Gender fluid stage clothes: Oskar Schlemmer's influence on David Bowie and Lady Gaga

Abstract

In 1922 Oskar Schlemmer staged the Triadisches Ballett, a great revolution whose implications are still visible today. The artist applied the principles of Bauhaus, the German school of art, to the theatre, transforming the connections between actors and objects placed on the stage into geometric relationships.

    Schlemmer stripped the human figure of its intrinsic characteristics, first of all of its uniqueness, and showed it on the stage as a mask made up of geometric elements. For Schlemmer, the protagonists of his work did not have a defined sex, the clothes transformed them into self-moving architectures. The body had no gender, it was just a set of lines, flat and solid figures. The clothes were made by using what Schlemmer called «colored and metallic plastic elements that gravitate in space, created with materials whose use is very exciting in our time of technical inventions and substances».Schlemmer’s experimentation was so innovative as to inspire artists of later periods. The body became a central element, «considered as a performance, that is as an ever-open construction of material identity» (Calefato, 1996).

    On several occasions David Bowie, an artist who made his own body a gender fluid work of art, was inspired by Schlemmer’s works. In 1974, in the Ziggy Stardust video, Bowie appeared wearing a costume designed by Kansai Yamamoto that reproduced one of the costumes from the Triadisches Ballett. In December 1979, the artist performed at Saturday Night Live, and for the occasion he wore an extremely modular dress that looked like one of the costumes from the Schlemmer’s Ballet. It was a tight-waisted outfit with broad shoulders. The dress turned the singer’s body into a geometric figure exactly like the protagonists of Schlemmer’s work.

    The liveliness of Schlemmer’s experimentation still inspires the imagery of artists. In 2009, Lady Gaga gave the designer Bea Åkerlund the task of designing the clothes for the set of Paparazzi. Åkerlund does not belong to the world of traditional fashion, but she works in the field of industrial design (she even designed a collection for Ikea). The designer decided to combine fashion accessories, which had already appeared in the fashion shows of Thierry Mugler, John Galliano, Chanel, Christian Dior and Dolce & Gabbana, with clothes created specifically for the video clip. Åkerlund’s aim was to give a new shape to the human body by integrating two concepts: the acceptance of one’s own appearance, of which Lady Gaga has always been a symbol, and the story narrated by the videoclip director Jonas Åkerlund. To achieve her goal, Bea Åkerlund was inspired by the geometrization of the human body proposed by Oskar Schlemmer’s experimentation in the Triadisches Ballett.

Similar situation is in the Bad Romance video, in which the clothes and the accessories created by the designer Alexander McQueen pervert the corporeity of Lady Gaga: there are no more female and male figures, there are only forms.