Animal prints.  They can be super chic or super trashy.  Scalamandre…

Scalamandre’s silk velvet fabric

…or Jerseylicious.

Jersey-icky

Or they can be Campy, when we put them on horses.  Those of you who know the sedate side of me (and my tendency to harp on what’s wrong in the Age of Vulgarity) will understand when I say — and I don’t care about the Camp — that there’s something wrong here.

At least that was my thought when I saw an ad for Farnam’s Super Mask with Shimmer Weave mesh (sounds like a Cover Girl commercial, doesn’t it?).  It comes in 4 colors, with different trims and two of those trims are animal prints.

Not just any animals, mind you, but animals that eat horses. The lynx and the cheetah.  They eat horses, don’t they?

Lynx, photograph courtesy of David Castor

Susan Sontag wrote that “the whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious,” but even if it is faux fur, would you want to encircle your ears and nose with something that would be happy to kill you, even if it only looked like something that would be happy to kill you?

If you saw the movie Buck, maybe you remember Buck Brannaman talking about the dead animal connection we share with our horses.  I don’t remember his exact words, but he did point out that we throw a piece of another dead animal on our horses’ backs and then talk to them with hamburger on our breath.  Camp notwithstanding, horses are the consummate gentlemen and gentlewomen, given our crudeness and lack of couth.

Now I have to confess that I have a friend whose horse looks absolutely smashing in his cheetah-rimmed shimmer mask (he’s a chestnut).  I’m also a meat eater who shuns Biothane tack, and I wear leather shoes and boots.

I know I need to get over this, even if the custom boots I bought and the many, many saddles make me unable to afford these “pony skin” zebra loafers from Jimmy Choo.

It’s Camp, remember?