By CAUÊ NEVES*

Considerations about the theatrical play directed by Bete Coelho and Gabriel Fernandes

“Petra, I don't know why complicate what could be simple. Good behavior, as you call it, is something that exists, it is to be used. The person who is always looking for something new, when what exists has already been well tested, well, that person…” (Sidonie).

The history of fashion requires understanding its pathos included in the view of art history. This is how thinking about fashion can become capable of bringing such blissful categories closer to art in general. Pathos, genius, suffering, inspiration… are concepts that shape the gestural language of artistic creation. In this sense, the creation of the designer or seamstress is also haunted by the space of the clash between the creation immersed in fantasy and the creation immersed in reason, like a fight between the mythological gods Apollo and Dionysus. What comes from this process could be called the artist's style, so dear to the expressive forms of fashion. These are the teachings of German art historian Aby Warburg, who observed the energetic weight of creation modeled by euphoric, but also manic, nymphs. Node boudoir by Petra von Kant, we see the concentration of the theatrical experience of this dynamic and the phenomenon of fashion personified – , Dialogue between fashion and death (1824) by Giacomo Leopardi – between the artist and her object.

Petra (2024), adaptation by directors Bete Coelho and Gabriel Fernandes of the German play – which later became a film – The bitter tears of Petra von Kant (1971) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, illuminates what seems to us to be the perfect allegory to describe the melodrama experienced between Petra von Kant and Karin: the problem of What's new (or novelty) in fashion. The play, centered on the sapphic and intergenerational relationship between Petra and Karin, tells us, in five acts, the story of the relationship's glory and fall. Glory, certainly, as Petra, a successful fashion designer, is stunned by the spectacle of youthful beauty emanating from Karin. She, who is much younger than Petra, exudes charm at the same time as a neediness in her eyes; as a raw idea, she was attracted by the promises of the designer, who noticed that Karin would have a lot of potential in fashion. If, as Friedrich Nietzsche would say in his aphorism 114, in the work Aurora, the gaze of the convalescent is similar to the gaze of a child, that is, pregnant with drive and receptivity, so Karin was at the right time and in the right studio. Because, as we know, Petra had ended a relationship with Frank, her ex-husband, and was talking about him to Sidonie, her friend.

The problem of What's new was well captured by philosopher and Fassbinder's fellow countryman, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin knew how to decipher the densest layer in a modern habitat, namely, the endless attachment to what is new. Fashion appears, for the philosopher, as a figurative mirror that allows us to reproduce the scope of ramifications that novelty has in modern societies, such as the fetishization of merchandise and the sex appeal of the inorganic. However, fashion is also subject to its own aesthetic reflection, since clothing relates dialectically to society in Benjaminian thought, in which the new, in fashion, immediately dies, becomes disused, but is born again, gaining a nomenclature updated. Fashion is that harsh grace that creates victims, fashion victims, as it is worshiped. That said, as Giorgio Agamben states, we are all sacrificial victims of a faceless God called fashion. It is in this sense that we see, in both representations (both in the film and in the play), the allegory of novelty personified in the relationship between Petra and Karin. The stylist is the victim of fashion, whose current times are marked by demands that did not exist in past times, specifically, the creation of collections, fashion shows and private pieces. Marlene, his design assistant, is permeated by this temperament of searching for the current. So, when Karin arrives at the studio, she imposes on Petra the challenges of what we could call What's new. In addition to being, literally, a stranger to Petra, she is young, younger than Petra, and is marked by abandonment. Karin says that her father killed her mother and then committed suicide, which makes her lead a difficult life and, whose lack, Petra feels forced to fill. This is the appropriate example to understand the internal metabolism of fashion: Karin, darkened under the sign of abandonment, shines again in Petra's eyes. And Petra, in turn, wants to take possession of this newness that Karin emanates, like modernist painters who need to reproduce the instant seen, because whoever is fascinated with an object tries not to distance themselves from it. Karin needs to live with Petra, she needs to pose for Petra, she needs to be her nymph. Petra, in turn, sees a perfect future for Karin. In the adaptation (2024), Petra asks Karin to parade: Petra's fantasy is put into action. This passage seems to indicate that the play is a reflection on fashion, but there are, without a doubt, more clues to this indication at play: costumes and scenography.

In the film, the characters' costumes, designed by Maja Lemcke, are an invitation to learn about flirting, conquest and display. In the play, we see the veil and silk as the characters' main clothing. Paraphrasing the play's costume designer, Renata Corrêa, the idea was to convey the transparency of the soul and the stripping of dignity. It seems to us that the costumes manage, in addition, to adapt the sadomasochistic tone of the play and equally pay homage to Fassbinder's work. This is justified when we think about the sadistic and masochistic intertwining between Petra, Karin and Marlene, with Petra being the chosen sadomasochist: sometimes she is dominated by Karin, sometimes she dominates Marlene. In relation to the tribute to the filmmaker, we can highlight the countless times in which sadomasochism is a behavior normal of his films. And the same can be said about your person, your romantic relationships and the leather jacket or vest essential in your daily life. Running away from cool traditional fetishism, from latex to leather, so important for a Tom of Finland, for example, we consider that the play elevates fetishism to the category of a fetishism haute couture. The translucent silk that Petra and Karin wear represents the sophisticated and feminine update of fetish clothing, due to the black color and the glimpse of the skin through the transparency and irregular cuts. It is worth remembering here Azzedine Alaia, Halston and Rober Dognani as creators who combined sophistication and seduction through the use of fabrics without ribs, conducive to a transfiguration of the relationship between the veil and the veiled. THE choker, which is the accessory-symbol of a relationship of domination, unlike its appearance in the original, is already anticipated by Petra in the second act of the play.

In both scripts, the scenography tends to show us faces that are somewhat different from each other. That's why, in this new adaptation (2024), the scenography designed by Daniela Thomas and Felipe Tassara, designs its own room (a kind of Behind closed doors) full of mirrors in the center of which we find Petra's bed, in order to allow the audience to see different nuances of the actresses' faces - which constitutes yet another tribute to the filmmaker, considering that mirrors always appear in his works, reproducing ad infinitum the copulation scenario as an allegory of creation. In the film, the scenography is filled with naked mannequins. In the piece, the mirror is the allied object for fashion creation, as it cannot be missing as an instrument for stylist Petra. However, the mirrors become walls, forming almost a siege, which creates a claustrophobic atmosphere like a painting by French artist Francis Bacon: Petra caged in her bitter and passionate ruin, close to transforming into a dysformic beast.

The atmosphere of the play also takes us back to the theatrical setting of the Spring/Summer fashion show Voss (2001), by Alexander Mcqueen. Mcqueen, with this fashion show, revealed the connection between elegance, fashion and the beauty with phobos, claustrophobia and death. In a traditional fashion show, the catwalk is located in the center, in a straight line. In Voss, the models walk inside a mirrored cube and perform as if they were trapped inside it. When releasing the glass walls at the end of the parade, another cube is opened and shows us a naked woman breathing through a tube, motionless, with an elegant posture, petrified and forgotten, except for the insects. Petra appears to be a sum of all these women: elegant and claustrophobic, true emblems of fashion. Petra, like any designer, is condemned to producing something new in fashion, both for satisfaction and for work purposes. As novelty is a demand from society, fashion is the first instance to communicate what is new. Mcqueen's models' gestures of suffering resemble Petra's melancholic gesture, but without losing her posture – with the exception of the penultimate act, in which Petra is in complete ruin and drunkenness. In the last scene, Petra is like the naked woman breathing on life support, in a state of recovery after the new ritual.

Benjamin states in Book of Passages, fragment B 1, 4, the following: “For fashion has never been anything other than the parody of the colorful corpse, provocation of death by women, bitter dialogue whispered with putrefaction between shrill and false laughter”. We observe this bitter whispered dialogue at the moment when fashion's hope is fading: Karin's tenderness is no longer the same, which instigates the audience to wonder whether the seduction of the initial meeting has not hidden her true face. In this way, as Benjamin says, we can think that Karin was a colorful corpse that arrived at Petra's house. The consummation (Revolution) was due to Karin's moment of dispossession in relation to Petra, during her outings, parties and meetings. “Lie to me” – this is Petra’s request, whose expression

it symbolizes a masked love, but also a criminal love, themes that are so frequent in the work of Fassbinder, the filmmaker of decadent love. Other films that address these themes are Martha (1974) I Just Want You to Love Me (1976) and In a Year of 13 Moons (1978). Petra asks Karin to lie to her, but she actually wants the truth. And when she asks Karin to tell the truth, she wants to hear the lie. In this way, Petra hides her face with the bitter mask of this decaying love. She is, in fact, a faceless victim of fashion, as Agamben's thesis suggests. As if she hid her face under a transparent fabric, just as Martin Margiela masked his models for his fashion shows. maison: a twilight covering that tenuously hides the face. In this sense, your face mask it is the tenuous image between the color of the fabric and the face. It can be understood as the representation of Petra's bitter love, as it operates in the dimensions of phobos and Eros present in her relationship with Karin.

Petra can't believe Karin's detours, but could it be otherwise for her, as our allegory of newness, whose ephemerality and eternal-return is its hallmark? In other words, the new, in fashion, is intrinsically linked to death, to its moment of disappearance – this is the other meaning we can attribute to it: phantasmagoria, ie, the appearance of an object that is on the verge of its disappearance. Karin's departure represents the end of Petra's experience of enchantment in the face of the new. Furthermore, it indicates that the merchandise needs to leave circulation for another to arrive.

In the terms and objects in which we speak, the new merchandise is understood as the return of the new, as a poorly made copy of what was new. In contemporary terms, it would be the fake fashion or the fast fashion. For this reason, we consider Karin's return in the doll that Sidonie gives as a gift to her friend Petra on her cathartic birthday. What appears to be a simple doll is a poorly made and childish copy of Karin, seen under a wrapper thanks to like Jeff Koons' childish and disturbing sculptures. And, if we want to keep reading the decadent style, it would be appropriate to remember the doll models from John Galliano's last show for maison Margiela, which try to remember a Belle Époque, but are dizzying due to its impossibility of existence in the present. Years after such a historical and artistic period, Galliano makes these dolls appear in a secularized and disenchanted world. It is not, therefore, a reinterpretation of the time, but rather a representation of the image of clash between the two times.

The return of the new, here, in the form of a doll, shocks us with the diagnosis of our primeval, passionate and “childish” condition as a society incapable of awakening from the cycle of novelty, from the sphere of fashion to other spheres of culture and of customs. It is also a revealing expression of the impossibility of capturing the current, the present, the instant, at the same time as the need to protect them. Agamben, in his essay, What is contemporary?, indicates that we live in a relationship of distance with the present time, in such a way that we are anachronistic and out of date, as we are unable to coincide with the present. From this perspective, Petra's studio is the stage for the staging of the eternal return of the new, which demands from Petra the incessant capture of the newness that emanates in Karin and that wins, in the end, a copy of Karin. We are moved by Petra's gestures because, as an artist, she is passionately imbued with the idea of ​​the new. Her suffering refers to her impotence in the face of the ritual of the new, which is closely linked to the ritual of merchandise in capitalist society. Petra's suffering is, as we try to show and give voice to, a caricature of the passionate artist in the fashion sphere, whose creation has an energetic weight like any other form of art.

The staging of the play (2024) flirts with a certain reflection on fashion and, at the same time, proposes to poetically construct fashion appropriate and updated to the tone of the original script, in addition to being inspired by Fassbinderian aesthetics. With this, we return to the historical thinking of fashion to highlight the designers who also elevated fetishistic aesthetics to the category of haute couture. What is at the essence of this style in the play is, precisely, the representation of the bitter and masked love between Petra and Karin. Consequently, we evoke the one who, enigmatically, took the masks to the catwalk: Martin Margiela. We propose, through this mask, the tenuous image of the type of love experienced between the characters.

In line with the sophisticated “sadomasô” costumes, there is the impeccable and cloistering scenography, which invites you to reflect allegorically on environments as dramatic as those represented. Therefore, to do justice to the fashion, we examined the scenographic and poetic construction of the fashion show Voss (2001) by Mcqueen alongside the scenography of the play (2024). The mirrors on the set show, to the audience watching the play, a multiplicity of Petra's faces which, following her imminent tragedy in the script, are reminiscent of the deformed figures in Bacon's paintings.

Finally, Benjamin's diagnosis of modernity is fundamental for the concept of novelty to reveal itself as the central allegory in the play's drama, ranging from Petra's relationship with the demands of her profession to fashion's temporal flair. As we have seen, this temporal scent refers to the dynamics or paradox of the return of the new. We interpret this dynamic as the reproduced copies of the haute couture which are, above all, decadent in relation to the original. So, Karin's return as a doll signals to us the movement of attempting to reproduce the new, whose imperfection and perversion are exemplified, in the history of forms, sometimes by art thanks to by Koons, or by Galliano's decadent dolls.

*Cauê Neves He is majoring in philosophy at USP.

Reference

Petra
Text: Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Translation: Marcos Renaux.
Directed by: Bete Coelho and Gabriel Fernandes.
Cast: Bete Coelho, Luiza Curvo, Lindsay Castro Lima, Clarissa Kiste, Renata Melo.

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