Does Anyone Still Wear a Hat?

Alex Bag
Débora Delmar
Jasmine Gregory
David L. Johnson
Louise Lawler
Paul Levack
Lorenza Longhi
Carlos Reyes
Zazou Roddam
Bruno Zhu

Here’s to the ladies who lunch…
Lounging in their caftans and planning a brunch
On their own behalf…
And looking grim ’cause they’ve been sitting
Choosing a hat
Does anyone still wear a hat?
…Another long exhausting day
Another thousand dollars
A matinee, a Pinter play
Perhaps a piece of Mahler’s…
…Look into their eyes and you’ll see what they know
Everybody dies…

Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company debuted in 1970. Structured in a series of fragmented vignettes, the non-linear plot follows a cohort of Manhattanites who experience no substantive transformation nor character development. Company was the first ‘postmodern’ musical, confronting the bourgeois Broadway-going audience with the issues affecting their lives and the disintegration of social institutions they existed within, rather than offering an escape.

Company opened at the start of a decade which ushered in a neoliberal turn, and the death knell of the American middle class. Modernism had become exhausted and the postwar economic boom was nearing a halt. As labor’s bargaining power collapsed, wealth stratification began to rapidly accelerate. The political radicalism of the prior decade was repackaged into aesthetics and sold back to the public at a markup.

The sixth number from Act II, “The Ladies Who Lunch”, contends with luxury consumption, and the death drive of purposelessness. These upper-class ‘ladies’ lack a raison d’être beyond conspicuously consumption–of prestige education, culture, and commodities. In economist Thorstein Veblen’s words, they are “useless and expensive.” Their lives are defined by leisurely activities and rituals that demonstrate their affluence, which Jean Baudrillard identifies as a social “production of status.”
The song was written by Sondheim, who captures himself and fellow members of his ‘elite’ cultural milieu within his critique. But the ouroboros of consumer capitalism cannibalizes critiques of consumption as rapidly as it produces them. The only transformation Capital allows of critique is its own–from critique to commodity.

“The Ladies Who Lunch” is performed as a solo monologue by Elaine Stritch, who asks, “does anyone still wear a hat?” Once an accessory used as an immediate display of status, the distinguished lady’s hat had begun to fall from fashion. How, then, are they to signal class in an era of rapid socioeconomic change, and how to hold onto that power and find meaning in it?
Is there a means to an end when one’s means have no end?

Let’s hear it for the ladies who lunch
Everybody rise…

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Tags: Alex Bag, Bruno Zhu, Carlos Reyes, David L. Johnson, Débora Delmar, Does Anyone Still Wear a Hat?, Does Anyone Still Wear a Hat? (Closing Reception), Hans Goodrich, Jasmine Gregory, Lorenza Longhi, Louise Lawler, Lower West Side, Paul Levack, Pilsen, Zazou Roddam