Sometimes there’s a fine line between love at first sight and love is blind.
Case in point: the sweater I’ve worn the most this winter is a little cashmere number from Alberta Ferretti’s Love Me collection. It’s in a dusty pink (I don’t like to wear color), with "life is desire" emblazoned across the chest in bold intarsia (I usually shy away from typography on clothing).
The appeal must have been the layers of irony: a seemingly profound claim of “life is desire” is Joe and the Juice-ified, commoditized, taunting my desire as a consumer - and infatuated I was.
A victim of my own desire, I thought this sweater is art.
Of course, the aim of fashion is to provoke desire.
Fashion historian Rebecca Arnold wrote in Fashion, Desire, and Anxiety that fashion permits fantasy, flaunts glamour, and allows us to dream - it does so by simultaneously provoking desire and anxiety in consumers, both using and abusing the power of wealth to promote “good” taste. Similarly, art historian John Berger noted in Ways of Seeing that the objective of fashion imagery is to strategically construct glamour through envy, hence eliciting admiration and desire from the viewer’s gaze.
But why are we made the way we are made, that to see, to love, is to want?
Perhaps love is an inherently visual desire. In his twelfth century treatise on love, de Amore, French courtier Andreas Capellanus defined love as a suffering “derived from sight and beauty of the other sex”. Even the practice of image-making originates from love and desire: ancient Roman writer Pliny asserted that the earliest painting is a Corinthian maid’s tracing of her lover’s shadow on a wall, to preserve his image as a memento while he was away.
There’s an undeniable material dimension to desire - for objects are desire embodied. Consider Prince George of Wales’ marriage proposal gift to Maria Annie Fitzherbert in 1785: a miniature portrait of the Prince’s own eye, framed in jewel. Beauty of the beloved’s literal eye, an amorous gaze, readily receivable in the eye of the beholder. It’s desire to look at, to keep.
I think about how I succumb to fashion’s desires and anxieties. Keeping up with the latest trends. Following the Fashion Week news cycle. Sifting through the ever-emerging waves of gift guides and endless SSENSE sales. But it’s all an exhausting, Sisyphean search for some inexpressible “more" - and there is always more to desire.
Or perhaps it’s not really about the end state of “having”, but rather the “seeing” and feeling of “wanting”. I’ve spent enough saturdays at Saks to be able to see its glorious floors with my eyes closed - but I usually leave empty-handed yet content. I like looking at the colors and silhouettes on the racks and feeling the softness of silks and cashmeres in my hand. I can indulge in seeing myself with something that caught my eye, without necessarily an urge to possess. In some ways it’s a feeling of love and admiration not so different from being in an art museum - the pure pleasure of being surrounded by so many beautiful things, the corporeal culmination of someone’s creative vision - with an added tactile dimension.
Writer Ana Karina Zatarain’s phrased it best in her interview with
on RLT:A lot of people say that material goods and consumerism are these dark, bad things that are the opposite of soulful or profound. I don't agree with that at all. I think beautiful objects enrich my life; wanting them is often better than having them, or just as good as having them. I wouldn't say better. I want to have them, but the process of waiting for them, thinking about them, and coveting them is a very deep source of pleasure. It's the pleasure of conjuring, imagining your life with this object or in relation to it… I love living with always wanting something.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I fell very ill a few weeks ago.
For a number of days, I could not get out of bed. I barely slept. I could not eat. I had no wants or yearnings or hope - only dread. It was a terrifying void of desire. I felt like the whole world has lost its luster, and there’s nothing I could do to gain it back. I wrote in my journal:
How can one tame the light when there is only darkness?
I don’t think I have an answer.
When the illness eventually passed, I began to think more about desire - beyond the material sense - I think it’s also something much more visceral and intangible:
It’s the way afternoon light lingers awhile, and I want to invite it to stay even longer.
It is getting dressed every morning, each a chance to choose who I want to be today, how do I want to face the world? How do I want to feel? How do I want to make others feel?
It’s how gently butter melts into warm oatmeal. It is a dash of cinnamon in cafe au lait sipped window-side. It’s a craving for the gorgeous pink of radicchio, for dark chocolate cake with olive oil and whipped cream at Chez Ma Tante, after a long dinner catching up with an old friend - as if no time has passed.
It’s how much time seems to freeze or extend to infinity when I stand so close in front of a painting to really pay attention, to see the richness in every pigment, the surety and fluidity of every brush stroke.
Renaissance Florentine Marsilio Ficino’s interpretation of Plato’s Symposium is really true - that when we speak about love, we mean the desire for beauty.
It’s the yearning for poetry, for beautiful words to be strung into beautiful phrases, to feel the urge to underline and highlight and engage.
It’s Chloé designer Gaby Agnion’s love of white, ivory, beige and dusty pink blouses, to remind herself of the feeling of sand in her native Egypt.
It’s the mystery of Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek, of the continuous creation and all that providence implies, the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.
Desire is hunger. Curiosity. It’s want to create and to share and to be kind. To cherish. To celebrate. To love.
It’s why I read, and write, and paint, and take photographs.
It’s why I want to tame the light. It’s probably the closest we can get to knowing God.
It’s the want for living.
I must admit my sweater is right - life is desire.
Happy (very) belated Valentines.
Lyndsey, what a beautiful piece of writing. Keeping up your desire to write more and light up your life. Cheers!
Lyndsey this was the most beautiful and moving piece of writing I've read in a long time ❤️ Cheering you on always!