"Culture occurs at the edge" — attributed to Roland Barthes
Another thought about Alexander McQueen and the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Savage Beauty," running until August here in New York City.I agree with the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen. He designed a style of pantalons that expose just a little bit of the buttocks, as seen in the above picture (which he playfully called bumsters). McQueen believed the most erotic part of a person's body, whether male or female, is their slightly exposed backside.
I agree. The mesh of clothes revealing a gap of skin is erotic indeed.
Roland Barthes put the same thought in a slightly different way:
"Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance. "
