Dress simultaneously delivers woman to nature and petrifies her from it

Evidence

The function of dress and ornaments is highly complex; for some primitives, it had a sacred character; but its most usual role was to complete woman’s metamorphosis into an idol. An equivocal idol: man wanted her erotic, for her beauty to be part of that of flowers and fruits; but she also had to be smooth, hard, eternal like a stone. The role of dress is both to link the body more closely to and to wrest it away from nature, to give a necessarily set artifice to palpitating life. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 351

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the distinctive Beauvoir device of woman-as-idol: natural and artificial, alive yet set and eternal.
• XREF: connects to: Woman in Breton’s surrealism is the mediator who delivers nature’s truth