Alexander Wang and Junya Watanabe are Jacob and Esau

"Rebekah covered Jacob's hands and the smooth part of his neck with the goatskins. Isaac did not recognize him, for his hands were hairy like those of his brother Esau, so he blessed him. Esau said: 'Isn't he rightly named Jacob? He has decieved me two times: he took my birthright and now he has taken my blessing!'" Genesis, King James Bible. 

Here we have wandered into the macabre recesses of the biblical closet. Watching a girl reach to pluck a Junya Watanabe from the rack, there is a double-gleam in her eye. While stepping into the billowing figure erases her, she simultaneously assumes the personality of a giant black deity. There are garments that by their alien nature oblige us to not be us. A minority of garments, such as a hushed Alexander Wang, oblige an Esau-like honesty. Most of dress-selecting is identity-dissolution. Though we say it is for entertainment’s sake: Jacob’s original disguise says otherwise. Rebekah robbed Esau of his birthright with a wardrobe selection. Who are we trying to fool and for what sinister motives?

Alexander Mcqueen and the Original Sin

          

"And God said to Adam: Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast though eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that though shouldest not eat?" Genesis, King James Bible. 

           

Alexander McQueen’s smock dress is unable not to fire the synapses of defiance. It paints Eve as the Edenic brat: something within the embroidered casing hungers to consume those around her. The scaly golden twining thread akins her to the snake, the congealed blood-red hue to the fruit yet untasted. Her determination she gets by mimicking Adam, but clumsily surpasses him in her pride. So she unwittingly endeavours to make God-like choices in hiding. There, unseen, she decides that nakedness is what will allow her to discover a lustful wardrobe. While McQueen champions the fresh closet of sin: Adam receives the hilt of the Godly hammer. 

Jean Paul Gaultier and the Fifth Day

"And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them (...) the evening and the morning were the fifth day." Genesis, King James Bible. 

Jean Paul Gaultier has emulsified the first day; his bride is parented intermittently by light and shadow. It is a holy and violent sartorial dissection that tattoos the pulsations between night and day across the body, when they should naturally come from outside. He has turned our relationship with light inside out. The day is bursting rows of white tulle, where labouring hands find unfamiliar stimulation. The shadow is where the curious and perverted can get their own fingers caught in the nape of a neck or curve of a thigh. Our days and nights seem long to us, but Gaultier’s bride shows how to a greater being we are just several blinks between the light of day and the flesh of a Godly eyelid, pulsating momentarily between the sky and the Earth’s floor.