“Cloth for Men”: Masculine Identities and Haptic Visuality in Advertising for Dormeuil Tonik, 1968–75

Abstract

With the widespread use of synthetic fibers and the impact of youth culture by the 1960s, many menswear retailers and manufacturers of wool and cotton resorted to more inventive ways to symbolize the heritage and quality of their products. This article focuses on how one campaign in particular, Dormeuil's “Cloth for Men” of 1968-75, dealt with this double impetus and interrogates how its alphapictorial rhetoric connotes the ludic and utopian valorizations of lifestyle, escapism, and luxury that Jean-Marie Floch elaborated with the semiotic square. In 1973 and 1974, for instance, German model Veruschka von Lehndorff appeared in the campaign, wearing 1930s-styled clothing, while the copy and mise en scène of the same ads evoked a nineteenth-century sensibility. Veruschka also “doubled up” to play both “male” and “female” parts. Thus I analyze how the gender ambiguities and crisscrossing of time connoted in the rhetoric of the ads perform what Jane Gaines has called a “homosexual/heterosexual flip-flop,” and how the knowing transvestism, style, and visual decor they represent overlap with Susan Sontag's notion of Camp as “Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” Finally, I address how the ads link the idea of looking good to feeling good, evincing Merleau-Ponty's contention that there exists “an inscription of the touching in the visible, of the seeing in the tangible—and the converse.

Keywords:

• semiotic square
• intertextuality
• mohair
• youth culture
• androgyny
• camp
• decadence
• haptic visuality