Jonah Goldman Kay is an accomplished art researcher & critic at outlets like Artforum and The Paris Review. He’s also my boyfriend (haha) which is how I persuaded him to write this for Wicked Tongue. The piece engages with some of this newsletter’s frequent themes—that is, how we can understand, read, and represent the signifiers of the past from the perspective of the present—but through a visual and art historical lens I generally find outside my own capacities. There’s little I love more than going with Jonah to a museum exhibition and then sitting down afterward with a cup of coffee to talk over the show. I think reading this essay feels a lot like doing that.
In May of 1937, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson traveled to London to photograph the coronation of King George VI for the French communist newspaper Ce Soir. Like a good communist, Cartier-Bresson turned his back on the new regime, photographing the crowds who had camped out to witness the historic spectacle. In one photograph, a group of onlookers gazes upward through small mirrors mounted on rods, bearing an uncanny resemblance to an iPhone on a selfie stick. Reflected back at them was a new king. He wore a long robe of purple silk, velvet, and gold lace. Craning their heads to see the king in the mirror, the British proletariat witnessed a show of luxury unlike anything they’d ever seen.
At his coronation last year, soon-to-be-King Charles wore the very same robe worn by his grandfather nearly a century earlier. To audiences conditioned by years of luxurious minimalism, brainwashed by dreams of Loro Piana sweaters and taught to revile the gaudy ornamentation that adorns fast-fashion designs, the sumptuous fabrics looked comically tacky. Watching the scene play out on a flatscreen in a conspicuously empty Camden pub, I was struck by how cheap those same robes appeared.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Wicked Tongue to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.