We’re not going to
leave well enough alone, here.
As Anil Dash showed a few years back regarding lolspeak,
if you’re gonna investigate a thing, if you’re gonna talk about it,
don’t just mess around all surfacewise and headline-skimmy.
Instead, actually give a damn and do it up right, get into it,
even if you’re not going to defend a thesis
based on its subcultural ass.
There you have it:
My looking-over-the-shoulder rationalization
for this review of Takako Iwasa’s Fashion Cats.
*clears throat, begins*
Of course this originally comes from Japan.
Specifically, it – a full-color perfectbound paperback
from the Vice empire responsible for books on skateboarding
and Norwegian Black Metal, even beyond the punk-flavored
popculture excellence their website and magazine has been
fomenting for years now – comes from fashion designer Takako Iwasa.
Iwasa has a pair of cats: Princess Prin and Prince Kotaro.
The cats are Scottish Folds: Prin, pure white; Kotaro, orange and white.
And Iwasa makes clothes for them: Princessly fantasias of lace and tulle,
chic raiment featuring plaid capes and jaunty little caps,
cosplay marvels that make the cats look like cartoon chickens or frogs,
and so on in that manner, with everything pretty much walking the line
between sartorial elegance and an almost Lovecraftian level of kawaii.
These well-clothed cats are then photographed, of course –
One must not hide such light under a bushel!
One must tell the teeming masses of the cat-adoring world! –
and the photographs presented in page after glossy page.
God damn, these cats are cute.
And the outfits – the darling little outfits, yes –
are wonderfully designed and created and, and, and,
oh, they just look so right on the cats.
(Not that Princess Prin and Prince Kotaro aren’t thinking,
deep within the feral labyrinth of their feline minds,
“Fuck you, Takako – we’re gonna get you for this, biatch.”
In fact, the possibility of that simply adds – at least for me –
to the pleasure of viewing these images: I do so enjoy seeing cats made to suffer indignities.)
But – and here we get to the nitpicking evaluation of this post –
there’s one problem here: The wigs.
Yes, wigs.
Because sometimes Iwasa has her kitties wearing
little wigs of humanish hair, little wigs of bright ginger ringlets
bursting from beneath a jaunty cap or flowing down the cat’s neck.
And that’s a misstep – a misstep that all but the clumsiest of cats
would never make, not even while navigating through the harshest
obstacle course one could concoct for a cat. (Hey – there‘s an idea.)
Because, goddamnit, the whole point of these costumes,
it seems to me, is that one is dressing up a cat.
One isn’t pretending that the cat’s a little human, no,
one is concocting clothes for a feline to wear –
and to see that feline wearing those clothes imparts
a sweet cognitive dissonance at the same time as one’s kawaii receptors
are stimulated all to hell & back.
But, if you put a wig on a cat, with clothing added or not,
you’ve entered the realm of pretending that it’s not a cat anymore,
that instead it’s some tiny furry Jon-Benet Ramsey sort of thing
– may Cthulhu preserve us from the idea – and it thereby becomes
more like, instead of some sweet kitty transvestite,
a sort of feline iteration of men who dress up in female latex masks.
And à chacun son goût, I suppose, but … *shudder*
Look: Clothing is an extra for humans;
it only seems otherwise due to the whole lame taboo-against-nudity farce.
So, there’s that.
And: Clothing is an extra for cats, too;
and so, to dress a cat, is to not only make the cat look absurd
but to also point out the absurdity of (unless environmentally dictated)
human clothing.
So that’s two True Good Things in one.
But: Hair is definitely human and not at all like animal fur
(NB: Disregard Afghan Hounds, those goddam showboats)
and it doesn’t delightfully amplify the absurdity when it’s added to a cat;
rather, it gets too near the brink of some interspecies uncanny valley.
Okay? Okay? Okay?
At the very least – Please, Vice! – Please, Takako! –
put that shit in a separate book, alright?
Thank you.
I mean, we won’t be buying that one …
but, yeah, we know a few perverted people who probably will.
This article appears in August 19 • 2011.