ABSTRACT
The picture overleaf is an advertisement from the classy US magazine, the Netv Yorker. It is a picture which exudes class. The welldressed model by the exclusive shop front looks out of the frame towards us, but despite her glasses, briefcase (almost concealed in her left hand) and the severe cut of her suit, hers is not the uncompromising look of the mass-media depiction of the business woman. Compromised, then? Well, her smile is certainly a bit crooked, her look indirect. Her arms are set behind her, exposing the full front of her suit, and, at the same time, suggesting a ‘suggestive’ submission to parallel the lack of uncompromising stare. In the coded world of the photographic advertisement, if a woman wears glasses — except and especially in a spectacles’ advertisement - it is a special cultural sign that puts the woman in a different class. A female doctor — or even academic — will have glasses to emphasize (constitute) her status as the one-who-knows; the business woman wears glasses to create her status as the notjust-a-beautiful-woman figure: the model who offers . . . another model. ‘The glass of fashion’? What’s behind the smile and the glasses here, then? How do we read her body language? What does she know in her glasses? (Be careful in your answer. Remember Molly Bloom’s smile - read by Bloom as a mark of love and a remembered scene of pleasure — for Molly meant the worry of menstruation. The smile is also the sign of the inscrutable, the mark or mask of irony.)
Behind the smiling woman there is, of course, a man. Here the
‘A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must be appropriate.1 Aristotle
man, delicately faded into a more generalizable presence and shaded by an umbrella, can be seen to stare at the woman. He’s reflected in the glassy shop front but he does not look at himself as if in a mirror. Both he and his reflection are looking at the woman who looks towards us. Perhaps what the woman knows is that she is being looked at — as Lacan, following Sartre, puts it, what she sees is herself being seen. 1
The arrested gaze, looking back over the shoulder as the man passes
Does not merely double our gaze at the woman in glasses.
