Wednesday’s Child: From my Balcony

In tourist season one sees a lot of tattoos, which always makes me wonder how all that art got here. On reflection I concede that the social phenomenon is by no means unique, though it’s the only one I’ve ever been able to think of that’s totally incomprehensible. Why would an American lad who probably describes himself to his friends as a pacifist want to look like a soldier of fortune? Why would an English lass who is probably vegan, or at least free of gluten, want to look like a Papuan cannibal?

They come here to get suntanned, which is another notion of comparatively recent vintage. Everybody knows that before World War I tanned skin was a social marker of the lower classes, particularly manual laborers who worked outdoors and were exposed to the sun. Parasols were widely used by the middle and upper classes, and short sleeves were not seen on the Lido of Venice unless part of a gondolier’s costume. Meanwhile on the altane, the roof terraces of palazzos invisible to prying eyes, Venetian ladies did tan, but only to bleach their hair using crownless hats with brims wide enough to protect the face.

Just before the war it became known that as a matter of scientific fact exposure to the sun produced Vitamin D, which countered a number of ailments, notably rickets. The term “heliotherapy” followed, with sunbathing becoming increasingly a pastime of the upper classes. After the war, this became a fashion trend, launched in particular by Coco Chanel and Jean Patou, who in 1927 launched the world’s first tanning oil, Huile de Chaldee. It was now à la mode for the woman of society to look like a Mesopotamian migrant from the era of the Babylonian Captivity. With a smidgeon of Beelzebub, too, seeing that in 1924 Guerlain launched a lipstick called Rouge d’Enfer.

The trend became practically universal after World War II, with the swimming costumes depicted in fashion magazines becoming ever smaller until they shrank into the bikini, a contraption of handkerchiefs and string invented in 1946 by Louis Réard and named after the nuclear test that had just taken place in the Marshall Islands. A few years later Brigitte Bardot made the invention world famous with Manina, the Girl in the Bikini. By now there was no turning back, with a global explosion of tanning salons and the fake tan in which the once proud nation of Ireland is at present the world leader.

A similar excursion may be taken through the history of other relatively newfangled social phenomena. Keeping dogs in decidedly urban environments is something I most definitely want to look into, as is the modern appetite for cleanliness, or “hygiene,” which I trace to the Earl of Bristol, the first man in England to take a daily bath and thereby lend his name to innumerable grand hotels on the Continent. And what of the obsession with mountain climbing?

Indeed, one sees shirts commemorating various mountaineering exploits almost as often, and often on the same tourists, as the tattoos. Few alpinists, I reckon, have read Nietzsche, but it is in his works that the seeds of their obsession germinated. In the eighteenth century, mountaineering feats had been the purlieu of a precious few professional explorers, and it is only in the wake of Nietzsche’s romantic juxtaposition of the vulgar valley and the lonely peak, haunt of the Superman, that they became fodder for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.

I propose the gentle reader and I take a closer look at the trends people follow, if not altogether blindly, at least in reflective sunglasses. I spend a lot of time on my balcony anyway, what with the heat wave and all, so if I get myself a pair of binoculars or a telescope we should be all set.