The Fairy of the Waist and Sélika Lazevski at the Met Gala
A fashion flash
I'm back! Where did I go? I am not entirely sure. I worked all last year, sometimes on my day job, sometimes on Amazons of Paris, sometimes on learning Swedish, and yet it felt as though I achieved very little of any of these tasks. I am eating my elephants one bite at a time, so to speak, and they are very big and tough.
I took down most of the Amazons posts here because I finally realised I was accidentally publishing the final project as a newsletter rather than a book. I also realised that I had to write the book in order to understand how to write it, and so I am plugging on, currently deep in the mysterious gaps in Caroline Loyo’s life because it turns out that I also needed to write the book in order to know what research to do. I am in full conspiracy-theorist mode, drawing lines on old maps and annoying parochial archivists.
But there have been some real-life developments that felt like leaps forward. I took part in two circus history conferences, one online and one in person at the Cinema Museum in Kennington in London where we sat in an extraordinary old multi-denominational chapel that was part of the workhouse where Charlie Chaplin once lived. We walked around the sites where the earliest circuses set up camp south of the river and heard from speakers who had come from as far away as Australia. Both events gave me an instant connection to others who are eating similar elephants, and we compared notes about archives and memorabilia collections.
Because I am self-taught, it had not occurred to me to try the latter source. I mainly navigate treacherous old newspapers and illegible civic records. The women I write about are made of words. Other researchers, I learned, were partly focused on the physical relics of circus performance. Then I was asked to help find objects for an exhibition that will feature the Amazons and that meant trying to think of what might be left of them other than words. And I came up all but blank.
What fragile, mouldering relics could be left? I know of one dress belonging to one of the women I've written about (Agnes Willoughby) but surely everything else has long since been recycled one way or another? I have one copy of one letter from one woman. I would dearly love to find Émilie Loisset's crop with her jokey, defiant motto on the pommel (“I will not be a princess, I cannot be a queen, I am Loisset”), or a side-saddle still in use. Antique side-saddles generally have the rider's name inscribed on them, and many women I know who are using old saddles today have researched the first horsewoman who owned them. I did manage to think of one object that would fit the bill and was held in a museum collection in the correct country. But that truly is not much.
The physical remnant I have been able to track down has proved to be – in some cases – the actual bodies of the Amazons. I cracked the Paris burial and funeral records system and located Caroline Loyo, Angèle Abadie, and Jenny de Rahden. A friendly side-saddle rider is going to visit them for me before I can finally make it back to Paris. Blanche de Marcigny, the courtesan turned Olympic dressage rider, was found by the team who made a recent documentary about her, and I am closing in on Émilie Loisset. I have barely begun though, as usual.
But recently one of the Amazons has been manifesting from her afterlife, which is easy to trace than her actual life, in my experience. Sélika Lazevski, who has been circling the internet for well over a decade now, appearing in both a quilt by American artist Bisa Butler and a short film, materialised on the Met Gala catwalk in the body of British actress Jody Turner-Smith. Burberry had taken the studio portraits of Sélika and transformed her severe habit into a fantasy of intricately carved leather for Turner-Smith. What would Sélika herself have made of this homage? That she should become the best known of so many famous Amazons when she barely made her name in her own lifetime?
Click here to see the costume. It has been a bit weird seeing scrambled versions of my essay being trotted out across the internet but Vogue do still have a subeditor, unlike many publications. I have seen a whole host of misspellings and misreadings to add to the general pile of misspellings and misreadings surrounding Sélika. I guess her mystique only grows? But I am understanding at least some of it.
Here's a fashion snippet from the Amazons era to round things off. I generally find very little writing by women and for women concerning the circus horsewomen I study. Women's publications simply never turn up in the searches I run. Perhaps they are not often included in newspaper databases? But I did find this in the Journal Pour Toutes from 1864 and perhaps the horsewomen it refers to were circus performers exercising their horses. Perhaps. Here it is, from a very detail-oriented eye-spy fashion column called "Mode pour toutes" by Stéphanie de Roux:
"At the first rays of sunshine that allowed the Amazons to go to the Bois (de Boulogne, a park in Paris where the fashionable rode) two brilliant horsewomen stood out for the grace of their movements and the beauty of their mounts. Everyone admired them riding with surprising naturalness and skill. It was as if their horses were dancing. Both horse and rider were exquisitely supple, and the secret of the harmonious casualness of these ladies was this: they wore Billiard belts. So don't be surprised by my persistence in repeating to you that Mme Billiard is a fairy of the waist, and that this fairy lives at no. 4, rue Tronchet."