burlesque. (Baldwin 2004, pp. 49–50) By contrast, the research procedures recounted in Chapter 6 are similar to those employed by private eyes in detective novels, murder mysteries and police procedurals. Who did it? How? Why? Where? When? What’s the evidence? Does it stack up? It’s a literary genre, furthermore, where women ­figure prominently. And not just as victims. From ­Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, the so-called Queens of Crime, to the latter-day royalty of royalties Patricia ­Cornwell and Val McDermid, women have ranked among its foremost practitioners. And, as Symonds’s (1992, p. 249)

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encyclopaedic ­critique of the genre indicates, Gypsy was no mean writer of dick-lit: ‘Her second book, Mother Finds a Body, contains the splendid malapropism, spoken by a woman on leaving a party, “I’m going, I find the company very uncongenital”.’

MIRROR OF DESIRE When it comes to encapsulating our empirical findings – as outlined in Chapter 7 – the analogical item that best captures the spirit of the community is a mirror. Mirrors loom large in the neo-burlesque imaginary. Pocket compacts, for checking, double-checking and double-double-checking the look, are a must-have accessory. Mirrors in rehearsal rooms, for reflecting and perfecting the dance routine, are essential also, as are lightbulb-girt looking glasses in crowded dressing rooms. These frequently feature in publicity shots, promotional flyers and as on-stage props. One of Dita von Teese’s signature routines involves a giant powder compact, complete with massive circular mirror. Mirrors, moreover, intimidate and inspire simultaneously. As one of our informants confessed, ‘The beginnings were hard; I could not look at myself in the mirrors of the ballet room’. But, through time, her confidence grew: ‘I love wearing sexy lingerie … I enjoy staring at me in a mirror in lingerie. I am more sensual, in tune with my body, since I discovered burlesque’. Manners maketh the man, they say, but mirrors maketh the woman. In the neo-burlesque collective at any rate. The mirror, indeed, is doubly metaphorical insofar as our informants see a different self, a better self, a sexier self, a more self-confident self – an extended or extrapolated self, according to Belk’s (1988) much-vaunted metaphor – in the mirror-ball that is neo-burlesque. Granted the very idea of the

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self has latterly been called into question (Chater, 2018). It’s a figment of firing synapses, we’re told. It’s a grammatical error, some say. It’s ‘a metaphor which depends for its force on a fundamental experience of singleness’, Strawson (2018, p. 29) explains. But, for our informants at least, several selves are clearly identifiable including the empowered self, the naughty self, the visible self, the extraordinary self, the authentic self and the feminine self. These selves admittedly are spectral and, as such, they pass imperceptibly through the metaphorical wall that separates Chapters 7 and 8, where Derrida’s revenants await… Chapter 9, by contrast, is closer to a busy buzzing bees’ nest – or an industrious ANT colony, if you prefer – of ostensibly apposite analogies, all the way from neo-Marxist accelerationism to Bey’s (1994) off-beat book about immediation, which posits potlatch as a post-capitalist paradigm. Each of these offers honeyed possibilities for future research endeavour. But, which one is the Queen Bee? Is there a presiding spirit, an elemental or exemplary metaphor that encapsulates everything this book is about? Yes, there is. And, that trope is dance. When all is said and done, this book is about dance, a kinetic art form that often betokens rebellion or incites riotous behaviour (Driver, 2006). The cancan, the hoochy-cooch, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the rock ’n’ roll riots of the 1950s, dancing in the streets for Civil Rights, Lydia Thompson’s bawdy British Blondes and, of course, the once scandalous Viennese Waltz – yes, the waltz! – are a permanent reminder of dance’s seriously subversive potential (Ehrenreich, 2007). This book, moreover, has sought to dance lightly around its subject matter in accordance with the seditious spirit of the jolie laide Jacobins of neo-burlesque. It’s a ribald, rebellious and rambunctious spirit epitomised by anarchist Emma Goldman’s apocryphal one-liner about political activism: ‘If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution’.

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If that’s not enough to be getting along with, this book also offers an alternative metaphor for late capitalist consumer culture. Following in the figurative footsteps of Caroline Tynan (2008), we believe that the interaction between marketer and consumer can best be construed not as a life-long ‘relationship’ or a one-off ‘transaction’, as has traditionally been the case, but as a mutually satisfying dance where one leads, the other follows and, ideally, both parties are sufficiently coordinated to keep the party going.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE But, what of the trope that titles this chapter? Is dancing life? Well, it is if you’ve read Stephen King’s (2012) bestselling blockbuster novel, 11/22/63. Because it tells the story of a small-town schoolteacher, Jake Epping, who finds a portal in a local diner that transports him back to the late 1950s. While there, he is not only amazed by the taste of real, authentic, fructose-free root beer, but understandably seizes the opportunity to bet on major sporting events, where he knows the long-odds outcomes beforehand. As a card-carrying liberal, Jake also decides to do the noble thing by preventing the forthcoming assassination of John F. Kennedy. Which he does, but not before giving dancing tips to two young lovers and falling madly in love with a beautiful librarian, Sadie Dunhill, who gets shot and killed accidentally while thwarting Lee Harvey Oswald. Saving Kennedy, however, proves to be a catastrophic mistake because, on returning to our own time, Jake finds that the twenty-first century New England is a nuclear-wintered wasteland. Aghast, he goes back to the 1950s to undo his fateful decision, then returns again to the newly restored twenty-first century and tracks down Sadie Dunhill, who’d

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survived after all. They meet at a barbeque in Texas, where he asks the old lady for a dance. Overcome by a strange sense of déjà vu, she suspects that they’d somehow met before. In an alternative life, perhaps. Jake replies with his metaphorical mantra, ‘Dancing is Life’, and all’s well that ends well (King, 2012, p. 327). For Stephen King, of course, all’s well that sells well. He doesn’t describe himself as the Big Mac of literature for nothing. But, the self-confessed burger king – the Homer of the whopper, as it were – had no cause for concern, because the book was well received, favourably reviewed, garlanded with honours and turned into a successful television series. Indeed, it reminds us of Dunn’s (1972) aforementioned evaluation of various scholarly metaphors for revolution, which Fig. 10.1 David’s The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (1789)

Source: Marie-Cécile Cervellon (taken in the Musée du Louvre, Paris)

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c­oncludes that it is creative writers who best grasp insurrection’s essence, Charles Dickens especially. Though Victor Hugo, who once remarked that revolutions are the larvae of civilisation, wasn’t half bad either. Only David’s anticipatory oil painting of 1789, where the distraught wife and daughters of Brutus are a forewarning of the impending bloodbath, surpasses the inimitables in primal poetic power (Gutwirth, 1992). Wearing period costume, they look left towards the past – in a strangely beautiful balletic pose – while Brutus broods balefully in the shadows, betokening the terror-storm to come (Fig. 10.1): Poets of romantic weather-forecasting like Andre Chenier and William Wordsworth … continued to describe the Revolution as a great cyclonic disturbance. But increasingly it was no longer the storm that invigorates and cleanses; rather, a dark and potent elemental rage, moving forward in indiscriminate destruction. Its breath was no longer sweet but foul. It was the wind of war. (Schama, 1989, p. 572) Whither neo-burlesque?

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11 AT THE HOP

In the spring of 1968, American university campuses were torn asunder by a spate of violent student protests and vicious internecine fighting. At the height of the unrest, a disconcerted Ivy League student took swift and decisive action. George Leonard, a leading light in Columbia University’s glee club, was so appalled by the faction fighting, police brutality and temporary closure of his alma mater that he turned to the innocent pop culture of the immediate past. Inspired by the all-American, one-nation ethos of the Eisenhower epoch, he persuaded his a capella colleagues to form a 1950sflavoured song-and-dance act called Sha Na Na. Named after the (misheard) lyrics of a 1957 chart-topper, Leonard’s hastily assembled ensemble made their Columbia University debut with The Glory That Was Grease. Dressed in black skinny jeans and plain white T-shirts, with short, slicked-back hair and too-cool-for-school curls of the lip, Leonard’s reinvented juvenile delinquents restored calm with the balm of nostalgia. True, their songs were vastly speeded up versions of the originals and their choreography remodelled rather than repeated the dance moves of yesteryear. But, by turning the clock back to an edgy yet endearing age, 155

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Leonard’s fantasy-fifties do-wop troupe not only poured hair oil on Columbia’s troubled waters but put the camp into campus. For a few student revolutionaries, admittedly, Sha Na Na’s retro chorus line was reprehensibly reactionary, unforgivably nostalgic, egregiously inauthentic, shamefully sentimental and so on. However, one far-sighted individual in the audience saw things differently. His name was Jimi Hendrix and, as headliner for the forthcoming Woodstock Festival, he used his influence to add Leonard’s loony tunesmiths to the bill. As anyone who has watched the feature film of the landmark event will know, Sha Na Na’s short ’n’ sweet rendition of ‘At the Hop’ is a spectacular exception to the interminable, self-indulgent expressions of allegedly revolutionary ‘progressive’ rock, Hendrix’s set included. Leonard’s time-was tribute act may have been a tongue-in-cheek burlesque of the birth pangs of rock, but it resurrected a retro voodoo childe that has appeared and reappeared on innumerable occasions since. Sha Na Na, rock historian Simon Reynolds (2011) reports, directly inspired Grease!, American Graffiti, Happy Days, The Rocky Horror Show, Wizzard, T-Rex, Mud, Showaddywaddy, Shakin Stevens, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, the primal punk rock of The Ramones and countless thousands of tribute acts thereafter. Indeed, on looking back at the early days of ‘the neverending rock and roll revival’, it is necessary to remember two things. First, that George Leonard was little more than a babe in arms when Bill Hayley was rockin’ around the clock and, unlike today, he had no on-line archival resources to draw upon, let alone finger-clicking-good videos on YouTube. He invented tradition anew. He invented an imagined tradition anew. He was no reactionary, assailed by Boym’s restorative nostalgia. Quite the opposite. ‘Did we really feel nostalgic for the fifties?’ he once wondered aloud. ‘No. The whole thing was

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deliberately made up. Amateur historians write about history, professional historians make it up’ (Reynolds, 2011, p. 285). Second, Sha Na Na’s hop back into the past – their Benjaminian tiger spring, so to speak – is a reminder that even at the height of the 1960s, a decade generally regarded as the acme of future-facing, ever-advancing, don’t-look-back forward thinking, awopbopalobop was never far away. As Booker (1992, p. 17) notes in his study of neophilia, the post-war preoccupation with New-and-Improved, yesterday once more went handin-hand with onwards and upwards. Discussing the latest fashions of the most with-it boutiques in Carnaby Street and Kings Road, the epicentres of the Swinging Sixties, he states: There were other boutiques, to sell not just clothes but almost anything – from copper lamps, ancient theatre bills and old gramophones with horns, to old books sold by the yard for their elegant bindings to give what was described as ‘that instant stately home look’. There were new restaurants to go to – such as the Villa Caesari, a ‘Roman Banqueting Room’ on the banks of the Thames, where the waiters were dressed as gladiators and the menus shaped like scrolls, or The Charge of the Light Brigade in Brook Street, described by its proprietors as not so much a restaurant as an ‘Experience’, where the walls were hung with flintlocks and bugles, the floors covered with sawdust and Italian waiters in the uniforms of British Hussars at the time of the Crimean War.

IS OOH LA LA OUR SHA NA NA? Half a century after Sha Na Na stormed the citadel of progressive rock, a broadly similar social function is being performed

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by another art form that attained its apogee in the 1950s. At a time when the world is once again beset by civil disobedience, sectarian divisions, riotous behaviour and student protest movements, neo-burlesque is testament to the truism that when the going gets tough, the tough get an injection of retrospection (Blanchette, 2014). True, it is female focused rather than male dominated and characterised by dance-and-music instead of music-and-dance, where the former is the dominant partner. Neo-burlesque, nevertheless, shares the playful qualities, ironic overtones, invented traditions, subversive intent and nostalgic trappings of its retro rocking predecessor (Brownie, 2016). Consumers of neo-burlesque, as this book has shown, see themselves as fun-loving rebels in raunchy raiment who find pleasurable empowerment, supportive companionship and political expression in a nostalgia-infused art form. Perhaps they’re deluding themselves, as certain fourth-wave feminists contend. But Dita von Teese (2018, p. 9), while willing to concede that ‘one person’s empowerment can be another person’s degradation’, continues to insist that ‘burlesque has become a place for an alternative feminist movement’. Few of our informants would demur. So, what have we learned? And where do we go from here? The first and perhaps the most obvious takeaway from the present text is that neither retro nor nostalgia is a passing fad. The olden age that we are living through is unlikely to end anytime soon. A permanent state of affairs, seemingly, it’s less like the rising and falling of the tides, or a volcano that erupts and then lies dormant, than the background/foreground balance of an impressionist artwork, be it seascape or mountain range. As Hegel, the dialecticians’ dialectician, once observed nostalgically about the on-going aftershocks of the French Revolution, ‘I am just fifty years old, and have lived most of my life in these eternally restless times of fear and hope, and I have hoped that sometime these fears and hopes

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might cease. But now I must see that they will go on forever’ (Fritzsche, 2004, p. 45). Ditto retro. Likewise nostalgia. So too burlesque. Our second contribution concerns the character and conceptualisation of nostalgia. Thanks, in no small measure, to the sterling endeavours of social psychologists – who owe much to the pioneering work of consumer researchers, Morris B. Holbrook in particular – academics’ understanding of nostalgia has been revolutionised of late (Routledge, 2016). Once dismissed as ‘useless yearning’ (Starobinski, 1966, p. 101), nostalgia is now seen as a serotonin shot, near enough (Tierney, 2013). It no longer carries negative connotations. The word’s domain, what is more, has expanded from mental states to material stuff. It is made manifest in all manner of marketable objects from movies to motor cars, toasters to telephones (Cross, 2016). Even critical theorists, who once regarded nostalgia as irredeemably reactionary, have come to realise that the n-word has more than a modicum of emancipatory potential (Atia & Davies, 2010; Bonnett, 2016). As Hakim Bey (2003, p. xii), the czar of critical theory, confesses in a forward to the third edition of his barking mad manifesto, TAZ (which gave us pirate utopias, poetic terrorism, ontological anarchy and temporary autonomous zones, among others): If postmodernism offers us the melancholic freedom to pick and browse the ruins of the past and salvage whatever shards we may find amusing, why not dig up again (surrealist archaeology) some of the shattered relics of resistance, revolt … even revolution? Can these antiques ever prove dangerous again? Much has been written about the recent revolution in nostalgia. However, the nostalgia in revolution goes unheeded. The present study has focused attention on the seditious side

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of nostalgia, noting its appearance prior to – not just in the aftermath of – assorted insurgent episodes, big (Ireland’s stillresonant Easter Rising) and small (BritArt’s brazen bad boy’s booty). It suggests that nostalgia is even more powerful than social psychologists imagine. Predicated primarily on laboratory experimentation, the psych literature shows that nostalgia improves mood, enhances wellbeing and can help assuage existential anxieties (Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, & Routledge, 2006). However, our ethno-literary study reveals that nostalgia is potentially revolutionary. It can transform society, emancipate minorities and change the course of history. It’s not just experiential, it’s explosive. It’s more than a palliative, it’s a projectile. It’s akin to what Benjamin (2003, p. 403) calls ‘ball lightning that runs across the whole horizon of the past’.

FANS OF FUN In this regard, our third revelation is the simple yet undeniable fact that weapons-grade nostalgia is fun. The rebels of neo-burlesque enjoy the camaraderie, the carnality and the laugh-out-loud comedy that contributes to the collective’s incredible esprit de corps. Insurrections, admittedly, aren’t ordinarily associated with merriment. Belligerence, brutality and bloodlust, rather, are regarded as uprisings’ modus operandi. Recent research, however, is recuperating the irreverent side of insurgency (Popovic, 2015; White, 2016; Youssef, 2017). Arguing that, for those taking part, insurrections are almost always experienced as carnivals – as ‘festivals of resistance’ no less – Graeber (2011) contends that peaceful, playful protests are more likely to succeed than running battles or summary executions. As stand-up comedian Russell Brand (2015, p. 122) puts it in his anti-capitalist manifesto, ‘I prefer the playful spirit of Hermes in protest, regardless of how

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serious the objectives. Piety and solemnity are tyrants too, oppressing ludic joy’. The ghost of Emma Goldman keeeeeeps dancing. Strictly speaking, ‘fourth wave’ feminism would never have found its feet if it weren’t for the ribald revolutionaries of neo-burlesque and people like them. Fourth-wave’s defining characteristic (in addition to its adroit use of the internet, its emphasis on intersectionality and its hostility towards the ascetic astringency of mainstream feminism), is having fun, fun and more fun (Cochrane, 2013). Yes, fourth-wave feminist stand-ups like Nadia Kane (Wide Open Beavers) and Mary Bourke (Muffragette) condemn neo-burlesque out of hand. However, it if it hadn’t been for neo-burlesque’s funfilled feminine challenge to feminist orthodoxy, the space that fourth-wavers now occupy may never have opened so opportunely. This is not to suggest that neo-burlesque deserves all the credit, nor is it especially unique. Numerous studies of consumer tribes indicate that playfulness helps build goodwill and a collective sense of purpose (see Mikkonen & Badje, 2013). It remains to be seen, furthermore, whether White’s (2016, p. 198) confident prediction that ‘a supranational government led by women’, will come to pass. But, there’s no doubt that #TimesUp owes more than a little to the dancing queens of time-was. Neo-burlesquers may not be the Red Brigade, but they’re definitely the red-soled shoes brigade, the Louboutin Liberation Front.

MOVING FORWARD ON LOOKING BACKWARD So, where do we go from here? Reluctant as we are to recycle the old academic chestnut ‘additional research is necessary’, more retro research wouldn’t go amiss. Although our

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study employed a Benjaminian approach to neo-burlesque, there are plenty of other conceptual frameworks – some of which were mentioned in Chapter 9 – that can be applied to the community and many possible perspectives on consumer nostalgia that are well worth pursuing. Apart from ObjectOriented Ontology, which seems especially apt given burlesquers’ undying love for stuff, others include queer theory (Blanchette, 2014), dialectic genealogy (Holt, 2004), gender performativity theory (Harju & Houvinen, 2015), and Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer studies of ‘bare life’. The Italian translator of Walter Benjamin, Agamben (2011) maintains that strip-tease is not only the paradigmatic representation of humankind’s natural state, but also a distant echo of the Garden of Eden. It was there that Eve – the aboriginal nude – rebelled against her heavenly father’s instructions. Since nakedness was normal before the Fall, stripping thus represents ‘nostalgia for nudity without shame’ (Agamben, 2011, p. 71). Neo-burlesque is shameless. And, there’s nothing wrong with that. Another area that warrants further scholarly scrutiny in the relationship between nostalgic artworks and rebellious outbreaks. Our own field of consumer research, for example, was transformed by the interpretive turn of the late 1980s, a revolution in all but name. As Askegaard and Scott (2013) show in their unofficial oral history of our subdiscipline, two early articles did much to rally the rebels: ‘Out of Africa’ and ‘Theodicy on the Odyssey’. And both papers, in a foretaste of things to come, were deeply steeped in nostalgia. The former deconstructed the meanings of a 1985 movie, based on a 1937 book, which ruminated wistfully on early twentieth century events (Holbrook & Grayson, 1986). The latter took its cue from Homer’s classic work of literature and drew special attention to consumers’ retroactive yearnings (Belk, Wallendorf, & Sherry, 1989). More than that, though, they

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paved the way for a steady procession of nostalgia-freighted works of scholarship (Hamilton, Edwards, Hammill, Wagner, & Wilson, 2014). Indeed, if anyone in CCT deserves Benjamin’s (2003, p. 405) ultimate accolade, ‘a prophet facing backward’, the authors of ‘Africa’ and ‘Odyssey’ surely qualify. Like the authors of ‘Africa’ and ‘Odyssey’, our own contribution to CCT’s retro-nostalgia corpus uses art as an entrée into its subject matter, itself a popular performance art. And, we, like them, take our cue from the cavalcade of leading philosophers and creative artists who contend that artworks provide a privileged insight into the human condition. At a time, indeed, when we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the uprisings that swept the western world in 1968, it is salutary to remind ourselves that the soixante-huitards were themselves heavily influenced by artworks, not least a spate of outlaw movies, which lionised the rebel, the insurgent and the antihero (Bullitt, Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, The Dirty Dozen). Vinen (2018), moreover, perceptively points out that more than a few revolutionaries back then turned to writing detective fiction in later life, the best known being Stieg Larsson and Massimo Carlotto. Contemporary thriller writers, meanwhile, are casting a cynical eye on those who celebrate insurgency: Never underestimate the vanity of self-styled revolutionaries. ‘Man the barricades, guys. Let’s revive the spirit of ’68. We’re the new Black Panthers. This is our Prague Spring’. It’s all a pose, all nostalgia, like everything nowadays. Revolutionaries? Don’t make me laugh. Take away their iPhones for five minutes and they’d have a seizure. (Cumming, 2018, p. 307) Where are the tumbrels when we need them?

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THE NEXT BIG THING BEFORE LAST A final focus for future research is of course retro. Our sevencategory typology of retrospection is ripe for empirical investigation, not least the neglected category of replicant goods and services. A condition where brand new products or experiences are given an ersatz past, à la Hollister or Bailey’s Irish Cream, this activity is generally regarded as reprehensible, as cheating, as if not quite unethical, certainly close to the chicanery of P. T. Barnum. But it’s very common. It seems to work. It’s surprisingly effective. And, as there is nothing to stop brands inventing a fake past or concocting a post-truth genealogy, it’s unlikely to cease increasing. Consider the J. Peterman mail order catalogue, which was renowned for its ability to spin a yarn for the sake of a sale, and enjoyed enormous success in the early days of our olden age. According to Birkerts (2000), there is a three-step formula behind Peterman-style fake-news narratives. First, ‘Begin with one-time vista to conjure a memory of better days’. Second, ‘Invoke, as frequently as possible, exotic locales – Ecuador, Shanghai, Pamplona, Bucharest – against which the clothes make sense’. Third, and most importantly, ‘populate them with writers, artists and the film stars of an earlier era. Kate Hepburn is a goddess here and so is Jean Harlow; ditto Hemingway, George Orwell and Clarke Gable’ (Birkerts, 2000, p. 32). Clarke Gable may not give a damn, frankly. But, even the Financial Times accepts that ‘artists are our reconnaissance unit warning of troubles to come’ (Aspden, 2007). If troubles do come to this text, which is written in the ‘pomo-retro-irony’ mode that the Financial Times also recommends (Aspden, 2004, p. 8), it is unlikely to come from those who believe that academics should write in a flat, factual and figure of speech-free prose. It’ll focus, rather, on what we’ve forgotten to mention. Memory. History. Heritage. Once, Scanlan (2004)

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states, nostalgia was to memory what heritage was to history, a debased aspect of the superior construct (analogous to the alleged difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture). Such binary oppositions, however, have latterly been called into question, not just by nostalgia’s recent rebranding (Routledge, 2016), but by fundamental changes afoot in memory research (Draaisma, 2013), heritage studies (Wright, 2010) and historical scholarship (Lowenthal, 2015). All four phenomena are in flux, not to say revolutionary ferment. We’ll deal with them next time round, tumbrels permitting.

The Show Must Go On

Appendix 1 SOME DEFINITIONS OF NOSTALGIA A wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition (Merriam-Webster). The name we commonly give for to a bittersweet longing for former times and spaces (Niemeyer, 2014, p. 1). Nostalgia is a recognition – pleasant, but not entirely welcome – that the past is home (Birkerts, 2000, p. 36). Recalling the fun without reliving the pain (Collins, 2011, p. 65). Today’s favoured mode of looking back (Lowenthal, 2015, p. 31). A positively toned evocation of a lived past (Davis, 1979, p. 18). An emotional state in which an individual yearns for an idealised or sanitised ­version of an earlier time period (Stern, 1992, p. 11). A sentimental or bittersweet yearning for an experience, product or service from the past (Baker & Kennedy, 1994, p. 169). Longing for what is lacking (Pickering & Keightley, 2006, p. 920). Bad history (Angé & Berliner, 2015, p. 4). An empty trope within an overly mediated society (de Groot, 2009, p. 249). The desire for desire (Stewart, 1999, p. 23). Optimism for the past (Smith, 2012, p. 11). Hankering for the idealised past … a mildly contemptuous descriptor for golden age myths of all kinds (Wernick, 1997, pp. 218–219). Yearning for a golden age in less complex, more harmonious times (Kammen, 1991, p. 294). A product of a shared historical consciousness of general displacement that is able to make parochial misfortunes and individual losses socially meaningful (Fritzsche, 2004, p. 64). A state of decline and languor caused by an obsessive regret for one’s native land, for the places where one lived for a long time (Kessous & Roux, 2008, p. 195). Nostalgia invokes a positively evaluated past world in response to a deficient ­present world (Tannock, 1995, p. 454). A powerful stimulant to feel optimistic about the future (Adams, 2014, p. 26). A situation where the problematic individual looks back with painful yearning and respect to the non-problematic individual of earlier times (Wright, 2009, p. 23). Nostalgia is neither illusion nor repetition; it is a return to something we have never had. Through nostalgia we know is not only what we hold most dear, but also the quality of experiencing that we deny ourselves habitually (Harper, 1966, pp. 26–27).

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Appendix 2 LIST OF INFORMANTS Informants

Role in the Community

Profession

Age

Lady Flo (Florence Agrati)

Art Director

Artist

30s

Cherry Lyly Darling

Performer and professor

Artist

30s

Krystie Red Sugar

Hair and make-up artist

Artist

40s

La Violeta

Cabaret performer and professor

Artist

30s

Bambi Freckles

Trainee for 2 years

Decorator and artist

20s

Lady Strawberry

Trainee for 2 years

Clerk

30s

Lady Pee

Trainee for 2 years

Student

20s

Barbie I Doll

Trainee for 1 year

Account manager

40s

Marie

Trainee for 2 years

Professor

30s

Sandrine

Trainee for 1 year

Nurse

30s

Laeticia

Trainee for 1 year

Insurance clerk

30s

Alexia

Retailer and trainee

Lingerie retail

30s

Chantal

Vintage retailer and designer

Clothing retail

50s

Caro

Vintage retailer

Clothing retail

40s

Muriel

Spectator aficionado

Computer programmer

40s

Audrey

Spectator aficionado

Housewife

40s

Karin

Spectator aficionado

Hospitality manager

40s

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INDEX accelerationism, 131 Acocella, Joan, 104 actor-network theory (ANT), 132–134, 137–138, 143, 149 Adams, T., 78 Agamben, G., 162 Agrati, Florence (Lady Flo), 73, 87, 88 Allen, R. C., 60 Almarich, Mathieu, 73 altermodernism, 131 American Graffiti, 34 American War of Independence, 82 anarchy, echoes of, 91–92 anarchy in archive, 48–50 ANT, see actor-network theory (ANT) anticipatory nostalgia, 20 Antin, Steven, 4 Apistos, 140–142 Appadurai, A., 19 Apple Inc., 29 Aragon, Louis, 123 Arcades Project (Benjamin), 123 Art Deco, 32 Askegaard, S., 162

Aspden, P., 6 ‘At the Hop,’ 156 Auden, W. H., 79 Austen, Jane, 31 Back to the Future, 115 Baldwin, M., 63, 65 Bambi Freckles, 97, 98, 118 Barbie I Doll, 83, 119 Barnum, P. T., 67, 68, 164 Barthes, Roland, 55, 57, 91 Beckman, J., 69 Belk, R. W., 148 Benjamin, W., 51–52, 66, 71, 81–84, 90, 96, 100, 123, 124, 129, 160, 162, 163 Betty Page, 62 Bey, Hakim, 129, 149, 159 Birkerts, S., 164 Blaize, Immodesty, 81, 84, 106, 117 Blanchette, A., 117 Bonnett, A., 16, 41, 117 Booker, C., 157 Bourke, Mary, 161 Bourriaud, N., 131 Boym, S., 21–23, 68, 117 207

Index

208

Brand, Russell, 160 BritArt revolution, 141 Brown, S., 34 Brunk, K. H., 42 Buddy Holly, 40, 127 burlesque, 3–4, 58–59, 73 BusinessWeek, 126 Callon, Michel, 132 Cameron, James, 39 Camino Island (Grisham), 14 Cantone, L., 36 Carlin, G., 5, 6 Catterall, M., 72 Celtic Revival, 111 Chandler, Raymond, 79 Charles, Ray, 115 Cherry Lyly Darling, 118 Chesler, P., 115 Child, Lee, 31, 43 Christie, Agatha, 31 Cif’s artworks, 139–140 Citroën DS, 55–57, 62 CivilWarLand, 33 The Classical Now, 141 Collins, Andrew, 47 commedia dell’arte, 58, 106 communal nostalgia, 68 The Communist Manifesto, 120 Comrades of Care, 42–43 consumer culture, 100–101 body images and selfcare practices, 76 women’s participation, 71–74 consumer culture theory (CCT), 9, 72, 77, 163

contemporary nostalgia research, 77 Coren, V., 113, 114 Cornwell, Patricia, 147 The Corpse Wore Pasties (Porkpie), 81 Corrigan, M., 13, 14 Cova, B., 36 Coyote Ugly, 4 Crapper, Thomas, 113 Crichton, Michael, 10 Cross, G., 28 cultural critics, 46–48 cultural revolutions, 49 Cumann na mBan, 92 The Cursed Child, 126 The Damned, 118 Davies, J., 21 Davis, F., 7, 9, 19, 23, 68, 78, 128 de Bergerac, Cyrano, 58 de Gaulle, Charles, 42 Derrida, J., 120–124, 129, 149 The Devil Wears Prada, 4 Dickinson, G., 19 digi-modernism, 131 Dion, D., 36 do-it-yourself (DIY), 89, 94 Donoghue, D., 142 Draper, Don, 25–26 Dufficy, T.A., 81 Dunn, J., 144, 145, 151 Eagleton, T., 121 Economist, 41, 128 Eco, Umberto, 91

Index

Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 105 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 69–70 Elective Affinities (Goethe), 116 Eräranta, K., 71 esprit de corps, 80, 160 Evans, Dixie, 62

209

Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Spotify (FANGS), 44 Fantastic Beasts, 126 Fantin, E., 57 Ferreday, D., 117 Financial Times, 135, 164 fin-de-siècle, 116 Finucane, R. C., 122 Fischer, E., 71, 72, 133 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 13, 14, 16, 22 Fleming, Ian, 31 Follie Follies, 75, 88, 102 Foster, R. F., 111, 112 France strip-tease classes, 63 theme parks, 41 French Revolution, 51, 158 Fukuyama, Francis, 120 The Future of Nostalgia (Boym), 23

Germany nostalgia boom, 41 ostalgie, 42 Ghostbusters, 122 ghost dance, 111–112, 115–117 Giesler, M., 42 Gill, A. A., 46, 47 Glazer, P., 66, 69 The Glory That Was Grease, 155 Goblet of Fire, 126 The Godfather, 34 Goldman, Emma, 149 Goldstone, J. A., 48 Gopnik, A., 66, 104 Grable, Betty, 73 Grade, Lew, 39 Graeber, D., 160 Grainge, P., 19 Grease, 90 The Greatest Showman, 67, 68 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 13–15 Great Recession, 4 Grisham, John, 14 Groskop, V., 41 The G-String Murders (Lee), 79–81 The Guardian, 141 Guffey, E. E., 27 Gutwirth, M., 70

Gable, Clarke, 164 Gatz, Jimmy, 13 Geary, J., 145 Genisys, 127

Hallegatte, D., 36 Hamid, M., 6 Hammett, Dashiell, 79 Happy Days, 40

Index

210

The Happy Stripper, 92 Harman, G., 137 Harper, R., 117 Harry Potter, 125–127 Hatherley, Owen, 47 Hendrix, Jimi, 156 Hepburn, Kate, 164 Heroes of Labour, 42 Hirschman, E. C., 76 Hirst, Damien, 140–144 Hofer, Johannes, 15, 23, 77 Holbrook, Morris B., 159 Holt, D. B., 108 Hopper, Edward, 22 Houston, John, 118 Howard, Rachel, 141–142 Howland, E. S., 16 Hutcheon, Linda, 28, 29 hypermodernism, 131 intellectual revolutions, 50 iOS11, 30 Jackman, Hugh, 67 Jackson, Michael, 115 Jameson, F., 19, 121 Jenner, Kendall, 114 Jonze, Spike, 40 Jump, J. D., 58 Kammen, M., 45 Kane, Nadia, 105, 161 Keightley, E., 19 Kennedy, John F., 150 King, Stephen, 150, 151 Kirby, A., 131 Kitchen, P. J., 143 Klee, Paul, 100, 129

Krystie Red Sugar, 73 Kühe-Reyen, 69 Ladies Land League, 70 Ladino, J., 19 Lady Flo (Florence Agrati), 73, 87, 88 The Lady of Burlesque, 80 Lagerfeld, Karl, 99 La Guardia, Fiorello, 61 The Last Picture Show, 34 Latour, Bruno, 132 Lauren, Ralph, 98 Law, John, 132, 138 Le Coucher d’Yvette, 60 Lee, Gypsy Rose, 60–61, 79–81, 108 legislated nostalgia, 20 Lennon, John, 56 Leonard, George, 155–156 Lerner, L., 78 Les Escholiers, 35 Les Lettres Nouvelles, 55 Lipovetsky, G., 131 Little Red Riding Hood, 88, 98 Lowenthal, D., 41, 112 Luhrmann, Baz, 13, 14 Maclaran, P., 72 McAlexander, J., 72 McCarthy, T., 131 McCracken, G., 98 McDermid, Val, 147 McKeon, Lauren, 143 Mad Men, 25, 27, 48, 57

Index

Markiewicz, Constance, 112 Marsh, Margaret, 94 Martin, D., 72 Martinez, Ursula, 92 Marx, Karl, 6, 49, 130 Mazzalovo, G., 36 Mencken, L. H., 14 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 70 meta-modernism, 131 metonymy, 146–147 Michel, Louise, 94 Milne, G. R., 76 mirror of desire, 148–150 Mitchell, David, 47 Moisander, J., 71, 76 Monroe, Marilyn, 56, 84 monster theory, 115 Morrison, Ewan, 37 Mother Finds a Body (Lee), 81, 148 Moulin Rouge, 118 The Mousetrap (Christie), 126 Munford, R., 115, 122 My Bare Lady, 117 Mystic Chords of Memory (Kammen), 45 Naughton, K., 126 necronauticalism, 131 Negri, A., 121 neo-burlesque community, 74, 83, 158, 161 neo-burlesque movement, 62–66 neo-burlesquers, 70 neophilia, 157

211

Niemeyer, K., 18 Nighthawks (Hopper), 22 nostalgia boom, 5 Oath of the Horatii (David), 39 Object Oriented Ontology, 29, 162 ‘Old Time Rock and Roll’ (Seger), 22 The Onion, 20, 127 onto-theo-archaeoteleology, 129 On Tour, 63, 73, 103 O’Rourke, P. J., 20, 59 Orwell, George, 30, 47 ostalgie, 42 package holiday, 40–43 Parmentier, M-A., 133 Past Times, 113, 114 Paysan de Paris (Aragon), 123 Peñaloza, L., 72 Peterman, J., 164 Pickering, M., 19 Pike, K. L., 72 PIN, see postmodern ironic nostalgia (PIN) Pinault, Francois, 140 Pin Up Girl, 73 Piot, C., 41 Pontani, Tara, 64 Porkpie, Jonny, 81 Portwood-Stacer, L., 94 postmodern ironic nostalgia (PIN), 20–23, 105–108

212

post-postmodernism, 131 pre-revolutionary epoch, 111 Princeton’s Firestone Library, 14 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, 112 Pussyhat Project, 106 Queens of Crime, 147 Raise the Titanic, 39 Rand, Sally, 94–95 Ready Player One (Kline), 127 reflective nostalgia, 21, 22 Regehr, K., 105 Repetition is Truth: Via Dolorosa (Howard), 141–142 restorative nostalgia, 21, 22, 68 retrobranding, 36 retro consumption, 6 retrocopia, 29–31 retro manes, 117–119 Retromania, (Reynolds) 8 retro marketing, 27–29 retro revolution, 43 revolutionary analogy, 146 Reynolds, S., 8, 20, 27, 28, 34, 156 Richter, G., 123, 124 Riot Grrrls, 69, 70 Rite of Spring (Stravinsky), 149 The Rocky Horror Show (O’Brien), 68 Routledge, C. D., 17

Index

Samuel, R., 19 Saunders, George, 33, 123 Scanlan, S., 164–165 Scarron, Paul, 58 Schama, Simon, 82 SCHNOCK, 41 Schouten, J., 72 Scott, L., 162 Seger, Bob, 22 Service-Dominant Logic, 50 Sha Na Na, 155–160 Show Off, 92 Situationist International, 50 Smith, Paul, 32 Smith, Zadie, 7 soixante-huitards, 163 Southampton School, 77 Spanish Civil War, 69 Spectres of Marx (Derrida), 120, 122 Spiggle, S., 74 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 121 Stanwick, Barbara, 80 Starobinski, J., 15 Star Wars, The Last Jedi, 67 Stevens, L., 72 Strawson, G., 19, 149 Strunk, W., 146 Sumner, John, 61 Tannock, S., 19 technological revolutions, 49 temporary autonomous zones (TAZ), 90–91, 159 Terminator chronicles, 127

Index

‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Benjamin), 81 Thompson, C. J., 76, 128 Thompson, Lydia, 6, 59, 65, 94, 102, 124, 149 British Blondes, 99 Tigersprung, 52 Timmons, Deirdre, 73 Titanic, 39, 43, 44 Trump, Donald, 6 Tucci, Stanley, 4 Turner, B. S., 19 Turner, D. C., 19 Twain, Mark, 146 Tynan, Caroline, 150 Usborne, S., 68 Valtonen, A., 76 van den Akker, A., 131 Vermeulen, T., 131 Verne, Jules, 55 vicarious nostalgia, 20 Vinen, R., 163

213

Vlasic, B., 126 von Teese, Dita, 84, 95, 106, 116, 158 Ward, C., 93 ‘The Waste Land’ (Eliot), 49 Waters, M., 115, 122 Weinstock, J. A., 120 West, Mae, 84 Whelan, Jo, 106 Whelehan, I., 115 White, E. B., 146 White, M., 51, 161 Wide Open Beavers, 105 Willsher, K., 42 Willson, J., 86, 92 Wilson, J. L., 28 Wodehouse, P. G., 31 Wright, P., 19 Yearning for Yesterday (Davis), 9 Yeats, W. B., 111 ZMET, 145