Sesame Street, Style & Semiotics

Christian Louboutin's Alpaca Lamb Clutch

The fashion set has named this sea green clutch “Oscar the Grouch”. How apropos! Too much fun to see a few of my favorite things—Christian Louboutin and vintage Sesame Street—converge in faddism. Anyone who recalls the classic Sesame Street segment and song “Me and my llama” (about a Manhattan girl who takes her pet llama for a dental cleaning) can concur how alluringly absurd this alpaca bag is. It’s so deliciously unbeautiful. It’s so wrong its right. And with a little wear and tear it will most assuredly become classically tacky and look more like a Yip Yip than Oscar the Grouch.

Yip Yips

Oscar the Grouch

Fashion will always be enthralled with the unconventional and I particularly adore items that have a distinctive harmony and charm. Look closely and you’ll see the double mini heel clasp. Clever! Objects like this beg for a semiology of the ugly. The Lithuanian linguist Algirdas Julius Greimas (a buddy of Roland Barthes) contributed to the theory of semiotics. He introduced the “semiotic square” as a means of mapping the key semantic oppositions in a text or practice.

The semiotic square