Sunday, June 25, 2023

Cockade

Cockade (pronounced ko-keyd)

(1) A rosette, knot of ribbon, etc, worn usually on the hat as part of a uniform, as a badge of office, or the like.

(2) A feather or ribbon worn on military headwear, the colors of which served as unit identification.

(3) In (mostly military) aviation, an emblem of concentric circles of different colours, identifying the country to which an aircraft belongs (often called a roundel).

1650–1660: As cockade, an eighteenth century adaption of the earlier cockard, from the French cocarde (a knot of ribbons), from the Middle French cocquard (boastful, silly, cocky), the construct being coc (rooster, cock) + -arde (-ard).  The French suffix –arde was the female equivalent of –ard and was from the Middle French, from the Old French –ard & -art, from the Frankish -hard (hardy, bold), from the Proto-Germanic harduz (hard), from the primitive Indo-European kert- & kret- (strong).  It was used to form pejoratives, diminutives, and nouns representing or belonging to a particular class or sort.  The French cockade gained its name from the resemblance of the devices to a cock's crest, being from cocarde (feminine of cocard (arrogant, strutting) and thus cocquard (boastful, silly, cocky) which was an allusion to the behavior of the strutting rooster which appears so arrogantly boastful).  Cockade is a noun and cockaded is an adjective; the noun plural is cockades.

A gothic flavored Lindsay Lohan in Chanel with white rosette, MTV Studios, New York City, December 2005.

The companion (an now more widely used) term rosette describes a rose-shaped thing which may be an ornament, a fitting or any number of circular things, the best known of which are those with many small parts in concentric circles, especially when formed from a bunch or knot of ribbons and worn as a decoration or award.  Dating from 1790 from the French rosette (a diminutive of rose), rosette has a wider range of application than cockade and in the abstract is a generalized term referring to any number of stylized items which to one degree of another, are vaguely rose-like.  Rose was from the Middle English rose & roose, from the Old English rōse, from the Latin rosa, of uncertain origin but it may via Oscan be from the Ancient Greek όδον (rhódon) (rose), from the Old Persian wda- (flower) and Middle Iranian borrowings including the Old Armenian վարդ (vard) (rose), the Aramaic וַרְדָּא‎ (wardā) & ܘܪܕܐ (wardā), the Arabic وَرْدَة‎ (warda) and the Hebrew וֶרֶד‎ (wére)), from the primitive Indo-European wr̥dos (sweetbriar).  The –ette suffix was from the Middle English -ette, a borrowing from the Old French -ette, from the Latin -itta, the feminine form of -ittus.  It was used to form nouns meaning a smaller form of something.

Girl with Cocked Hat (1925), oil on canvas by Walt Kuhn (1877–1949), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.  It’s an example of early American Modernism.

Cockades fulfilled the function of maintaining the shape of a hat and were usually formed as a bow or knot of ribbons.  Inherently ornamental whetever their intended functional purpose, cockades quickly came to be used to signify the wearer’s identification with a political party, a particular military unit, or a household (in the form of livery).  They could be a matter of life or death during the French Revolution (1789) because the revolutionaries wore blue, white, and red cockades adopted from the colours of the royal family and the city of Paris.  The royalist forces and other reactionaries adopted white, orange, or black and yellow cockades (depending upon the nationality of the army in which they were serving), the French émigrés apparently preferring white.  The military often retained the colors but the use of cockades as such ceased for all but a handful of ceremonial uniforms when first armies and later navies ceased wearing cocked hats.  They’re still seen as a fashion item and a few of the surviving royal households have maintained their use in the leather cockades on the headgear of liveried coachmen and chauffeurs.

Although it seemed an early call, Nylon, after surveying the frocks at the 2023 Golden Globes, declared that rosettes were not only back but trending, noting the catwalks at the European spring shows were lush with floral themes.  Their conclusion: when roses bloom, rosettes surely follow.  If so, the fashion cycle is following the usual routine although the rapidity of cyclical churn does seem to have accelerated; whereas for most of the period since the seventeenth century when mass-produced rosettes first became a thing, the gaps between their splashes of popularity could be measured in decades, now they seem to be showing up every second generation.  Widely used in the 1980s (often as a bolt-on to the dreaded scrunchie), they re-appeared early in the new millennium and now Nylon says they’re back.

Boris Johnson (b 1964; UK prime-minister 2019-2022) with Conservative Party rosette and Lord Toby Jug (Brian Borthwick, 1965–2019, leader of the Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire branch of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party until expelled in 2014 at which point he founded the Eccentric Party of Great Britain) wearing Eccentric Party rosettes, UK general election, 2015.

Still used around the world as (mostly amateur) awards in sporting and other competitions, rosettes displaying party affiliations were once a feature of elections in much of the English-speaking world but never really caught on in the US where badges, buttons, banner and latterly, stickers were preferred.  In the modern age, their use has faded just about everywhere except in the UK where they remain an essential part of atmospherics of campaigning and New Zealand where they’re still sometimes seen.  In the UK, they’re now more standardized than they were during much of the twentieth century when the sizes could vary greatly and there was no such thing as an official party color, some candidates even switching colors between polls, either at whim or in the quest for electoral advantage.  The advent of color television changed that and the party leaderships insisted on a consistent theme.  The electoral authorities also impose restrictions on the text which can be displayed and limit the size of rosettes which can be worn at polling places.  The convention of use in the UK evolved into:

Red: Labour
Blue: Conservative
Amber: Liberal Democrats
Green: Green Party
Yellow: Scottish National Party
Red, white and blue: Democratic Unionist Party
Green and orange: Plaid Cymru
Light blue: Reform UK
Purple: UK Independence Party

Nylon could be onto something.  The sequined lace column gown by Valentino Lindsay Lohan wore for the Falling for Christmas premiere (New York City, November 2022) was embroidered with a floral motif.  The reaction was generally positive.

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