Not
everything elegant is expensive; not everything expensive is elegant. Making a
list of costly, trashy things is easy: leopard-skin rugs, yachts with
bulletproof glass, Jeff Koons's paintings, Monte Carlo. But discovering
elegance in modest or everyday sources, especially in the face of a
multibillion-dollar luxury industry, takes more doing. That is the subject of
Jessica Kerwin Jenkins's Encyclopedia of the Exquisite, a deceptively light survey of "uncommon
delicacies, carefully selected." Kerwin Jenkins, formerly an editor at W
and now a writer for Vogue, wants us to do away with the "luxe
fantasy" (pushed in part by those same magazines, of course) and find
wonder in the "obscure, exquisite, and twinkling" pleasures she has
compiled, alphabetically.
Many of Kerwin Jenkins's
favorite things come from Europe, particularly France, in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. In the section entitled "Divan," she looks at "the
illicit pleasures of reclining" through the novel Les Liaisons
Dangereuses and the paintings of Manet—reclining, she says, is
a "suspect" in-between state that suggests decadence or immorality.
There is a hilarious entry on the pouf, the hairstyle favored by Marie
Antoinette, who incorporated in her towering beehive accessories from sheaves
of wheat to a replica of a battleship. (Kerwin Jenkins observes that, while
elegant, the pouf was a tough look to master: it made sleeping difficult, and
the hair could become infested with vermin, against which women wielded "ivory
scratching sticks designed to plunge into the hair-covered hives.") And
like any good fashionista, the author demonstrates a complete reverence for
Japan and its aesthetics: we get commentary on folding fans, the kimono, the
tea ceremony, origami, the art of food arrangement, and even an in-depth look
at the 10th-century diarist Sei Shonagon, whose Pillow Book, a compendium of miscellaneous thoughts and lists
of beautiful things, might be a model for Kerwin Jenkins's own work.
Yet
other amusements are found closer to home. Busby Berkeley musicals are one: the
author is enraptured by the dozens of chorines who "sprang from a sea of
white ostrich feathers wearing wispy feathered bikinis," and relieved that
his maximalist vision endures on the soundstages of Bollywood. In a section on "Heels"
she reveals how Marilyn Monroe would cut a quarter-inch off one of her shoes to
give her walk its signature hip-swaying allure. Some of the most charming
sections of the book aren't historical at all, but general takes on small
pleasures—pears, crickets, clouds, the color black. Best of all is the section
on far niente, the Italian art of idleness; puritans may object, but
Kerwin Jenkins is right when she praises "the languorous sweetness of
doing nothing at all."
It might be easy to
dismiss this book as a trifle, and matters aren't helped by rococo
illustrations and blurbs on the dust jacket from such literary authorities as
Sarah Jessica Parker and the designer Michael Kors. But if the form of Encyclopedia
of the Exquisite plays up its author's insouciance, the text itself
nevertheless carries a surprising authority. Entries can jump across centuries
and disciplines: the section on "Enthusiasm" harvests ideas from
Hobbes, Diderot, Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, and Germaine de Staël. And Kerwin
Jenkins provides a 40-page bibliography, set in eye-straining type—this must be
the only book to cite both Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Vogue's
Diana Vreeland.
It's a paradox: the
greatest pleasure of this ode to frivolity is the author's own diligence. Encyclopedia
of the Exquisite may eulogize the pointless in this era of industry, our
noses pressed to grindstones or BlackBerries—and yet idleness, and the elegance
that can arise from that state, turn out to be very hard work.
Jason Farago is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, n+1, Dissent, Frieze, and other publications. Trained as an art historian, he has contributed to several exhibition catalogs on art since 1960. He recently returned to his hometown of New York following a long sojourn in London.
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