The Pucci Dress

A typical Pucci Dress

In July of 1964, Esquire Magazine published an article by Robert Benton and David Newman called "The New Sentimentality," which essentially tried to portray the cool, capable, reserved style of the early 1960's as being, not cynical, but of a different type of sentimentality, as a sort of Existential Sentimentality.  This was an almost Absurdist Sentimentality, embracing emotional attachments almost randomly.  It did this in an amusing format, contrasting icons of the Old and New Sentimentalities.  A typical pairing was Arthur Miller ("Inner honor.  Suicides.  Social poetizing.  New Deal.  American tragedies.  Find yourself.") with Robert Lowel ("Beauty of destruction.  The sanitarium as a setting for a poem.  The order of chaos.").  Other pairings were Ben Hogan and Sonny Liston, Jackson Pollock and Roy Lichtenstein, Count Basie with the Modern Jazz Quartet.  This was written just on the cusp of the drastic social changes that were to come in the second half of the decade.  Rock and Roll was new, but not pervasive, Kennedy was dead, but there were still a lot of Cold Warrior Liberals around, Malcolm X was still alive and he was the only one who said "Black" instead of "Negro."  It was a curious moment, because the authors understood  the sentimentality of the previous generation, and sensed that it was slipping away, yet they hadn't any kind of grasp on what was to come.  They understand the Rat Pack, but not the Beatles.

"The Clan — They are Boys' Night Out; the gang; the Buddy System; the romance of booze; practical joking; the Playboy Philosophy; Nouveau Riche; the idea of Organized Fun; millionaires; Show Biz."

"The Beatles — They are the Put-On; the big laugh; a slap in the face; Professionalism; the new idea of the Celebrity; Ringo's looks; "We're not any good, but we're having a good time"; Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"

And here is where they really miss the mark and yet hit it at the same time: the Pucci Dress —

Women dressing for women are not in the New Sentimentality. The designer Pucci was the first to realize that what men love about women is not their chic, or their correctness, but their bodies. Men are sentimental about bodies. The Pucci dress is all about women's structure. It respects the body and makes it look female. There are cheap dresses that do this, but they can't do it for the woman you love.

Marilyn Monroe wearing a Pucci print dress.

Quite a statement, and quite prescient. The whole ethos of fashion was going to change, and change radically. And it was going to be about bodies and a more sensual way of dressing. What is simply astonishing is that none of what they say applies to the Pucci dress! It makes you realize just how out-of-touch men of that era were with sensuality. Think of the crass, scrubbed, powder-white skin of the typical Playboy "playmate" of the time. Can you imagine the shock that a young man, whose only knowledge of naked women came from Playboy, would have upon actually seeing how hairy women are? how wet and slippery the actual process of coupling is? and how very pungent a woman's arousal can smell? Look at the picture of Marilyn Monroe, certainly a woman know for her womanly form, observe how even she looks utterly de-sexed in a Pucci dress! It makes you realize just how utterly cultural sexual desire is. How Victorian men might actually have desired women in the freakish corsets of the era, how Mandarins might actually have been aroused by stunted and dwarfed feet, or perhaps even how someone might desire Helen Gurley Brown.