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06706_Field_TCUM T271.txt
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1996-04-10
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Today in America there is a revolutionary attitude
expressed as much in our attire as in our patios and small cars.
For a decade and more, women’s dress and hair styles have
abandoned visual for iconic—or sculptural and tactual—stress.
Like toreador pants and gaiter stockings, the beehive hairdo is
also iconic and sensuously inclusive, rather than abstractly
visual. In a word, the American woman for the first time
presents herself as a person to be touched and handled, not
just to be looked at. While the Russians are groping vaguely
toward visual consumer values, North Americans are frolicking
amidst newly discovered tactile, sculptural spaces in cars,
clothes, and housing. For this reason, it is relatively easy for us
now to recognize clothing as an extension of the skin. In the
age of the bikini and of skin-diving, we begin to understand
“the castle of our skin” as a space and world of its own. Gone
are the thrills of strip-tease. Nudity could be naughty