A coffee with Mirella - The Duke and the Fashion

"I have always wanted to be an instigator of new ideas, I tried to try everything that could be an artistic tool, I tried to be a revolution made man".

So David Bowie loved to describe his life, defining himself as a revolutionary and influencer of every sphere of the artistic world.

David Bowie not only was and is defined as a "rock chameleon", capable of personifying different roles and characters, each of them mentors of an artistic, cultural and ideological movement, but also a "chameleon of fashion".

Each transformation of him was accompanied by a specific, eclectic, enigmatic and revolutionary style, anticipating the world of influencers ante litteram.

We can therefore consider this enigmatic character as a revolutionary transformer in every sense, who went from androgyny to punk, to dandy with extreme ease and genius.
I would like to focus on some of my personal considerations on the esoteric sense of androgyny, easily combined with genderless, much more earthly, for which Bowie is defined as a precursor.
Genderless fashion that is reflected in behavior presupposes the man dressed as a woman and the woman dressed as a man.
Androgyny presupposes a different, alchemical man. In alchemy, the androgynous man is a hermaphrodite with behavioral characteristics of both sexes.
Androgyny, indicated by the Gospel of Thomas, we read in Jung, a lover of occultism and esotericism.
In an interview Mircea Eliade talks about androgyny and Mephistopheles: the androgyne was trying to be God, a new man spiritually speaking. He sought perfection through occultism, Gnosticism.
All this is a game that comes to characterize in dressing up in fashion; the game is between appearing and being that characterizes androgyny.
Androgyny, appearing and being in Bowie have cultural foundations.
Bowie was a fan of esotericism and occultism and in an interview with Dario Argento he stated in no uncertain terms that the knowledge he pursued was the Gnostic one, and that dreams helped this knowledge.

Because in Bowie's artistic cultural discourse we find very important foundations also in the past, which give him creative immortality.
In the search for immortality the Italian Renaissance played a predominant role, and Bowie was a Renaissance man who lived four centuries later. In him converge Oscar Wilde and Pico della Mirandola. Herman Hesse's tale of the “Steppe Wolf” and the poetry of Baudelaire and Shelley echo in him. All British irony and a strong dose of natural stardom did the rest.
Each album by him, each piece of him is a search for immortality, a paroxysm of the senses, an existential answer to the big questions.
A proof of how he sought his immortality of him can be read in this text taken from “Oh! You, Pretty Things ", from 1971, taken from the album" Honky Dory ":
"I think about a world to come / Where the books were found by the Golden Ones / Let me make it plain / You gotta make way for the Homo Superior / Look at your children / See their faces in golden rays / Don't kid yourself they belong to you / They're the start of a coming race / Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use / All the strangers came today / And it looks as though they're here to stay ".
(I think of a world to come / Where books are found by Golden Beings / I want it to be clear / You have to make room for Homo Superior / Look at your children / See their faces under the golden rays / Don't fool yourself with the fact that belong to you / I am the beginning of a new race / Homo Sapiens has served its purpose / Here come all the strangers today / And it looks like they are here to stay.)

Pico della Mirandola, Oscar Wilde, Boudelaire, William Blake, Mircea Eliade; because the way to knowledge is to go beyond all limits.
We therefore note the importance of the Dionysian and the loss of control of the world as the substance of the expressive moment. All this naturally has repercussions in the world of fashion
Which also finds traces of Dadaism in an unmistakable style that marked not only the 80s.
So a 360 ° genius !!

Mirella Granelli