his story appeared in the March issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe
In March 2013, Jack Nicholson was photographed in Paris wearing a navy-blue beret embroidered with the New York Yankees logo. The official MLB merchandise store does not sell a Yankees beret, which suggests that Nicholson either created or commissioned the piece himself, perhaps specially for his trip to France (on US soil, he favors a more traditional Yankees baseball cap). Nicholson is a fan of both the Yankees and berets. In 1975, he wore a black beret to the Oscars. He was nominated for Best Actor for his role in Chinatown and brought Anjelica Huston as his date. The ceremony took place 22 days before the end of the Vietnam War, in which berets were prominently worn by the US Special Forces team, also known as the Green Berets.
In other words, the beret is a felted mass of contradictions. It can symbolize French simplicity or an auteur's complexity, military authority, or revolutionary ideology. And recently, it has become unavoidable. In January, Katy Perry hugged Gloria Steinem at the Women's March in Washington while wearing a plush yellow Moschino version topped with a smiley face. Two days later, Korean rap sensation G-Dragon arrived at Chanel's haute couture show in a sequined Karl Lagerfeld number that recalled Bianca Jagger's memorable red paillette beret from her Studio 54 days. Though it is perhaps the simplest hat possible—brimless and traditionally made from hand-matted wool—the beret has strangely diverse connotations.
A little history: The earliest recorded berets were worn by ancient Greeks on the island of Crete around 1500 BC, and the hat has remained a wardrobe staple in parts of Europe ever since, particularly in the Pyrenees, where shepherds have worn Basque-style berets for centuries. The beret's military associations go back to the Chasseurs Alpins, a French mountain corps that conscripted the hat as part of its uniform in 1889. Since then, military units across the world have adopted it, usually with detailed color codes. With no brim to block a soldier's sight line, the beret has become standard-issue military headwear across the world.
Continue reading on i-D
from vice http://ift.tt/2nA8SPT
via cheap web hosting
No comments:
Post a Comment