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KODONA FASHION INSPIRATION: ARTHUR RIMBAUD.
The next time you’re itching to dress Kodona – comme un garçon victorien – call upon the ghost of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Ah, quelle histoire! As a boy, Rimbaud often wandered to neighboring countries and had to be brought home by the police. The poetry bug bit at age 16. Soon after, Rimbaud may have joined the Paris Commune and was possibly gang-raped by soldiers. The poet became a street-dwelling anarchist, complete with long hair, shabby clothes, and body lice – not unlike kids today, eh? He moved into the home of Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, who promptly fell for the sullen blue-eyed teen and abandoned his pregnant wife for him. The pair ran to London and took up la vie bohème, spiking it with absinthe, opium, and hashish. They traveled; they fought; in Brussels, a drunk and raving Verlaine shot at his lover and hit him in the wrist. Quand il a realisé que Verlaine avait perdu la tête, the boy had him arrested. Verlaine was subjected to a humiliating interrogation of his lifestyle and sentenced to prison for two years.
Rimbaud returned to France, and at age 18, completed Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). The work, which switches between poetry and prose, is “widely regarded as one of the pioneering instances of modern Symbolist writing and a description of that drôle de ménage (domestic farce) life with Verlaine.”
Througout his twenties, Rimbaud worked random jobs and extended his travels to uncharted terrains. He enlisted in the Dutch army for a free ride to Java (as soon as he reached the shore, he deserted). As an importer-exporter (possibly dealing with slaves), he led caravans through Cyprus, Yemen, Egypt, Ethiopia. A knee carcinoma forced his return to France. His leg was amputated. At age 37, he was dead.
Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. Et je l’ai trouvée amère. Et je l’ai injuriée.
One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap. And I found her bitter. And I cursed her.
+ Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), 1873.
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QUOTE FROM KAMIKAZE GIRLS BY NOVALA TAKEMOTO.
“I suppose that when I say clothing – and flouncy, frilly, ruffly, lacy clothing at that – is the most precious thing in my life, most people of intellect would just laugh disparagingly and call me a silly girl. I might be scolded, but never praised: dedicating myself to love, scholarship, or work is valid, they’d say, but devoting my entire being to something so trifling as clothing is nothing more than frittering away my life. But why can’t I devote my life to clothing? What’s wrong with treasuring encounters with clothes more than encounters with people? People have different values. I don’t think the convictions and philosophies of people who become doctors to save the lives of poor people in developing countries are superior or inferior to those of someone like me, who was enchanted by the Lolita look and decided to live according to the Rococo aesthetic that is its source. And even if I was wrong about that, and my aspiration to live as a Lolita is terribly foolish, or indeed the worst thing anybody could do, I still would not renounce it. Even if everybody in the entire world agrees that something is a piece of junk, if to my eyes it appears more precious and necessary that diamonds or the giant panda, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to defend it to the death as the most important thing in the world.”
From Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma Monogatari) by Novala Takemoto, trans. Akemi Wegmuller (VIZ Media LLC, February 14, 2006), 41-42.
Photo from the Kamikaze Girls film starring Kyôko Fukada (as Momoko) and Anna Tsuchiya (as Ichigo).
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