Hand in (Opera) Glove

The last time I wore gloves was March 2020; a moment that, for reasons I don't think I need to spell out, was completely devoid of fantasy. At first, it was whatever I had laying around (cotton, wrist-length, with palms dipped in latex), and then, the ones I bought in bulk (disposable, cerulean, with a persistent, chemically vanilla scent). Almost as immediately as they had seemed necessary, I found them clumsy and counterintuitive, preferring bare hands and a ready supply of Purell, white-knuckling whatever felt most like control. I ended up swearing off gloves completely for the next two winters, much to the detriment of my skin barrier. Fault lines cracked along patches of windburn.

I'm thinking, too, of Sarah Burton's latest for Alexander McQueen. (Gloves are critical to its succinct vocabulary, directing focus to erogenous slices of skin.) Backstage after its debut, Burton intimated that this Spring 2023 collection emerged from certain preoccupations with vulnerability and isolation, with human contact "in the world of technology," and cited her recent revisitations of George Orwell's 1984 and Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights as central to its development. Just four days after it appeared on the runway, Taylor Russell wore Look 22 (a floor-length leather dress with a halter neck, open back, and exaggerated hips) while promoting the cannibal romance Bones and All, and finished the silhouette with a pair of gloves that stretched beyond the bicep. Now, it feels like these long, romantic gloves are everywhere—in velvet and mesh, printed and fringed, on red carpets and at the dive bar down the block. Their proliferation is evidence of shared desires for closeness and protection, of boundaries reconstructing in real time.

Gloves broker a relationship between the wearer and the rest of the world. When long evening gloves first rose to prominence in the formal dance settings of the early 1800s, they were a mark of high society for European women—a satin boundary against the twinned scandals of touch and labor and their attendant implications of a person’s worth. Despite initial fluctuations in popularity, they quickly became de rigueur, as common and expected as suit jackets and stockings, and remained standard dress through the turn of the twentieth century. After protracted periods of war, they eventually receded from regular use, but rather than falling out of style, their rarity only further preserved an association with status.

Throughout Garry Marshall's 1990 neoliberal Cinderella story Pretty Woman, gloves punctuate Vivian Ward's transformation from sex worker to storybook princess (with the roles of Prince Charming and Fairy Godmother both played by her millionaire client Edward Lewis, who accumulated his immense wealth through a series of private equity corporate raids). Suggesting refinement and civility, they’re at their longest and most optic white at the film's climax, when Edward whisks Vivian away via private jet to see La traviata at the San Francisco Opera.

And then, there's Marilyn Monroe dripping with diamonds and pink peau d’ange silk for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Madonna's fitting tribute in "Material Girl"; Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946) and her cartoon double, Jessica Rabbit. By their example, opera gloves are the understood uniform of femme fatales, faux naïfs, and women who don't quite have money but are adept at translating social capital into currency the landlords and deli counters will actually accept. The same idea, sharpened: Opera gloves are for those certain of their own power, skilled in a strategic game of concealing and revealing.

In the 1961 film adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, gowns and gloves forge a connection between Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly, a Manhattan transplant who charms a survivable income out of lonely rich men, and a nameless dancer at the strip club that she and her neighbor Paul visit on a drunken night out. It's about as close as we get to Capote’s original characterization, which, after the film's major stakeholders took a gallon of bleach (and yellowface) to the source material in the name of broad commercial appeal, is barely recognizable, cloaking vague references to transactional intimacy and omitting much more. Removed even further from its narrative context—on posters and throw pillows—the image of Hepburn swanning around Kennedy-era New York in Givenchy LBDs has such a strong connotation of class that Golightly, a character who, were she introduced today, might be labeled a scammer or a sugar baby (affectionately), has instead become the antiseptic patron saint of college dorm rooms and first apartments. Disfigurement by a thousand market incentives.

Not every gloved ensemble is instantly iconic, but many of them are. Rihanna paying nearly naked homage to Josephine Baker at the 2014 CFDA Awards. Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body (2009) and the ripples of her influence in Olivia Rodrigo's "Good 4 U" revenge fantasy. Pepper LaBeija making her grand entrance in gold. Gypsy Rose Lee, always and forever. Ziwe blinking incredulously through white eyeliner and an Instagram Live window.

The lady's glove—scientific name, Digitalis purpurea—is a poisonous flowering plant common to the woodlands and hedgerows of the English countryside. Its stem grows straight toward the sky and erupts every other year with a cascade of purple blossoms like a staff of sleigh bells. When the physician William Withering was studying the effects of the plant, he wrote of its "power over the motion of the heart" and "a giddiness of the head" which followed its use, sometimes lasting as long as ten days. Safe to touch, but fatal if ingested without guidance. He eventually landed on its medicinally perfect proportions: At the right dosage, lady’s glove could treat heart failure, provoking it to beat more forcefully without quickening its pace.

A slight correction: That March was the last time before the last time I wore gloves, which was actually two nights ago. Black mesh, to the bicep. Meteorologically, they're useless. Aesthetically, they're barely noticeable. But hasn't a whisper ever made your hair stand on end? The gloves counteract the forced austerity of the last few years with a frisson of romance. But if I'm being really honest, their most curative quality is the negotiation they compel with my phone. Materially thin and porous, their effect is not a complete blockade (though I did briefly consider something like Botter's water-filled condoms), but a bit of necessary friction, a stopgap to make space for noticing—where my attention goes, how reliant I've become, what I'm trying to escape or project. If gloves typically confer power through an ability to manipulate without the burden of sense, this is the direct inverse. My grip is slick, my phone slips. Scrolling operates on a delay, only working when I adjust the side of my index finger and its neighboring seam just so. But if nothing else will slow down, at least I can, and in more shapeless moments, the gloves are a reminder that whether we speak of hands or numbers or technology, it's all digital.

Gaby Wilson is a writer and journalist based in New York. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Elle, HBO’s VICE News Tonight, MTV, and more.