Culture of Bathing #1 Diving in with WET Magazine
Hi Everyone,
Welcome to our first Culture of Bathing newsletter!
Not unlike our appetite for food, the purpose of a bath changes with our emotional and physical state. In a world of shifting currents, the bathhouse can serve as refuge, a place where anxieties melt away. Never has the escapist appeal of bathing felt quite so enticing as this fall.
Leonard Koren captures this palpable shift in mood and energy beautifully: ‘To bathe is to fall into step with your biological rhythms: in and out breathing, the speed of blood coursing through your veins, the slowness of tiredness… The mechanical world of objective time – seconds, minutes, hours – is irrelevant here.’
Koren has influenced and inspired each of our bathing and aesthetic journeys, especially his publication from the 1970s, WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing. It was like nothing any of us had seen before – bold, playful graphics and photography loosely centered around bathing.
It seems only fitting that our inaugural Substack is centered around the ‘Philosopher of Bathing.’Â
We hope you enjoy.Â
Elena, Jane and RobbieÂ
P.S. If you’re in New York, Friday November 15th, please join us and Leonard at the NYPL for his talk – From WET to Wabi-Sabi, and Back Again: Leonard Koren with Stella Bugbee. Tickets are free. The evening promises another form of escapism and community, centered around the power of aesthetics and the importance of democratizing beauty and pleasure in our world.Â
The Philosopher of Bathing
I first came across Leonard Koren in 1996 when a small book with a sepia cover titled Undesigning the Bath landed on my desk for review. Curious, I started flicking through and quickly fell under Koren’s spell. In deceptively simple language, Koren describes the profoundly visceral appeal of bathing and promotes the idea that bathing is as much a state of being as an act of cleansing – a portal into a different physical and psychological dimension from the rational, clothed world. The book is illustrated with grainy photos of baths, from a traditional hamam to a cable car converted into a flying bathtub. And mud baths, yes, lots of gungy mud baths. It struck a deep chord. These were the kinds of bathing experiences that had kindled my own passion for soaking and steaming. I wasn’t alone.
To designers, artists and bathers, Koren is a legendary if slightly mysterious figure, whose influence has been quietly pervasive across many creative fields. Through his imprints Stone Bridge Press and Imperfect Publishing, Koren has published maybe 20 books almost all in a modest format and mostly concerned with different aspects of aesthetics. Best known is Wabi Sabi for artists, designers, poets and philosophers deftly describing the Japanese aesthetic of the imperfect, impermanent and humble. Among my favorites are an extended essay about the workings of a Viennese flower shop and their relations with their customers titled The Flower Shop: charm, grace, beauty, tenderness in a commercial environment, and Arranging Things, a treatise on the rhetoric of arranging objects illustrated by Nathalie Du Pasquier.
But Undesigning the Bath was not Koren’s first venture into bathing. In 1976, he published WET The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing. The first issue had a black and white cover with a hand-painted logo dripping down over miniscule illustrations of a female figure in different stages of bathing. Over the next 5 years and 34 issues WET established itself as a cult zine with an international following, a wonderfully absurdist world view and a seminal force in Postmodern graphic design.
When Koren hit on the idea of WET he had just left architecture school and was looking for something to do. At college, he had become fascinated with the psychological space of the bathroom and the rituals enacted there. He began to use it as the subject for performances and held freeform parties at bathhouses. That was the testbed for WET.
What exactly ‘a magazine of gourmet bathing’ was didn’t seem to matter, at least not to its founder, editor, designer and writer. Koren has described the magazine as ‘a spirited assault on good taste and linear thinking’. Its pages became a space for experimentation where photographers, artists, and writers were invited to express their ‘bolder, brasher, weirder visions – unfettered’. Angular graphics and a raw collage aesthetic exploded creatively over the page in what soon became known as New Wave and Postmodern. One issue famously featured a cartoon strip by Matt Groening called Forbidden Soaps where a rabbit extemporizes on his relationship with a bar of soap that eventually gets eaten by a dog. Covers included a pistol-blazing Debby Harry and a then unknown Richard Gere photographed by Herb Ritts bare-chested and cradling a small anatomical doll. A cover featuring two pigs copulating bore the title ‘sex with the dead’ which got it banned from some stores.
Jane Withers
If you can’t make the talk on November 15, watch out for our interview with Leonard in the next few weeks. Undesigning the Bath has just been re-issued by Blunk Books - order your copy here.
Images courtesy of Leonard Koren.
One Last Thing
Jamie Dornan on being treated like a piece of meat at one of our favorite bathing spots, NYC’s Russian & Turkish Baths.
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