Silks and Skins : Animal Fashions in Nina Wetzel’s Costume and Scenic Designs for Thomas Ostermeier’s Nuit des rois - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Apparence(s) : Histoire et culture du paraître Année : 2022

Silks and Skins : Animal Fashions in Nina Wetzel’s Costume and Scenic Designs for Thomas Ostermeier’s Nuit des rois

Résumé

This essay originates from a 2020 interview with Nina Wetzel about her work as costume and set designer for Thomas Ostermeier’s Nuit des rois, which opened in 2018 at the Comédie Française (Paris). It discusses Nina Wetzel’s ironic repurposing of fur and other animal made-objects in relation to Twelfth Night’s obsession with the material dimension of cloth and clothing. Following a brief presentation of the critical history of allusions to textile in the comedy, I inquire into the material properties of all animal-made-fabrics mentioned in the play. This leads me to discuss and contrast the references to silk-based fabrics and those related to skin and fur. By opposing the reflective opalescence of silks to the porous and haptic properties of animal fur and skin, the play commemorates some central late Elizabethan material anxieties, reflected in both sartorial and pictorial self-fashioning. Nina Wetzel’s positively physical and animal take on the costumes and the setting for Ostermeier’s production thus expose and materialise some textile matters only metaphorically alluded to in the text. By bringing to the fore the animal agency in her design, she therefore bares the very origin of the comedy’s variegated fabrics and exposes the way animal fashions reveal and shape the question of human identity in relation to the beastly, social advancement and forms of domination.

Dates et versions

hal-04053875 , version 1 (31-03-2023)

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Anne-Valérie Dulac. Silks and Skins : Animal Fashions in Nina Wetzel’s Costume and Scenic Designs for Thomas Ostermeier’s Nuit des rois. Apparence(s) : Histoire et culture du paraître, 2022, 11, ⟨10.4000/apparences.3583⟩. ⟨hal-04053875⟩
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