A Conversation Between Oscar Wilde and Frank Zappa [1]
By Ben Cobb
Another Man, Autumn / Winter 2012
Inspired by Dries Van Noten's Psychedelic Elegance collection, Another Man eavesdrops on a conversation between Oscar Wilde and Frank Zappa ...
Dries Van Noten felt like doing something different for his A/W12 collection. The Belgian designer, celebrated for his calm, natural aesthetic, was determined to introduce an element of "silliness" this season – but he wasn't sure how. Then he dreamt up an unlikely meeting between 1960s rock revolutionary Frank Zappa and the Victorian master of wit Oscar Wilde.
The result, presented at the magnificent Grand Palais in Paris [2], featured heavy overcoats, shirts emblazoned with acid-coloured Wilde quotes, tailored military jackets and far-out cosmic patterned suits paraded in front of a giant mural of swans, naked swimmers and more Wilde bons mots. Accompanied by recordings of Zappa rambling to his imaginary friend Suzy Creamcheese spliced together with a narration of Wilde's The Happy Prince, the experience was, as promised by Van Noten, "psychedelic elegance". With quotes from Frank Zappa and Oscar Wilde, Another Man brings that impossible meeting to vivid life ...
WILDE: Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
ZAPPA: The whole universe is a large joke. Everything in the universe are just subdivisions of this joke. So why take anything too serious? I think it's really tragic when people get serious about stuff. It's such an absurdity to take anything really seriously.
WILDE: Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
ZAPPA: I make an honest attempt not to take anything seriously – I worked that attitude out about the time I was 18. I mean, what does it all mean when you get right down to it, what's the story here? Being alive is so weird ... You've got to be digging it while it's happening because it might just be a one shot deal.
WILDE: To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
ZAPPA: Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence ... Those Jesus freaks, well, they're friendly but the shit they believe has got their minds all shut.
WILDE: Religion does not help me ...
ZAPPA: The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own. My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: keep him or her as far away from a church as you can. Tax the fuck out of the churches!
WILDE: My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also.
ZAPPA: There is no hell. There is only France.
WILDE: Each of us has heaven and hell in him.
ZAPPA: Well, I believe that those energies and processes exist. I just don't think that they've been adequately described or adequately named yet, because people are too willing to make it all into something that supports a religious theory of one flavour or another. If you start defining these things in nuts-and-bolts scientific terms, people reject it because it's not fun, you know. It takes some of the romance out of being dead ... but, basically, I think when you're dead – you're dead. It comes with the territory.
WILDE: Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday and no tomorrow. To forget time ...
ZAPPA: Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
WILDE: Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one's nerves, which is the same thing nowadays ... I like Wagner's music better than anybody's.
ZAPPA: Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass. All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff. But I think pop music has done more for oral intercourse than anything else that ever happened, and vice versa.
WILDE: Everything popular is wrong.
1. The conversation part of the article was republished in 2017 to celebrate Wilde's birthday. "An Imaginary Conversation With Oscar Wilde and Frank Zappa".
2. The same event as described on the Vogue website:
Can you imagine Frank Zappa and Oscar Wilde
in the same room? Dries Van Noten could. Or at least he put them
together on the aural collage he spent a week working on as an accompaniment
for his new show, Zappa's dialogues with fictional groupie goddess
Suzy Creamcheese spliced together with a plummy-voìced narration
of Wilde's The Happy Prince (maybe it was Stephen Fry,
but it sounded too plummy even for him). And while models walked
to that soundtrack, a team of artists painted a mural that used
Wilde's words and
Zappa's winginess. It was, to say the very least, a multifocal event,
maybe even a happening. And what it suggested was that
Dries had decided to stage an intervention on his own career, to
rattle a cage, release the bars. A risk, for sure, but also a feel-alive
moment. And,
mercifully, that was how it felt.
"Psychedelic elegance" was his pitch. The delivery split two ways:
prints so packed with narrative and detail they could have been
lifted from Brueghel, matched to a solemn, tailored, military-tinged
Victorian story. Which was, if you think about it, a shading on
the Zappa-Wilde exchange. And also, in a less obvious way, an indication
of how fundamentally compatible those two probably were, and not
just because they both set out to épater la bourgeoisie.
The haute hippie style of Zappa's late-sixties heyday drew on vintage
Victoriana, with a bit of lace and a lot more color added for sensual
effect. And The Happy Prince was practically hippie chapter
and verse.
If Dries hadn't exactly drunk the electric Kool-Aid, he'd taken
on board the heightened perceptions of the psychedelic sixties in
the motifs lifted from Dutch artist Gijs Frieling and the reinterpretation
of Wilde's words by calligraphy artist Letman. They were both eye-popping
on jackets, shirts, and pants, maybe even more so because they were
cut so precisely. Their boldness also seemed poignant in an odd
way, like many feel-alive moments. Dries has decided it's not a
moment to play safe. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. But there's
always the nagging sense that attaches itself to risk of any kind.
See also video - Dries Van Noten Fall 2012 Menswear.