The breastplate is always en vogue.
And some brief notes on quitting IG.
I’m, like, dropping hints that I’m quitting Instagram (I’m quitting Instagram). I can’t really explain it without sounding woo-woo, but 2025 just feels different. There’s something about this midway point through the decade that is screaming: “Make big changes!” Of course, I’m hoping that the big changes don’t include a bird flu contagion, and I’m choosing to ignore that 2025 starts with WTF, just like 2020 did.
After struggling through one of the hardest years of my life, my decision to quit IG came down to some pretty simple logic: the app rewired my brain, it’s extremely difficult to concentrate, and I can no longer accept spending so much time scrolling when I could be learning, exercising, or doing literally anything else that isn’t beholden to an algorithm that, frankly, is getting shittier by the day.
By breaking up with Instagram, I’m hoping to read more (shoutout to Chloe for introducing me to the Libby app), be more present, and, yes, write this newsletter on a more consistent basis. The aim of Public Service in 2025 is to be even more of an extension of myself. I’ll still do deep dives (scroll down for some breastplate lore), but I hope to also mix in some life updates, little reviews, and whatever else fits. Maybe a few photos? Who knows! Variety is the spice of life, or so I hear.
Welcome to Public Service.
Mentions of the word “breast” in this essay: 23
When @italybutoncrack pitted two handbags molded into breastplates against each other on Twitter in October 2022, they had no way of knowing that two years later, I’d embark on a journey that would take me from Ancient Greece to the collections of Jean Paul Gaultier and beyond. On the left, a sculpted bag from Look 6 of Lemaire’s Fall 2015 Ready-to-Wear (RTW) collection, crafted by their longtime collaborator Carlos Anibal Peñafiel; on the right, a very similar-looking bag from Schiaparelli [mistakenly IDed as being from Spring 2021 when it’s actually from Look 14 of the Fall 2021 Ready-to-Wear (RTW) season]. Both continue a longstanding love affair between fashion designers and the breastplate.
The first known iteration of the object first appeared in Ancient Greece as the cuirass during the 5th and 4th centuries BC. This piece of armor was made of hammered bronze (and, later, boiler leather) to mimic the idealized male form — and sorry to horny men, but big-breasted armor was almost certainly not a thing in Greece or on any battlefield. The missing link between the cuirass and the breastplates of high fashion comes via the “cuirass bodice,” a fresh take on the bodice (the upper part of a dress covering the chest) that mimicked a piece of armor. As a Paris correspondent from the Warehousemen and Drapers’ Journal writers in the December 26, 1874, edition of Otago Witness: “That the cuirasse will continue in vogue is quite sure.” This form would eventually fall out of style, but as a great L’Officiel feature on the breastplate by Hannah Militano notes: “Nearly a century later, the breastplate found its way onto high fashion runways.”
In 1969, Yves Saint Laurent collaborated with the acclaimed Surrealist sculptor Claude Lalanne to mold replicas of model Veruschka von Lehndorff’s bust (and torso) for his haute couture Fall/Winter “Empreintes” collection. The resulting objects, made of galvanized copper, were paired with dresses in blue and black crepe voile. That show opened the floodgates, as a wave of designers throughout the 80s and 90s used the breastplate in their collections. I’ll likely devote an entire future issue of the newsletter to the way Issey Miyake, Thierry Mugler, Hussein Chalayan, Paco Rabanne, Alexander McQueen, and Jean Paul Gaultier found inspiration in this object, but let’s bring it back to the Schiaparelli of it all.
The breastplate bag from Fall 2021 is best understood in the context of creative director Daniel Roseberry’s multi-season meditation on breasts during his pandemic shows. His Spring 2021 Couture show was bodies, bodies, bodies; it served as an ode to the brand’s founder, Elsa Schiaparelli, and the experimental, Surrealist spirit she brought to the fashion house through collaborations with Dali, Cocteau and Man Ray — for another take on Surrealism, see my post about Bally’s Spring 2025 show. The show featured a solid gold breast and face plate, a glossy black chestplate with enviable abs (later rendered in a custom, Hulk-green shade for Kim Kardiashian’s 2020 Christmas party), a crazy leather body plate with a matching bag, and, most strikingly, a solid gold mold of a child breastfeeding from a single breast.
That latter piece is a direct reference to Michaelango’s drawing “Madonna and Child” (1522-25), depicting the infant Jesus suckling at the Virgin Mary's breast, which is itself an interpretation of Duccio di Buoninsegna’s original “Madonna and Child” painting from around 1300. A few months later, the Fall 2021 Ready-to-Wear collection continued Roseberry’s exploration of breasts (breastploration?) with the aforementioned leather breast bag, plus more molded iterations in gold-dipped and glossy black leather and some conical varieties attached to coats, shirts, and sweaters. The theme resurfaced again in his Fall 2021 Couture collection, which featured a breastplate in metallic silver.
Alongside Roseberry’s gilded objects and references to Michaelangelo, other designers have put their spin on the object, kicking off a new renaissance for the breastplate. There was Tom Ford’s Spring 2020 RTW show with lacquered metal breastplates (retailing at $15,000 and modeled by both Gwyneth Paltrow for Harper’s Bazaar February 2020 cover and Zendaya at the 2020 Critic's Choice Awards), which reappeared as Look 39 in his final Archive collection in Fall 2023; Sinéad O’Dwyer’s solid fiberglass molds cast from muses she handpicked for Spring 2020; and No Sesso’s Fall 2022 RTW collection featuring a denim corset breast bag in Look 19 (seemingly part of the designers’ collab with Levi). Off the runway and on the red carpet, Sydney Sweeney wore a custom silver breastplate by LaQuan Smith in 2022 with aggressively pointed nipples (inspired by Look 20 from Smith’s Spring 2023 show), while Rihanna had a custom breastplate made by Loewe for her low-energy, full-pregnancy 2023 Superbowl Halftime Show performance.
The allure of this object, whose origins combine the strength of armor with the sensuality of the body, makes for a great metaphor. And let’s be honest, strapping the molded female figure onto a model is a stunt — even more so if it’s coated in gold or has a shiny lacquer. Fashion’s love affair with the breastplate shows no signs of ceasing, and I get it. As Elio’s father explains in Call Me By Your Name, flipping through a slide projector of statues: “They are all curves, sometimes impossibly curved and so nonchalant, hence their ageless ambiguity. As if they are daring you to desire them.”
December Letterboxd review dump:
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (3/5 stars) — Wanting dirty, sweaty David Bowie to raw you would drive any man crazy.
Dìdi (2.5/5 stars) — As someone who willingly and enthusiastically talked to SmarterChild, had very few friends, and once bought a t-shirt that said “that’s it! You’re out of my Top 8” as a teenager, I will be filing a lawsuit for the deep psychic trauma this film caused by showing echos of my cringy adolescent on screen. That said, I think the quiet tone was a bit too quiet. The material has been done better elsewhere, but it was still nice to watch.
Babygirl (4/5 stars) — Milk being lapped up from a plate hasn’t looked this erotic since Cats (2019)
The Holdovers (3.5/5 stars) — For fans of Paul Giamatti saying “look me in my lazy eye while I (almost) ruin your Christmas, you precocious bitch.” Also for fans of first-time actors (Dominic Sessa) who seem lab-grown for starring roles in cozy, 70s-era, Northeastern-set Christmas movies.
Queer (4.5/5 stars) — I, too, would do a little curtsy, stumble through the jungle, and vomit up my heart on ayahuasca in an effort to get Drew Starkey to touch me.
Civil War (1/5 stars) — It says a lot when you go through so much effort and special effects to make what you think is some highbrow Children of Men ass, Jan. 6 era war movie, and the most interesting takeaway is that even in civil war, retail workers still have to be fake nice. There was a good, interesting movie hidden somewhere in that mass grave, but Alex Garland was too busy jerking himself off to find it.
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (4/5 stars) — Them days are over when a cleaning lady can walk into Dior with wads of cash and expect haute couture in return.
Pulp Fiction (4/5 stars) — Call me a pawn shop basement gimp the way I felt locked away from society by not seeing this film until Dec 1, 2024.
Thanks for joining me, and have a nice day!