Wearable Vanity

Everything is vain!
– Ecclesiastes 1:2

I suppose it began in the netsuke exhibition at the LACMA that morning. It was a normal Saturday that began with a rooftop brunch with a friend and a trip to the museum where we share a membership. The Japanese Pavillion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a beautiful building designed by the eclectic American architect Bruce Goff, meant to evoke the experience of viewing art in a traditional Japanese home.

As we walked between the netsuke, we marveled at the combination of talent and humour combined into the wearable, utilitarian works of art. The kosode and kimono both lack pockets, so Japanese men would connect a container called a sagemono to hold their money, tobacco or other curios. The netsuke were used as a counterweight to hold the pouches over the sash.

While they could look like anything and were made from any material, the netsuke truly demonstrate how creativity works best when constraints are placed. The pieces could not have sharp edges, as they have to be worn, and must have a hole or two to run the cord through. The artists would stay true to the original shape the material, at times creating intricate designs in response to natural, organic deformities in the ivory, tusk or boxwood.

In world where we strive for things to be pixel-perfect, there is a sense of relief when people can see beauty in the imperfect. Handwritten calligraphy as opposed to typeset on a computer, for example.

Perhaps, more than anything else, the unwritten story of each netsuke fascinated me. What sort of life did the wearer live? Where did he go? Why did he choose this form and not another? What was its original meaning? Who did he pass it onto when he died? And so on. The same provenance which exists in larger European art is non-existent in its medieval Japanese equivalent.

Many of the netsuke served as daily reminders of morals or lessons, of things that the wearer chose important to remember on a daily basis, every time they reached to open their sagemono. It was a personalised version of the tsitsit, the biblically prescribed fringes religious Jews wear to remind them of god, or the crucifix many Catholics wear around their neck to remind them of Jesus’ salvation. While the latter examples act as an amulet, consecrated by greater spirits than themselves, the netsuke gained its meaning, like a talisman, from its owner.

Today, the background of the home screen of our iPhone is the most personalised and intimate we become, which we look at every time we check out texts, tweets, the weather, our email, our account balances and all our other notifications.

After leaving the museum and bidding adieu to my friend, I began my walk home on the beautiful Los Angeles summer day. I felt inexplicably pulled to visit the Pyrrha flagship store on 3rd street.

Pyrrha’s Canadian designers had discovered a trove of 19th century wax seals from France, originally used to seal and verify communiques. The seals, like the netsuke, were highly personalised and unique to the owner of the seal. The jewelry they created highlights the cracks caused by the aging of the wax. They are imperfect, which makes them better.

I still remember the first time I stepped into the store. I was drawn there on a Friday morning during a walk a year and a half ago, wearing an outfit I wish I could forget. I chatted with the steel-blue eyed salesman about the history and meaning of the collection and began to stare at one piece, designed with a skull on it and the words ‘Omnia Vanitas’.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, one of the genres chosen by the Dutch masters to paint was called ‘Vanitas’, where they would choose a rotting or decaying still life object as their subject, to remind the viewer of the fleeting nature of life. The phrase itself was originally found, repeatedly, in the book of Ecclesiastes, and means ‘everything is futile’ or ‘everything is meaningless’. Ironically, ‘vanitas’ is a translation from the Hebrew hevel, the same word as the first victim of fratricide, Abel, and is sometimes translated as ‘vanity’.

My interest had been piqued on many levels. If you were to ask me my favourite biblical book, I would have answered ‘Ecclesiastes’ and for my favorite period of art history, it was the 17th century Dutch. But the mixture of morbidity and humour in sealing every communiqué with a message that the contents inside don’t really matter seemed strangely relevant for my life.

So my new talisman has its own story. Whose provenance is farflung to include the Japanese, the French, the Dutch, the Canadians, and the ancient Israelites. One with origins in ancient religious belief and rooftop mimosas, wearable art and narratology. One that is perfect because of its imperfections.