Stede Bonnet and the Subversive Shirt
In season one, despite the colours, lace, and detailing, Stede’s dress is mostly conformist in cut and style. His shirts are high-buttoned, cravated, and do not show much flesh below his chin. Coupled with the pantaloon and waistcoat, Stede’s wearing the clothes of traditional masculine presentation of his era.
There are times Stede’s clothing becomes less formal. During the sword practice with Ed in 106, Stede’s shirt is open and the cravat loosened. Again, in 107 we see Stede in his open nightclothes wandering on deck. During evening story hour, his jacket is removed. Stede usually seems more relaxed during these moments too.
Stede’s style changes properly on the second leaving of Bridgetown. What Stede is wearing openly as he drags the boat to sea is a rather romantic poet-pirate look with billowing shirt and sash. The look has links with future nineteenth-century Romantic freethinkers, championing individualism, revolution and liberty - including sexual liberation.
The open-neck shirt was popularised by Byron and Shelley a hundred years later. It was a deliberate choice of styling in opposition to enforced gender presentation and monogamous heteronormativity. The fashion of the times, similar to the 1700s, was high collars and neck-wrapping in order to force the holding of the male head in a stately and erect manner. It’s all about rigidity…
For an English gentleman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to have his shirt open and loose in public, was a sign of effeminacy. It was women who showed their décolletage in society, who were allowed a softer presentation; this new style hinted strongly at sexual and gender nonconformity. Women were viewed as more animalistic, men as cultured. Cultured people cover up. Softness, looseness - these are aspects of female sexuality, a bit bestial. And women are also a little bit insane. Why would any man, especially a man of status, want to present as feminine and lesser? And what does it say about patriarchy if some men actively choose to relinquish their privileged status by presenting more effeminately? It’s dangerous.
By today’s standards, Byron was pansexual and polyamorous. Shelley’s sexuality is less clear, but he was viewed as a subversive atheist and disinherited. Both might consider themselves nonbinary today. Shelley especially seems to have had a strong gnc presentation. Both left England for more liberal Europe.
I feel the costume department must’ve made a very deliberate and informed choice regarding Stede’s shirts post season one, but I don’t feel it’s the one some people think it is. I know part of DJenks stated aim was to ‘make Rhys Darby as sexy as possible’, but it’s not about appearing more masc. just because he’s showing more flesh. It’s about appearing more Stede. Stede is expressing a new-found confidence in his sexual identity and gender expression, by choosing a more freer, less structured, less traditionally masculine way of dressing, associated rather presciently with future Romantic liberalism. It seems poets and pirates have more in common than we realise. And both were considered dangerous for questioning the system.
However, Stede is also an individual in flux and he circles back to a part of his former self. The Red Suit is a sort of hybrid male/female costume. The cuffs, detailing and shirt itself are femme. But there are elements of traditional masculinity which are quite toxic. The epaulettes reinforce the inverted masculine triangular shape. Anyone who grew up in the 1980s will remember their mothers feeling forced to wear exaggerated shoulder-padding as they entered male-dominated workspaces. They also enforce military rank. Stede thinks he needs this imagery to ‘be the Captain’. He doesn’t. The exaggerated coattails are also absolutely synonymous with upper class male power. It’s masculinity as performance and power-play. Stede needs to let all of this cursed patriarchal nonsense go.
As so often’s the case in OFMD, external struggle, this time with the crew over the Red Suit, could also be a manifestation of Stede’s internal conflict and shifting identity. It’s a final letting go of patriarchal ideas, especially around captaincy. The crew certainly don’t want it. Stede is (more than) adequate just as he is. At the end of all the pushing and pulling, Stede keeps the most relevant bit of the outfit - the shirt. It’s the least restrictive part, the more feminine and therefore, the more subversive on a male body. It’s a sartorial representation of a changing Stede.
The three shirts worn in series two are deliberately opened-collared and low-cut, showing more and more of Stede’s chest. This is a traditional feminine aesthetic which historically on a man, at least in the anglosphere, was considered subversive and dangerous. And Stede couples his shirts with a different sort of masculinity, a leather trouser. Class-wise, this is a traditional working man’s garment. Through his new choice of clothing, Stede is rejecting entirely his previous role within patriarchal hegemony, both the imposed status and imposed gender norms.
This was in my drafts a while but inspired to try and pull it together by @celluloidbroomcloset posts here and here
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