As May flowers appear closer on the horizon, we cope with April skies by celebrating the wetter month's undisputed rain-warrior: the umbrella. The iconic accessory is the star of this film by Tell No One, AKA Luke White and Remi Weekes, winners of the Young Directors Award (Video Art Europe) at Cannes 2012, with creative direction by Leila Latchin. The brolly also forms the focus of design expert and sophisticate Stephen Bayley’s century spanning essay. 

The Umbrella by Stephen Bayley

There are parts of southern Italy where they have a splendid tradition of flying monks. St. Joseph, who could hover, was one example. But I have seen in obscure churches dingy images of other monks using umbrellas to assist flight.

In fact, there is a school of thought, unscholarly, but persuasive, that the umbrella’s origin was not as a protection against rain, but as an experimental parachute-like device. Indeed, anybody who has used one in heavy rain knows that, so far from keeping you dry, an umbrella can be used to direct torrents of water onto any part of your body.

The umbrella may be part of the English gentleman’s iconography, but its cultural history goes back farther than Pall Mall and Clubland. In Nineveh, Persia, Athens and the India of the Mahabharata, parasols accessorized high-status figures and guarded them from the sun: the word umbrella, in fact, comes from the Italian word for “shade.” Associations with sunshine remain with the cocktail umbrella, popularized by San Francisco’s Trader Vic’s, where a cute little pastel-colored paper and wood parasol decorates your Mai Tai and threatens to put your eye out with every sunny sip.

Protection from the sun gave way to protection from the rain when the umbrella began to appear on the streets of London in the late 18th century, an idea perhaps imported from China. It became so much a symbol of Imperial authority that in Victorian Africa tribal chieftains borrowed umbrellas as status symbols irrespective of weather conditions.

Post-Freud, we know that the Empire’s tightly-furled umbrella suggests a vulnerable mixture of repression and anxiety in its user. Personally, despite the quasi-phallic character which any thrusting device acquires, I have always found umbrellas emasculating. Isn’t it more manly to get wet? Even Bulgaria’s secret police the Darzhavna Sigurnost’s interesting efforts to weaponize umbrellas by fitting them with ricin-poisoned pellets for subtle urban assassinations has not, if you ask me, made them any more butch.

And now the umbrella is changing. In the 19th century, silk replaced oiled canvas and umbrellas became lighter and more portable, but, nonetheless, a classic umbrella (the sort you might buy from James Smith & Co) with its cane handle and heavy metal frame is an expensive encumbrance instead of a lightweight convenience. Umbrellas are now compact, cheap and disposable. And, coming full-circle, they are all made in China : the province of Shangyu alone is said to have more than 1,000 dedicated umbrella factories.

But the umbrella argument remains strong. Despite its functional deficiencies, the potential of any portable device which gives its user a customized protective microclimate will forever be alluring. So, the technological successor to the umbrella may well be the sort of electro-magnetic repellent force field the army is developing for main battle tanks. Imagine: you could be fitted with a supercapacitor, switch it on, charge it up and walk boldly into London weather and remain like a duck’s back.

But the classic umbrella will, in one form or another, be with us forever. So unambiguous are its meanings that, all over the planet, an umbrella graphic is immediately understood to mean… there is a danger of getting wet. No one ever wants that which is why no-one will ever love an umbrella. You cannot wash away associations of rain.