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the rejection of ornament and with the ‘weight of the past’ associated with
Victorianism. Ornament is seen as naturally linked to women (to the same
extent as femininity is seen as a natural attribute of women) and therefore
women, by definition, cannot be modern. Women are represented as the bearers
of tradition, femininity coded as anti-modern. Ornament is also associated
with the Orient and the primitive, that is, with an eroticized ‘otherness’ and the
antithesis of progress. While one important strand of modernism was explicitly
Orientalist and decorative and celebrated ‘primitivism’, another strand rejected
it in favour of a more rationalist modernity (Wollen 1993). The most famous
example of this linking of femininity, ornament, and the anti-modern can be
found in the architect Adolf Loos’ 1908 essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ which
links women’s fondness for the decorative and the ornamental with that of
the Papuan ‘savage’, while arguing that modern man must reject ornament.
For Loos, ornament was associated with commodity status (Colomina 1994:
37–43).
Loos also saw ornament as symptomatic of degeneracy and homosexuality –
belonging to ‘dilettanti’, ‘fops’ and ‘suburban dandies’ (Colomina 1994: 38). In
his view, ornament was inappropriate to the depth and individuality of modern
identity:
Primitive men had to differentiate themselves by the use of various colours,
modern man wears his clothes as a mask. His individuality is so strong
that he cannot express it any longer by his clothing. The lack of ornament
is a sign of intellectual power.
(Loos cited in Colomina 1994: 35; emphasis in the original)
If lack of ornament is related to modern selfhood or identity, ornament came
to signify an absence of selfhood, a display grounded in nothing. This notion of
a contentless self-presentation was historically associated with male homo-
sexuality long before Loos. According to Foucault (1978) the concept of sexual-
ity and the connected development of male homosexual identities can be traced
to early modern Europe. The emergence of a notion of sexuality as a perman-
ent orientation is linked to the extended class-conflict between the old land-
owning aristocracy of Europe and the developing bourgeois class. In an essay
on the prehistory of ‘camp’ (as both a taste and a way of being, or performing)
Thomas A. King argues that the constructions of selfhood, the gestures, and
material accoutrements belonging to the aristocracy became ‘transcoded’ as
markers of homosexuality by the bourgeoisie, and subsequently appropriated
by early homosexual subcultures circa 1700.
Seventeenth-century courtly society in Britain and France placed the
emphasis on social performance and display, carefully cultivated poise and
gestures, and excessive dress. This kind of self-presentation was introduced to