Gaspar Noé’s 2009 film Enter the Void outstays its welcome by a considerable margin, and from its title is conveyed no finer a précis of the audience’s slump into the tedious abyss his stylistically overwrought and similarly overlong film deposits the viewer within, submerged in a world of psychedelic drug use and supposedly decadent subservience to the night-time economy that shocks only but the most pious of modern day observers.
Noé’s propensity to shock – which Enter the Void manages to for reasons contrary to his intentions, a judgement necessary for a feature whose most vivid experience severely wanes, with the obvious exception of his vulgar foray into incestuous relationships, once the memorably insistent and visceral opening credits sequence ends – results in his work being associated with the transgressive pretensions of the New French Extremity wave of cinema. But let us not be mistaken – life itself is already extreme enough, and abstract categories do nothing to remedy or reinforce the fact.
Sistaaz of the Castle, not so much a fashion show as collaborative and extreme social dissection between photographer Jan Hoek and designer Duran Lantink, is the latest dialogue between fashion and the dual topics it cannot shake. The wider cultural connotations of sexual politics and identity manipulation the fashion industry provokes are, in the hands of this sensitive and sympathetic project, whose photographs – included in an exhibition at Amsterdam’s Foam Photography Museum, and collection addressing the genuinely transgressive existence on the fringes of Cape Town society of transgender sex-workers – here privy to a major contribution.
Although reality is richer yet more preposterous than fiction, we must all take occasional flights of fancy away from surviving our daily conundrums, eventually cast free in search of more welcoming shores. For some, films provide this refuge. Others, such as Coco, Cleopatra, Sulaiga, Gabby, Flavinia and Joan Collins, the objects of Hoek and Lantink’s study, wash up on the welcoming island of fashion, a retreat providing the glistening sands of pastures new far removed from their extreme survival as sex-workers and toleration of a hostile social void – not yet prepared in Cape Town to readily accept the transgender community these figures represent – deeper and more overwhelming than any Noé can conjure on the big screen.
The girls, most of whom are homeless and live under a bridge, are part of S.W.E.A.T., a local sex workers’ organisation, within which Sistaazhood acts as a transgender support group. Their survival under such dismal conditions is further aided by their ingenuity with their appearance, and their desire to outwardly negate the inner trauma of their extreme livelihood, one which presents frequent dangers and routine social exclusion. In the face of entrenched cultural resistance to both their gender issues and choice of livelihood, each yearns for an outfit transcending the limitations of their frugal existence. To dress well is an outlet none are prepared to compromise on, as clothing is the fundamental source of their individual and collective renewal.
Their looks are, inevitably, the piecemeal result of found garments. Following meeting the girls in Cape Town, Hoek’s photographs of their creations provided the lookbook for Lantink’s dream-couture capsule collection, recognising as he did kindred spirits utilising on an authentic street-level his own ambitions to see fashion filled with designs echoing his own use of recycling and collage. Impressed with the girls’ resolve and inimitable method of self-expression – harmonising fashion with identity in order to neutralise the pressures of the many obstacles their lifestyle presents – the pair elected to use Mercedes-Benz Amsterdam Fashion Week as a political platform for facing square-on the societal issue of transgender marginalisation, while showing outfits inspired by the girls’ idealised representations of their fashion-selves.
The scale of Hoek and Lantink’s ambition succeeded beyond their imaginings, as a catwalk show here became a tender but forthright tribute to the Sistaazhood and denunciation of the prejudices they surmount with the combined weapons of fashion, resolve and imagination. As much as the girls remake their own gender and identity, so too did Hoek and Lantink remake the possibilities of fashion. A relatively long show, never did their carefully judged and committed presentation induce the repetitiveness Noé had no doubt hoped to avoid in his own artistic statement, for throughout was the inescapable feeling that the duo were tactfully but increasingly doing justice to the girls’ ambitions for parity, while realising on their debut of this show its full potential on both fashion and social scales.
Sistaaz of the Castle celebrated triumph in the face of adversity, and the crowd rose as one in a standing ovation, its own demonstration of the unity of acceptance Hoek and Lantink insist not just the transgender sex-worker community, but either element taken separately, also deserve, by way of fashion suturing social voids as much as it finds itself capable. The closing act could hardly have been more fortuitously poetic. A male model fell twice in quick succession during the closing walk in front of a, by now, adoring audience. Normally a cause of embarrassment, here the huge and encouraging applause righted both his body and confidence, as he picked himself up, dusted himself down, and continued, more of a spring in his step, bond with the audience and affirmation of Hoek and Lantink’s vision than ever before. The accidental metaphor added to the deliberate tone of the show – whatever the odds, never lie down. Get up. Don’t be cowed. Assert yourself, and your rights, as often as is required.
Paul Stewart