Garments in candy-coloured chiffon, velvet, satin and silk fabrics and golden and silver floral and delicate Eastern flora and fauna prints. Ruffly silk and satin slippers decorated in satin and silk bows, gemstones and Asiatic florals-carved medallions, and necklaces with pink, yellow and traditional diamonds in different sizes. Paper fans in rich deep blues, golds, coppers, ivories, pastel pinks and blues, and mints, trimmed in lace and gold ribbons, and painted in exotic flowers and plants and pastoral tableauxs of court women and men. Porcelain dishes painted in dainty floral lace, flowers and ribbons of flowers, and Asiatic floral petals and heads. Ornate, Asiatic-inspired pastries, embossed chocolates, luscious creams and frostings, kinds and diverse uses of sugars, spotless, globose peaches, citruses and berries, and edible gold and pastel glazed nuts from around the globe. Vertically, proudly stood up and bathed in brilliant lighting, these material objects are presented before Marie Antoinette, Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy and Gabrielle de Polignac in a swift, dizzying montage and speed. This montage is only one example of Marie Antoinette (2005)’s affirmation of the intellectual and moral superiority, strength and gloriousness of Rococo France’s imperial power and imperial and colonial activities – but, director Sofia Coppola does not present only this reading. I argue that Coppola creates flowery, vegetational, aqueous domestic interiors embodying gynocentric power, declaring the values found in (female) voluptuousness and women’s forming ideas and discoveries from this power within Versailles’ interiors that could not have been shared beyond them. The women’s brightness, colour and motion and men’s reflecting their hues and finding of their light demonstrating secondly, the former’s responsibility for the latter’s cultural achievements. In tight and tightly organized frames, the objects’ frontal placements and disembodying of the women’s bodies, French and colonial objects of the Wunderkammer tradition place women into the confinement to decoration, domesticity and frivolity, hindering intellectual achievement. The colonial objects’ representation aligns with Europe’s traditional representation of colonialism – Coppola using the picturesque to reinforce European perceptions of the Orient, the benevolence of French colonialism and Oriental (/yet to-be colonized) regions’ needing development by imperial powers. Colonial objects’ ordering into colonialist compositions and rows reflects tiers of a cabinet and the museum display practice, thus promoting to-be/colonized regions’ classification by the French and their existence as for France to ‘save,’ take from, luxuriate in and write a history for. Lastly, Versailles’ landscapes follow the imperial European tradition of visually-rendering landscapes, but curvaceous framing and a decorative cinematic lens dis-embeds traditional European imperial ideology firstly, to articulate voluptuousness’ power, and furthermore, gesture to the violent truths of France’s imperial wealth and colonialism.

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Fragonard’s oil paintings of natural landscapes featuring courtly women imagined fantastically lush, curvaceous and curling vegetation with large flowers in bloom and abundance enveloping them to reflect the fertility of women. In her ‘painterly’ techniques, Coppola expands upon this to suggest the femininely sensuous, or voluptuous, as possessing values that disrupt the 18th-century patriarchal order of virtues (Lajer-Burcharth 214). Flowery surfaces and designs, floral, curvaceous shapes, curvy lines, flowing and fertile compositions, and soft, aqueous lightning, map or draw voluptuousness from a shot. Such reveals the potentiality of the voluptuous to produce epistemological, ethical and moral material that could not have formed out of elsewhere, and to create a novel vision of the world. Coppola transforms the interiors of Versailles into aqueous compositions of towering heights and webs of fantastically, lusciously growing leaves, lofty, ruffly, exotic-appearing flowers and fluffy, billowing vines. In their hues of creamy pinks, yellows, ivory and robins egg blue, they represent the flourishing of women’s minds and bodies and the unboundedness of female sexuality (and the merits found only within it). She makes Versailles’ interiors – primarily inhabited by the courtly women and girls – into gynocentric and feminine paradises symbolizing the fecundity, power and strength of femininity. Seated amongst the flora of these interior spaces as if they and the flora were one, Marie and her courtly friends, Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy and Gabrielle de Polignac, sit very near and drape limbs upon each other. The intertwinement of their limbs and bodies mimic intertwining flowers or another floral species, and, with the folding of their dresses into each other, represent each other’s helping each to climb and to create. Flowers from the walls bloom in the gaps between their bodies to represent each’s aiding each’s ideas to bloom – their outstretching floral limbs, outstretching of what may be developed.

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In Coppola’s film, the forward positioning and propelling motion and figural spacing of female figures contrasts the still, dully or softly toned, and undecorated male figures. The courtly women’s dress, makeup and accessories are warmer and warm and bright lighting bathes them as they move about. The courtly men’s costumes’ fabrics and colours and makeup’s shades reflect the light tints and warmer hues of the women’s costuming, and their rarer and stiffer movement contrasts the women’s vibrantly and buoyantly dynamic aura. They are cast in warm, bright light only once they have found and stepped into the women’s reception of such. The male figures acquiring motion and warmth in their skin, costumes and lighting when nearing the female figures, states that the increases in the men’s selves are reflections of the women’s merits. She translates into her medium Fragonard’s representation of courtly women in warm and creamy yellows, pinks, blues and ivories, and men in pale, lifeless greys, tans and blues, the colours of the women that they are near reflecting in them (Lajer-Burcharth 216). She makes more dramatic and severe this figural relationship to represent such from the women’s perspective. This technique states how such women’s ideas and actions were responsible for, or inspired, the cultural achievements of French aristocratic artists. She reclaims the discoveries come to by the women and girls of Versailles that were not shared beyond the confines of the palace’s gynocentric rooms nor recorded and persevered.

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Burchard chronicles the Wunderkammer-like objects produced in and imported to France in the 18th-century that possessed the purposes of being beautiful/embodying the expanse of imperial European aesthetic sensibilities and artistic production. These objects were composed of the finest materials, materials cultivated across the globe, ornate design and decoration, and sometimes foreign and exotic-appearing imagery, and technology. These objects had romantic themes and child-like whimsy. Such contemporary household and personal objects had a heuristic purpose as well. The objects themselves taught about the world beyond Versailles’ doors, and in their grandeur and visual and symbolic complexity, sought to capture and to pacify the minds of the court’s women and girls. Such objects worked in accordance with the purpose of protecting the domesticity, decoration and frivolity of such female subjects. If the latter felt intellectually and philosophically nourished by the objects, then they would be less likely to seek out agentic and productive forms of intellectual nourishment (Burchard 159). Coppola represents the gifting of these objects to Antoinette, Marie of Savoy, and Gabrielle de Polignac by the patriarchal French monarchy as hindering their capabilities of forming ideas, making discoveries and developing such with each other.

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Brilliant lighting, objects’ heaven-pointing and positioning illuminating their textures, luminosity and fine decorations, and rich hues and natural and synthetic textures’ layering atop and beside each other achieve a sense of dreaminess. Using the cinematic medium to place the different objects in dizzying succession accents their opulence and confectionary quality. A glorifying of wealth and the bountifulness of what is in France’s possession; a number of objects and ingredients of which were acquired from European colonies and global territories that France wanted to colonize; takes place. But, tight and tightly organized frames and rectangular compositions portray the Wunderkammer-like objects. These techniques embody the confinement into the box of French monarchical patriarchy’s role of noble women. Increasingly over the montage, the women’s bodies are depicted as disembodied hands, feet, mouths, noses, necks and hair, demonstrating how participating in these objects’ practice subordinates them to an expectation of domesticity and decoration. The extreme closeness of the objects to the courtly women’s bodies/body parts, foreground and central placements (enlarging their sizes), and the women’s bodies/body parts’ placements behind the objects, declare that the objects are in control. Antoinette, Marie of Savoy, and Gabrielle de Polignac’s putting on of, playing with, or eating them happens at a slowing molasses-like, increasingly burdensome pace. This last technique in relation to the previous three concludes that this Wunderkammer-like object practice greatly hinders, even ceasing, courtly women’s abilities to think intellectually.

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Coppola’s montage presentation of the Wunderkammer-like objects, their making and their possession by the French, attributes glory to French imperialism, and colonialism. In addition to imperialist ideology, colonial ideology motivated the making of Marie Antoinette’s Wunderkammer-like objects. The visual representations of the lands which France were colonizing or preparing or wanting to colonize glorify and testify to their literary representation by the French monarchy, and further, represent colonialism as a noble and glorious mission (Burchard 159). In Marie Antoinette, objects imported from, traded for in, or thieved from the regions which France were colonizing are not framed in terms of the ethically-complicated or unethical processes of their exchange or acquisition that are part of the violent politics of colonialism. Rather, as the fruits of the triumphant and glorious colonial project, in which France gifts its intellectual, philosophical, ethical and moral superiority to the regions that it seeks to have as subjects of its empire. On the one hand, her techniques in these objects’ presentation represents the understanding of French colonialism provided to France’s noble women and girls. Yet its silence on the violence of colonial acquisitions of materials and colonialism proposes that what the French empire could provide to the regions it colonized would be and what it historically gave to the regions it colonized was a beneficial exchange. By suppressing this, it reaffirms the benevolence and the necessity of physically and culturally violent or exploitative processes in which brought colonial regions to become subjects of France.

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Each colonial object stands virilely erect, has a foregrounded, central or central-aligned placement and occupies much of a frame. Single and groups of colonial objects are arranged to make heroic, dramatic shapes. The richness of silks, satins, and velvets and of turquoises, raspberry, yellow, indigo, sienna and jade is featured, and layering of luscious and perfect Oriental vegetation is undertaken. The masterful, elegant forms and paint, fabric, metal and precious stone details of the objects are announced. Such richness, design and detail are brightened, sharpened, and made more luminous by the lightning which bathes them, and accents their textures and fineness of their detailed decoration. The spectacle of the material qualities and the absence of humanity’s trace in the presentation of the colonially-sourced material objects forbids the viewer from considering what had to occur for such a product to be present, and before the three women. Further, Nochlin characterizes Orientalism to constitute of a recreation of the picturesque – an ahistorical and timeless configuration and rumination on the European artist’s conception of an Eastern region. This Orientalist picturesque relies upon dramatic visual and thematic contrasts to on one hand, reify the region’s ahistoricity and glory, and on a second hand, subliminally reinforce the moral corruption that orders France to subjugate it (Nochlin 52). The aforementioned techniques embody the Orient as an ancient glory. Her colonial objects’ accented hardness and opaqueness contains the to-be colonial regions’ capacity for barbarism and contemporary poverty. The incredibleness of the objects’ shine speaks of excess lustfulness and wealth that must be ordered. Coppola is conscious of, and either consciously or subconsciously affirms such Orientalist notions, in her arranging for shadows to richen the severity of the objects’ hard and shiny qualities.

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Objects from eastern Asia are those which Marie and her courtly friends are primarily shown consuming. The 18th-century French understanding of east Asian women was as delicate, docile, coquettish and secretly, behind European eyes, exotically erotic, such meanings attributed to the fabrics, accessories, household objects and dishes from or representing the region (Honour 100). Coppola’s lighting curves around the objects from east Asia which gently rest upon each other, sleeping next to one another when looked at from a horizontal perspective. Such illustrates the fineness, delicacy and fragility of the fans’ paper, lace and pastel pinks, blues, yellows, greens, and ivory. The softness of the fans’ materials, composition and decoration, and the fluttering of their layers, as well as the aforementioned representational choice and techniques, mimicking the French imagination of the practices and nature of east Asian women. She does not provide a different vision of east Asian women and femininity, nor reflect on this vision’s violence against east Asian women nor how this vision could have aided in France’s colonial projects in “Cathay” (the contemporary European understanding of east and central Asia).

To explore Coppola’s focus upon “Cathay” objects, during the early modern period of European colonialism, achieving the grandeur of ancient civilizations (as displayed in architecture, art and objects) and the qualities attached to such great civilizations was a symbol of an empire’s strength. In achieving a recreation of such ancient civilization – as in the possession and provision of “Cathay’s” objects to France’s courtly women – the modern empire acquired for itself the concepts of eternity, impenetrability and undefeatability which accompany the former (Honour 88).  Furthermore, such showed that an ancient civilization had been ontologically dominated by and made a subject of the modern empire, at hand to be displayed according to its will and imperial ideology (Nochlin 57). Coppola expands upon these notions with ample natural overhead lightning flooding the objects as if the sun was shining right on them, or that they were under a microscope – thus declaring the regions’ discoveries, and forthcoming development by, French colonizers. The stillness and pristine posing and row arrangement of these objects symbolize the ahistoricity of east Asia’s historical ancient civilization, and its contemporary culture’s weakness. The objects’ frontal placements,  right-diagonal pointing into the next frame – towards progress – and these attributes’ possession of dynamic energy, announce and praise the French hand that has placed them as they should be placed. The sign of an expert French hand declares that France’s rule of a region that is being colonized would develop that region and its population. Nochlin characterizes these Orientalist techniques as an act of taxidermy – of  stripping the modern realities of a colonial population, dressing them up in the European ideal of their essential culture, and staging them in sealed displays presented as reality (52).

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The aforementioned techniques grant a porcelain nature to the represented colonial objects, as if each is a trophy belonging to the bountiful and glorious collection of France. Coppola’s tight and tightly organized frames and rectangular compositions honour the caging of artifacts acquired/taken from non-European lands French/European imperial powers were in the process of colonizing, and their display to be looked upon as a curiosity classified by the powers. The objects’ precise and authorly aesthetically-occupied arrangement into compositions, and Coppola’s camera’s capturing of the compositions in tight overhead frames, and each of such kind of shot appearing successively mimics the tiers of a cabinet of colonial objects. This montage thus honours the practice of museums of colonial objects, and their traditional belief as a feat of the French to be studied by those that belong to the empire. The glory of France as an imperial power and of their colonial project are not only reinforced, but so to the imperial authority and epistemological superiority of France. As well, the natural subject status of east Asian populations and the existence of east Asian culture to be luxuriated in, purloined and exhibited by the French. Lastly, France’s right to narrativize histories and historiographies of east Asia according to the former’s own notion of objectivity is buttressed. (These three points applying to all colonial subjects (Nochlin 57).) But, the spatial closeness of Versailles’ women’s pacification/increased subordination to French monarchical patriarchy’s roles, and the Orientalist depiction of Wunderkammer-like colonial objects may hint at the requirement of women’s subordination and Orientalist representations to colonialism.

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Lastly, according to Mitchell, the traditional European practice of visually rendering landscapes has been determined by colonial ideology and manifest destiny (that the natural world is to be conquered, and that man-made structures are feats of imperial achievement). The rendering is not as objective a representation of a landscape as the artist can achieve, but rather the placement, disposition and aura of components of a landscape are chosen to depict European human involvement as glory, need, and beauty. 18th century landscape painting portrayed harmony, the unity of components, regalness and bountifulness of nature (that is offering itself to human cultivation), naturalness of man-made monuments, and pastoralism of imperial machinery and industry (Mitchell 9). Coppola’s Versailles landscapes are exceptional and sublime. Further, they are pristinely organized to represent different aspects of France’s intellectual power, cultural history and colonial achievements. Versailles’ buildings take up at least two-thirds of the frame, and are positioned in the centre, grandly extending beyond the left and right borders of the frame, or arching in from the left or the right as crowning monuments. Such framing respectively turns them into mountains and cliffs – natural wonders of the world. The director uses deep depths in her landscapes to depict an amount of planes and the ‘natural’ formation of symmetry from all of the planes in a whole frame involving the man-made structures and the flora. Her landscapes have a matching balance of stoney, satiny and silky man-made and fluffy organic and vegetational textures. The architecture is embedded into, and often the nature surrounds, climbs, layers, spills onto, and lays atop, as if the architecture are features of the natural landscape. The harmony and order of the landscape and lushness of the flora declare man’s transformation of the natural landscape as meant to be – natural, and what the original natural landscape needed, for this landscape to be standing on this land.

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Grand, luscious, exotically-appearing trees, shrubs and different kinds of flora acquired (or taken) from colonies and trading partners in east and south Asia and Africa flank the architectural centrepieces as if they were jewels on the latter’s crown. Their leaning towards and/or embracing the architectural centrepieces communicate their paying tribute and gratitude to France. Their precise row arrangements enunciate the regions’ and their people’s domination by, existence for, and benefitting from/need for French colonialism. Of the architecture, Coppola accents the richly sculpted divine- and historically inspired ornaments and historical columns. Architectural geometrical elements’ ornateness and suspension are framed to accent their feat and wondrousness, the latter quality framed to represent soaring. She pictures the gracefully, mathematically calculated, laid and sculpted raw materials of Versailles’ buildings and accentuates the stones and bricks’ faultlessness of symmetry. The architectural elements are represented as having a natural harmony. Across these elements, Coppola represents nature’s achievement of perfection and its making of awe-inspiring geological features. Placed amongst or emerging from the vegetation as if natural features, are sculptures that archive historical French art movements. Included are marble or bronze biblical, monarch and Greek god statues, marble Roman emperor and monarch busts, and marble and stone figure-decorated vase sculptures. The colonial flora’s placement in between, or intertwining amongst such sculptures, further expressing how the colonization of the regions the flora are native to/the colonized regions belong to France’s imperial history.

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Barringer proposes that by choosing representational strategies that counter the traditional interpretation of European colonialism, the visual rendering of a landscape can speak to colonialism’s violence, violent reasoning of its ideology, and immoral principles. Coppola’s cinematic capturing of Versailles landscapes adopts Cole’s disillusioning of architecture’s naturalness and its imaginative reworking. She borrows his betrayal of realist techniques, compositions and colour palettes, historical unity and pastoral natures in his Western landscapes (Barringer 148). (Like earlier examples in this essay of formal artistic strategies that occurred after traditional Rococo, she introduces Cole’s 19th-century techniques into such’s grammar to present an embodied perspective that may not have been granted expression.) Coppola employs curvaceous framing of the landscapes ‘on’ her canvases and a shimmering, pink-toned cinematic lens. In choosing to apply such visual strategies to the imperially glorious and masculinely potent artistic realm of architecture, the director challenges the objectivity of history. She reinforces this essay’s first argument on the fecundity of voluptuousness, centrality of Versailles’ women to the achievements of aristocratic artists, and reclamation of such women’s discoveries that were not materially developed nor shared beyond the palace’s gynocentric spaces and preserved. Gloriously masculine golds, jades, bronzes and silvers are made rosy and blushing to articulate voluptuousness’ power. The shimmering of a botanical surface that is applied on top of her canvases honouring fertility and female fecundity. Such techniques soften bricks and stones into organic, vegetational forms, and with her curvaceous framing, lights wraps around and protrudes the curly, aqueous decorations and textures of the materials of the buildings. Thusly composing the buildings in aqueous, curved and floral shapes. The curvaceous framing of her landscapes makes the buildings embracing (as if a mother cradling her child in her arms), and their silhouettes Rubenesque and voluptuous. Further, this curvaceous framing makes the nature appear to be overtaking or swallowing up the architecture – as though the architecture has been long abandoned by a cause of human error, and the nature has won. The voluptuous nature’s fecundity, and the greater power in voluptuousness than in masculinity, are communicated. Thus, making her landscapes into gynocentric paradises that appear ahistorical.

Her curvaceous framing and shimmering, pink-toned lens shifts the aesthetic and dis-embeds the patriarchal imperial/colonial ideology that the architecture represent objectively. This breaking of the objectivity of the architecture’s appearance gestures at the suggestion of the truth of France’s wealth as deriving from thievery, mass violence, and the labour of enslaved and exploited persons. This breaking creates space for the remembering of the physical violence such persons and their children were subject to for generations and the cultural violence involved in imperial conquest, in contrast to the glorious, benevolent traditional representation of European imperialism. Coppola’s cinematic rendering of Versailles’ architecture, in relation to this essay’s earlier arguments, questions what could have transpired if the French noble women were aware of the truth of colonial ideology and its essentially violent practice. Further, what might the centuries of colonial violence have been constituted of if women held the positions of authority in the monarchy – what kinds of cultural encounters would have taken place, and what would have come from them?

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Bibliography

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Barringer, Tim. “Landscape and the Problem of History: Thomas Cole and Anglo-Atlantic Modernity.” What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019, 131-151.

Burchard, Wolf. Inspiring Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021.

Coppola, Sofia, director. Marie Antoinette. Columbia Pictures and American Zoetrope, 2006.

Honour, Hugh. Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay. London: J. Murray, 1961.

Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa. “Genre and Sex.” Genre Painting in Eighteenth-Century France, edited by Philip Conisbee, National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 2007, 201-219.

Mitchell, W.J.T. Landscape and Power. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Nochlin, Linda. The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society. Routledge, 1989.

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Ethnicity has acquired the kind of cultural and economic capital many scholars and theorists of colour writing in the 20th century would be astonished by. Since the musical structures of 1940s rhythm and blues musicians were heard by white-owned, American record companies and repackaged as rock and roll when recreated by white artists, the taking of black culture and such culture’s popularization as a white form of culture has been an American practice. Perhaps the theft of cultural products made by non-white labourers is a historically-entrenched (even nation-building) feature of American ideology. In any case, the outlook of the American zeitgeist changed at some point in time leading up to the 21st century.

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In other SDS courses I have taken at the University of Toronto I have analysed the “festival style” trend of the early to mid 2010s. I think the interlocking factors of the irreverent, postmodernist and apolitical trend of “indie sleaze” and the cool-ization of marginal ethnic identities in the American mainstream created a cultural space for the cultural-appropriating “festival style” to come into existence. On photo sharing digital platforms like Instagram and Tumblr and in countercultural spaces like Coachella and Glastonbury “festival style” garnered many likes and subsequently the style entered into the coffee table book of fashion inspiration. From roughly 2011 to 2017 wearable signifiers of non-whiteness (ex. signifiers of blackness, East- and South Asian-ness, Indigenous North American-ness, Pacific Islander-ness, and other global cultural identities) possessed aesthetic capital. White women (and men) were awarded socioeconomic opportunity (mainly modelling gigs) from the ephemeral putting on of ethnicized sartorial articles like bindis, feathers, headdresses, henna, (cut up) kimonos, and historically oriental and tropical patterns.

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Further Reading

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Puar, Jasbir K. "‘THE TURBAN IS NOT A HAT’: QUEER DIASPORA AND PRACTICES OF PROFILING." Sikh Formations, vol. 4, no. 1, 2008, pp. 47-91.

Butler’s disentanglement of gender performance from the gender one was assigned at birth and sexuality illuminates the landscape of contemporary digitally-born trends in fashion. Since the mid-2010s this theory of gender, physical appearance and sexuality has experienced a wide digital circulation. Since the mobile app TikTok’s rise as the dominant voice in digital discourses and of online aesthetics and the communication of information online, counter-hegemonic gender ideologies and a multiplicity of styles of dressing alike have been accessible to global interpellators.

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The (relatively) new and popular online and in real life “E-boy” and “kid-core” aesthetics are dialectic with Butler’s ground-breaking discussions of gender. The “E-boy” aesthetic – which has been popularized and adopted by persons along the contemporary popular spectrum of gender identification – is made up of pieces historically acceptable for females and pathologized of males: nail polish, pastel-dyed hair, layered necklaces and jeweled rings, eyeliner, mascara and/or blush and skirts. The “kid-core” aesthetic made up of masculinized pieces like overalls and shorts and historically masculine attributes of t-shirts and short hair, but pioneered by persons identifying as female or gender non-conforming, is another example of “TikTok fashion’s” disruption of historical linkages of gender, sexuality and sex.

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Cited Work

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. Routledge, 2011.

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After performing their international hit song “I Wanna Be Your Slave” in Poland (recorded and broadcasted to the televisions and digital devices of the Polish national audience) Damiano David and Thomas Raggi of Måneskin (Italian rock band) kiss (Måneskin, 2021: 2:47-2:54). After breaking the kiss Damiano delivers the following statement to the camera that is filming the band straight-on: “We think that everyone should be allowed to do this [kiss] without any fear. We think that everyone should be completely free to be whoever the fuck he wants (2:54-3:07).” Applause erupted from the crowd in attendance at the Polsat SuperHit Festiwal 2021, but it was a risky move (Blackett, 2021).

 

Three young men (singer Damiano, guitarist Thomas and drummer Ethan Torchio) and one young woman (Victoria “Vic” DeAngelis) make up Måneskin; of the four members, only Vic identifies as homosexual (Måneskin, 2023: 1:20-1:27). The band’s performance costumes each had the same aspects: a transparent black lace top (the men wore blouses while Vic wore a tank top and X-shaped nipple coverings), leather pants, large pearl jewelry and glittering purple eye makeup. Måneskin cite iconic male rockstars from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s as their primary musical and aesthetic influences (Larisha and Shannon, 2021) – therefore, the band’s gender-progressive approach to style can be understood as a desire to not just look like but to become the rockstars that they idolize. An application of Judith Butler’s theory of “gender melancholia” (179) would reveal a different reason for Victoria’s desire to wear the traditionally masculine leather pants and to display the non-feminine sign of one’s chest being (mostly) publicly exposed as well as the male members’ desires to wear the traditionally feminine lace, blouses, pearl jewelry and makeup. Whether the psychoanalytic impulse is the “ideal-I” or to become one with one’s parent of the opposite sex, the sociological impact of Måneskin’s “drag” (175), how they move in their costumes and how they move about the space of the stage contribute to Butler’s call for drag to be used as a tool to disrupt historical conceptions of male-ness and female-ness.

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In his contributions to psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan outlines the difference between the “I” (ego) and the “ideal-I” (or “ideal-ego”) (76). The gap between the “I” and the “ideal-I” (the mirror-image of an infant that the infant has seen for the first time) present from the moment the infant realizes that she herself is not her mirror-image is the permanent drive of an individual (to somehow become the “ideal-ego”). A human being’s sense of yearning to finally feel as they felt when they gained sight of the mirror-image Lacan attributes to the lack of any motor skills possessed by the infant at the time of their coming to know the “ideal-I” (78). Resultant of the “mirror stage” where the infant’s consciousness learns of the infant’s agency in the space of their environments (74), a human’s ego seeks those people which she thinks will bring her closer to achieving the mirror-image.

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“Desire” (74) is the urge to come to one’s “ideal-ego” by possessing the “desire” of another whom one’s ego desires (79). Lacan describes the relationality of her ego that desires his ego and his “desire” in the terms of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic: her ego (the slave) wants to overtake his desire (the master) as that would make her ego the master of his desire (and his desire would be the slave to (what she thinks will be) her “ideal-ego”) (79-80).

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Rock masculinity’s performance and traditionally feminine physical signifiers are not irreconcilable with one another. On the contrary, the borrowing and temporary putting on of historical and contemporary signifiers of female-ness is a practice male rock fans have participated in since the institution of rock music (as a raced white music made for white audiences) in the 1960s (68-69).

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Pop culture historian and theorist Norma Coates presents a sociological model for the gender dynamics within the rock music cultural group in the article “Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques: Girls and Women and Rock Culture in the 1960s and early 1970s”. Coates’ model is specifically based on sociological trends in the rock music subculture during the historical moment of the British Invasion, but Gretchen Larsen (2017) and McKenzie K. Hartmann (2019) trace the consistency of the model Coates identifies up until the late 1980s. Coates’ sociological model for the perpetuation of rock music production and of rock music performance identifies male music-makers (rockstars) and male rock fans as active agents and labels female rock fans as passive receivers (with female music-makers being unintelligible to the model) (65-68). “Rock masculinity” (Coates 30) is defined by carnal heterosexuality and libidinous musical performance style (79-81). In Coates’ sociological model of traditional rock music culture, possessing the aforementioned traits of rock masculinity enables male rockstars to put on physical signifiers of historical femininity without such signifying female-ness or biological essentialist traits of female-ness within the culture (68-77). Damiano, Thomas and Ethan’s adoption of traditionally feminine physical signifiers could therefore be read as them seeking to achieve the “ideal-ego” through the putting on of 1960s and 1970s male rockstars’ performances of rock masculinity (which possessed such female signifers as long hair, makeup, jewellry and fabrics and clothing articles that are culturally-coded in the Western world as feminine).

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Judith Butler considers the psychological aspect of the attraction to “performing” (176) as the opposite gender alongside her explanation of “drag’s” (175) deconstructive sociological capabilities. She reconfigures the physical action of acting out the signifiers of the opposite gender as “acting out” in Freud’s theorization of psychoanalysis: “performing” (in a gender performativity sense) as the opposite gender is a form of coping with the biological loss of the male or female Other (179-180). In the sense of Freud’s psychoanalysis, “drag” is identification with and an expression of love (or anger) for the maternal or paternal Other (179-180); as opposed to proving any essentializing notion about the male or female Other, “drag” is the fantasy of incorporating the Other which one’s infant self recognizes it is not (179). Vic’s adoption of traditionally masculine physical signifiers and Damiano, Thomas and Ethan’s adoptions of traditionally feminine physical signifiers can therefore be read, using Butler’s interpretation of Freud’s psychoanalysis, as each member’s desire to become one with the parent that their psyche latched onto when they were infants.

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Butler argues that the performativity of gender – the putting on or acting out of signifiers that denote dominant and historical images of male-ness and female-ness – illustrates the constructed nature of gender itself (176-181). She places value in being in “drag” of the gender that is one’s opposite as a form of resistance against the dominant heterosexist and patriarchal sociological systems that invent, reproduce and regulate essentialist and patriarchal expectations of either gender (176-177). Victoria’s performance style is a putting on of the affect of traditional masculinity: she stomps, struts with swagger, kicks, snarls and headbangs while leaning in to the idea that her plucking her bass is an imitation of her performing digital-vaginal sex on herself (or on her imagined female spectator). Where Vic invokes masculinity in her performance, Damiano (who also goes by “Dam”) invokes femininity. Dam swivels his hips, flicks his wrists, glides and rolls his eyes in a performance style that resembles the tropic classical Hollywood femme fatale character. Both Vic and Dam get on their knees (a sexually-laden gesture) during the performance but in imitation of different gestures: Vic drops to her knees and pounds the floor in imitation of 1960s and 1970s rock masculinity (2:35-2:38) while Dam inches down to his knees while looking up at the band member he is kneeling before in imitation of oral-penile sex scenes in heterosexual pornography (0:21-0:23).

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Thomas queers (as in disrupts or perverts) rock masculinity in two ways. By allowing Damiano to kiss him and in kissing Damiano back, Thomas destabilizes the rigidly-defined and inflexible heterosexuality that his performance style connotes and that rock masculinity demands male rockstars to conform to. When he sees that Vic is in her element Thomas joins her and the two string-players lean up against one another and play off of one another (1:40-1:46); in the language of rock performance, this gesture communicates his support for her and by extension, support for females tearing it up like male rockstars. Drummer Ethan Torchio’s queering of rock masculinity lies in potentiality during the particular performance of “I Wanna Be Your Slave” at Polsat SuperHit Festiwal 2021. Ethan’s performance style is similar to Thomas’: it aligns with Coates’ configuration of rock masculinity. However, Damiano’s kissing of a male member of Måneskin is not an action exclusive to the Polish event. After the band’s performance of their song “Zitti E Buoni” at the continentally-significant and internationally-broadcasted Eurovision 2021 competition, Damiano looks at Ethan (hieeeeronymus, 2021) after having kissed Thomas (@anti_bitch1, 2021). The drummer invites the singer over to kiss him, and the two heterosexual male members share a gesture of traditionally homosexual intimacy (@anti_bitch1, 2021). Had Dam turned around and leaned in to kiss Ethan, the drummer would have – based on psychological impulses or desires – enacted the same passive, feminized role that the guitarist occupied during the song’s performance at Polsat SuperHit Festiwal 2021.

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Butler warns however about the potentiality of the performing of “drag” to reproduce and therefore maintain or even add additional harmful dimensions onto disempowering, restrictive and violent signifiers of male-ness (masculinity) and female-ness (femininity) (176-177). If experimentation with appearing and acting as the opposite gender correlates with the analysis of how one is disrupting hegemonic images of male subjects and female subjects and how gender is a socially-constructed concept as opposed to a biologically-preordained fact then “drag” can be activism (180-181). Heterosexual persons adopting the physical and behavioural signifiers of the gender opposite to the one they identify as can be an act of resistance against the heterosexist and patriarchal arbiters of essentialist ideas about the male and female sexes (176-178). “Drag” is in itself not an ipso facto act deconstructive of restrictive, stifling or oppressive notions of male-ness and female-ness but Butler believes that it can be (180-181). The male members of Måneskin taking on hegemonic physical aspects of female-ness and their female bassist Victoria taking on those physical aspects of male-ness is an act of resistance and act of solidarity with the queer community. But it is in their styles of performance, how the members interact with one another on stage and the political messages delivered in speech which accompany the performances that tackle historical and essentialist concepts of the sexes.

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Works Cited

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Blackett, L’Oréal. “Måneskin Share A Kiss On Stage In Defiance Of Poland’s Anti-LGBTQ+ Rulings.” Bustle, 29 June 2021, www.bustle.com/entertainment/maneskin-share-a-kiss-on-stage-in-defiance-of-polands-anti-lgbtq-rulings. Accessed 9 Feb. 2023. 

 

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. Routledge, 2011.

 

Coates, Norma. “Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques: Girls and Women and Rock Culture in the 1960s and early 1970s.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 65-94, doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2003.tb00115.x. Accessed 8 Feb. 2023.

 

hieeeeronymus. Måneskin’s Ethan and Damiano share a kiss after the band’s performance of “Zitti E Buoni” at Eurovision 2021, by unknown. Pinterest, 2021, www.pinterest.ca/pin/1081849141707260911/.

 

Hartmann, McKenzie K. Did I Want to Be with the Band? A Study of Feminism and Consent in the Time of Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll. 2019. The University of Texas at Austin, BA thesis. Texas ScholarWorks, dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/2565.

 

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition In English. Translated by Bruce Fink, Heloise Fink and Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

 

Larisha, Paul, and Delisa Shannon. “Måneskin Talk Musical Influences With ‘Rolling Stone’.” Rolling Stone, 2 Nov. 2021, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/in-the-greenroom-with-maneskin-1252160/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2023.

 

Larsen, Gretchen. “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World: Music Groupies and the Othering of Women in the World of Rock.” Organization, vol. 24, no. 3, 2017, pp. 397-417, doi.org/10.1177/13505084166890. Accessed 8 Feb. 2023.

 

Måneskin. “Polsat SuperHit Festiwal 2021: Måneskin - I Wanna Be Your Slave.” YouTube, uploaded by Polsat, 26 June 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ9hAu_6Lls.

 

“Måneskin - KOOL KIDS (Lyric Video).” YouTube, uploaded by Måneskin Official, 19 Jan. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDggLD69tG8.

 

@anti_bitch1. “Wow! Damiano David kissed both of the other male Måneskin band members, Thomas Raggi and Ethan Torchio, on stage at the #Eurovision Winner's Performance.” Twitter, 22 May 2021, 8:27 p.m., twitter.com/anti_bitch1/status/1396261537032155136?lang=en.

 

On the future of the concept of “feminism” in the 21st century, Spivak considers briefly, the power of the “electronic circuit” (Spivak et. al., 2000: 115) – inarguably, the digital world, in the first decades of the 21st century, is the summa cum laude channel for the argumentation and dissemination of ideas and ideologies. Pinterest, a platform built around images, captions and sections for commentary, sharing and collecting posts and forming relationships and communities through posts, has since 2010 offered youth understanding and developing their identities a space to do so by finding images and messages that call to them. As a platform engaged with through the visual, ways of seeing and ideologies governing understandings of the visual are embedded into all of the images that appear. Significantly, those images which become popular or “hegemonic” on the platform, reveal hegemonic ideologies of appearance as well as reflect structures that control appearance.

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Jordan Theresa, in the video essayist form, examines how “hegemonic Pinterest images” from three communities ordered by visual, sartorial aesthetics – “cottagecore, e-girl and Y2K” – reaffirm racist, white supremacist, Eurocentric aesthetic ideologies (Theresa). Expanding on the analysis of her study of the racist, anti-black, colonial hegemonic ideology at play in the predominant uplifting of thin, white women’s images in such digital “aesthetic” communities (Theresa, 11:50-23:50), I will connect the appraisal of “white [subcultural] femininity” to the reproduction of “femininity’s” embedment in racist, colonial ideology (Dahl et al., 2018: 384-391).

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Fig. 1. One of the first images found when “cottagecore aesthetic” is searched on Pinterest which’s visual elements represent Theresa’s explanation of the “cottagecore” “aesthetic” (Theresa, 3:10-4:38).

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Tate contends that the semiotics of “femininity” in dominant society are disconnected from “black women’s bodies”: what goes into the meaning of “femininity” are attributes systemically attributed to “good” executions of “white womanhood” during and after European colonization and Euro-American slavery (Dahl et al., 2018: 385-391). Theresa, employing knowledges gained from predominantly black intersectional feminists, principally, Sabrina Strings, examines how with the Atlantic slave trade, to reason violence against those indigenous to Africa, apart of European theorizations of their absolute inferiority, black bodies were argued to be excessive, spatially and sexually (Theresa, 11:47-13:38). Though (white) men’s and women’s larger bodies did not have such a conceptual Otherness prior to the slave trade, African – as well as larger – bodies were established in Europe and the lands its powers colonized as biologically, philosophically and aesthetically, animalistic and anti-Reason (Theresa, 11:47-15:38).

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Theresa states how when the adjectives “cottagecore”, “e-girl” and “Y2K” are searched on Pinterest, across each’s results page, thin, white female bodies are the only bodies presented as representative of the subcultural “aesthetic” – to locate plus-size or of colour bodies, such terms must precede the “aesthetic” (Theresa, 0:02-11:46). The suppression of images of bodies that are not thin and white affirms, in the context of the digital “aesthetic” communities Theresa examines on Pinterest, Tate’s argument that femininity is disproportionately recognized in white women/girls, and displaced off of, in particular, black women/girls (Dahl et al., 2018: 385). While the “cottagecore, e-girl and Y2K” digital communities are generally self-defined as politically and ideologically liberal and supportive of intersectional feminism (Theresa, 3:05-11:46), in the construction of new femininities that reaffirm “femininity” as thin, white bodies’ successful execution of a visual aesthetic signifying community values, femininity as an “artefact” of colonial thought is reproduced (Dahl et al., 2018: 384-387).

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Fig. 2. One of the first images found when “e-girl aesthetic” is searched on Pinterest that like Fig. 1., what is in the image coincides with Theresa’s description of the “e-girl” “aesthetic” (Theresa, 5:20-7:12).

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kennedy-macfoy, from empirical research with multiracial girls, puts forward that the successful execution of the femininity(ies) girls take as their objective(s) to fulfill, is central to their assessments of their selves and understanding and creating of their identities (Dahl et al., 2018: 386-387). Theresa’s thesis, that the privileging and raising of images of thin, white bodies in the “cottagecore”, “e-girl” and “Y2K” communities on Pinterest denies other bodies the ability to locate themselves as belonging to such (Theresa), is dialectic with all of the thinkers consulted by Dahl et al., but in the critical race context, Tate, Gopinath and kennedy-macfoy. Young females conceptualizing themselves, their value, potentiality and place in the world that have plus-size or not-white bodies, upon understanding their absence and the “rightness”  or naturalness of their absence from the “aesthetics’” images, and therefore the “aesthetic” and “subcultural femininity”, will be displaced/displace themselves from such.

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Fig. 3. One of the first images found when “Y2K aesthetic” is searched on Pinterest that like Fig. 1. and Fig. 2. is representative of how Theresa describes the “Y2K” aesthetic (Theresa, 7:14-10:08).

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Tate foregrounds the resistance of of colour, and in specific, black, femininities, to the white supremacist patriarchal and feminist “homogenising force of a femininity” that holds as its objective, “femininity’s continuous removal from black bodies whether as epistemological, performative, or social” (Dahl et al., 2018: 385). Linking to Gopinath’s studies of non-white, non-Euro-American women’s “re-appropriati[ng] and reworking” “white femininity” (Dahl et al., 2018: 388-389), bodies that deviate from the hegemonic ideal of either “cottagecore”, “e-girl” or “Y2K” yet adopt the aesthetic “undermine”, challenge the racist, white supremacist hegemonic ideology of the digital communities, and the social realities that inform them. Theresa concludes her (video) essay by calling on her viewers to uplift in action, not merely theory, Pinterest accounts which provide and/or accumulate images which display plus-size and of colour bodies adopting and transforming the “cottagecore”, “e-girl” and “Y2K” “aesthetics” (Theresa, 21:26-24:21), resisting that “white/whitened femininity” which makes truly alternative femininities, an “absence even within the presence of their emergence” (Dahl et al., 2018: 385).

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Figure Citations

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Fig. 1. One of the first images found when “cottagecore aesthetic” is searched on Pinterest which’s visual elements represent Theresa’s explanation of the “cottagecore” “aesthetic” from @liizziema; “☁️”; Pinterest; Pinterest.com, 30 Sept. 2022, www.pinterest.ca/pin/37365871900362474/?nic_v3=1a1Z8Lbku.

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Fig. 2. One of the first images found when “e-girl aesthetic” is searched on Pinterest that like Fig. 1., what is in the image coincides with Theresa’s description of the “e-girl” “aesthetic” from @wattpad; “𝔐𝔞𝔩𝔡𝔦𝔱𝔬 𝔭𝔰𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔭𝔞𝔱𝔞”; Pinterest; Pinterest.com, 30 Sept. 2022, www.pinterest.ca/pin/863283822335541608/?nic_v3=1a1Z8Lbku.

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Fig. 3. One of the first images found when “Y2K aesthetic” is searched on Pinterest that like Fig. 1. and Fig. 2. is representative of how Theresa describes the “Y2K” aesthetic from @luvbxnny; “Pink Y2K outfit 2000s”; Pinterest; Pinterest.com, 30 Sept. 2022, www.pinterest.ca/pin/207165651600764105/?nic_v3=1a1Z8Lbku.

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Works Cited

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Dahl et al., “Femininity revisited – A round table.” European Journal of Women's Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, 2018, pp. 384-393, doi.org/10.1177/1350506818774744. Accessed 27 Sept. 2022.

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Spivak et al., “Feminism 2000: One Step beyond?” Feminist Review, vol. 64, no. 64, 2000, pp. 113-116, doi.org/10.1080/014177800339007. Accessed 26 Sept. 2022.

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Theresa, Jordan. “pinterest aesthetics, fatphobia & whitewashing.” YouTube, uploaded by Jordan Theresa, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7bXgSvJpE&t=1340s.

 

As Blue dissects in Girlhood on Disney Channel: Branding, Celebrity, and Femininity, since the mid-2000s the Disney Channel, a television network belonging to The Walt Disney Company and predominantly marketed towards eight- to sixteen-year-old girls, has foregrounded teenage girl performers in their properties (Blue, 2015: 1-2). The “Disney girl celebrity” begins as a featured actor in a Disney Channel (DC) show or movie, then attaches to another or several more DC audiovisual works and/or becomes a recording artist for one of Disney Music Group’s (The Walt Disney Company’s music production and distribution arm) record labels (Blue, 2015: 1-2). During her stint working with/for The Walt Disney Company (abbr. Disney) the “Disney girl celebrity” will become a figure featured across Disney’s multimedia properties: she will do live performances and appearances in company events and/or on funded tours and her image will feature on various forms of merchandise from clothes, makeup and accessories to books and video games to school supplies, room decoration and everyday items (Blue, 2015: 9-10). During this time period, she will have to demonstrate a specific kind of girlhood outside of Disney works just as she does within them: a lighthearted yet intimate, relatable yet aspirational girlhood in which problematic matters like politics (outside of generally accepted messages) and sexuality are absent (Blue, 2015: 2-3).

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The girl is a representation of The Walt Disney Company, and therefore she cannot deviate from its values; when the girl celebrity breaks away from and association with the company, her maintaining representing those values becomes a focal issue of her girl audience and their parents, future employers and the mass media because of the height of the stakes of whether she does or does not (Blue, 2015: 1-2). Prior to the rise of the digital age, print was the primary form of mass media communication; in the late 1990s and through the 2000s, magazines were the primary form of media used to disseminate information about celebrities. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the concept of the “Disney girl celebrity” was being formed and established by Disney as well as began being covered by the press; through the 2000s, the first occurrences of “Disney girl celebrities” parting with that identity took place, and what they were doing as they were doing so or to do so, was too, reported (Blue, 2015: 19-22). The first “Disney girl celebrities” constructed the figure of the “Disney girl celebrity”, and how they eventually broke from that identity, set the precedent for what that meant/how that could be done.

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Britney Spears sang, danced and acted on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club (MCC), a variety show on the Disney Channel, in the mid-1990s, and a few years after the show had ended, signed to Jive Records as a recording artist (Crutcher, 2010: 4-6). Though Jive Records was not apart of Disney Music Group, the label demanded as part of their contract, Spears perform the “Disney girlhood” she had on MCC, in her first album, …Baby One More Time (1999), the tours, live appearances and other promotional materials tied to it as well as outside of properties tied to it (Crutcher, 2010: 5-11). Spears was the first “Disney girl celebrity”: a girl celebrity who is a representation of “Disney girlhood”; over the course from her second album, Oops!... I Did It Again (2000), to her fourth, In the Zone (2003), she would break away from that identity (Crutcher, 2010: 6-17). Hilary Duff starred as Lizzie McGuire in the eponymous Disney Channel television show that was among the first set of original live-action shows on the network, from 2001 to 2004 (Jakeyonce & Shelby, 2022). Lizzie McGuire was an immediate hit, launching Duff as the second (/first ‘official’) “Disney girl celebrity”; in 2003, she featured in the DC original movie (“DCOM”), The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and from 2002 to 2008 she was signed to Disney Music Group’s Buena Vista Music Group and Hollywood Records (Jakeyonce & Shelby, 2022). Duff has never severed connection to the “Disney girl celebrity” identity however, over the course of her third album, Hilary Duff (2004), to her fourth, Dignity (2007), she would deviate from performing textbook “Disney girlhood” (Jakeyonce & Shelby, 2022). Lindsay Lohan made her acting debut in Walt Disney Pictures’ The Parent Trap (1998), then proceeded to feature in the DCOMs Life-Size (2000) and Get a Clue (2002) as well as Walt Disney Pictures’ Freaky Friday (2003), Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004) and Herby: Fully Loaded (2005) (Tequila, 2020a). Following the commercial and critical success of Freaky Friday, Lohan was made the third established “Disney girl celebrity”, and like Duff, was required to demonstrate “Disney girlhood” outside of her professional life (largely of which, was tied to Disney) (Tequila, 2020a). Lohan’s breaking from the “Disney girl celebrity” began when she was still connected to the company, with her feature in Mean Girls (2004) marking the start of this distancing, which increased across the following three years (Tequila, 2020b).

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To examine how the American press presented Spears, Duff and Lohan, I have surveyed several headlines from cover stories written about them over a five-year time span, from their first in a mainstream magazine to the year they had voiced they were disconnected from the “Disney girl celebrity” identity. The time span of headlines surveyed was from 1999 to 2003 for Spears, 2003 to 2007 for Duff and 2004 to 2008 for Lohan; each time span begins with their representation as a “Disney girl celebrity” and covers their course growing out of/away from that identity. As a “Disney girl celebrity” each girl is attractive because she is at the same time, a girl and a celebrity: intimate information about how she navigates each identity due to their co-existence is the press’ primary area of interest. Due only partly to how much the girl possesses a body that is associated with biological womanhood, the “Disney girl celebrity’s” relation to sexuality is specifically, the subject of most interest. If the girl celebrity as she is transitioning from being a “Disney girl celebrity” performs “good girlhood” characterized by traditional American gender expectations, the press will hierarchize her professional life above her personal in terms of interest, and will represent her as a “role model” to girls and young women. If, as she transitions, she performs “bad girlhood” characterized by transgressive bodily and sexual practices, the press will have a much higher interest in her personal life than her professional, framing the latter as hurt by the former, and foregrounding in terms of the former topics of spectacle such as the “bad choices” she makes and the issues she struggles with.

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In 1999, Britney Spears featured on the cover of Rolling Stone, beside the headline “Britney Spears: Inside the Heart, Mind & Bedroom Of a Teen Dream” ([Britney Spears’ April 1999 Rolling Stone cover], 2008), speaking to Projansky’s theory that anxieties about girls’ sexuality generates a ‘dangerous’ eroticism about them (Projansky, 2014: 49). Spears’ innocent, pre-sexual girlhood was perceived as (dangerously) erotic: that the girl celebrity was incompatible with adult womanhood and sexuality, produced a desire to know her sexual/bodily practices. The potential sexuality of Spears was particularly attractive because of the dichotomy between her appearance and her girlhood, as well as her being a celebrity and a girl: her music, dancing and clothing were sexualised, while her self and personal life were asexual and oppositional to sexuality. February 2000 People’s “Pop princess Britney Spears: Too Sexy Too Soon?” ([Britney Spears’ February 2000 People cover], 2012) voices anxiety about the singer’s sexualised performance, echoing concerns about such, and its potential sexualising effect on her girl audience, present in public discourse. Fisher provides background for these prominent concerns, explaining that girl celebrities are frequently bound to an issue present in society that authorities are anxious about – in this case, parents and the (self-) sexualization of girls – and blamed for that issue’s existence (Fisher, 2011: 305).

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June 2001 Us Weekly’s “‘It’s Hard to Wait’: Sexy, Rich and Powerful: What It Feels Like for a Girl” ([Britney Spears’ June 2001 Us Weekly cover], 2017) and November 2001 Entertainment Weekly’s “Britney! The Confessions (And Confusion) Of a Teenage Sex Kitten” ([Britney Spears’ November 2001 Entertainment Weekly cover], 2001) communicate two attitudes about the girl celebrity: (erotic) interest in her sexual practices and spite caused interest (“Rich”) or disinterest (“Confusion”) in her (financial) success. These headlines are dialogic with Spears’ public relationship with “Disney boy celebrity” Justin Timberlake, former cast member of MCC and member of pop boy band *NSYNC, of which there was much national interest about (Crutcher, 2010: 4-7). Lucia argues that investment in girl celebrities’ serious romantic relationships is symptomatic of alleviation from the reconciliation of her sexuality: the girl celebrity’s sexuality is disempowered by her now domesticity, and therefore, the relationship is the subduer of the girl (Lucia, 2015: 223-224). Spears and Timberlake broke up in early 2002, as represented in Us Weekly’s April 2002 “Britney & Justin: It’s Over” ([Britney Spears’ and Justin Timberlake’s April 2002 Us Weekly cover], 2019), September 2002 “Britney & Justin: Did She Betray Him?” ([Britney Spears’ September 2002 Us Weekly cover], 2019) and December 2002 “Britney vs. Justin: The War Is On” ([Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake’s December 2002 Us Weekly cover], 2019). The September 2002 headline is dialogic with national speculation, supported by Timberlake and denied by Spears, that Spears’ infidelity had motivated the break up and the December 2002 headline is dialogic with Timberlake’s confirmation of that speculation is his album Justified (2002), and Spears’ clothing expressing anti-relationship statements (Crutcher, 2010: 12-16). The maligning of Spears for transgressive sexual and bodily practices in relation to the support of Timberlake’s word and ‘side’, codifies the punishment of the (former) “Disney girl celebrity’s” (transgressive) sexual and bodily autonomy. Us Weekly’s September 2003 “Britney’s Revenge” ([Britney Spears’ September 2003 Us Weekly cover], n.d.), dialogic with Spears’ beginning to engage in ‘casual’ sexual relationships in the public eye, further illustrates the condemnation of the transitive “Disney girl celebrity’s” transgressive sexuality and by association, her transitive self and work (Crutcher, 2010: 15-17).

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In 2003, Vanity Fair featured contemporary girl celebrities on its cover, accompanied with the headline “It’s Totally Raining Teens: And It’s, Like, So A Major Moment In Pop Culture” ([Girl celebrities’ July 2003 Vanity Fair cover], 2014), with Hilary Duff in the foreground. The group was dominated by “Disney girl celebrities”: the headline, though using pejorative language that trivializes the girl celebrities’ work, focuses on the professional successes of Duff and her fellow girl celebrities. While Britney was a dichotomy of sexuality and pre-sexuality, no attribute of Hilary for over half of the time span I am looking at deviated from “Disney girlhood”; this girlhood and traditional American girlhood are compatible, and Duff represented the nation’s values (hard-working, ambitious, upright) and gender expectations (passive, delicate, feminine) (Jakeyonce & Shelby, 2022). March 2004 Cosmogirl’s “Hilary Duff: Why She’s More Like You Than You Think” ([Hilary Duff’s March 2004 Cosmogirl cover], n.d.) presents Duff as a girl celebrity that is relatable and aspirational, that girls should want to look up to; October 2004 Hollywood Life’s “Hilary Duff: So Much To Do, So Little Time” ([Hilary Duff’s October 2004 Hollywood Life cover], n.d.) foregrounds her (professional) successes and intonates them to be valuable; and a 2004 edition of Twist’s “Hilary vs. Lindsay” ([Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan’s 2004 Twist cover], 2017) solidifies Duff as a “good girl” by positioning her in opposition to “bad girl” Lindsay Lohan.

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Duff was an embodiment of traditional American girlhood and significantly, unlike Spears or Lohan, possessed a body that resembled a biological girl’s not a woman’s, however, there was discernible interest in her sexual practices. Lucia dissects the erotic appeal of a girl who appears to be a “good girl” that is behind close doors, sexually experienced; the potential (transgressive) sexuality of asexual Duff was fetishistic therefore she, as a paradoxical consequence of her asexuality, was fetishized (Lucia, 2015: 226-234). The “Disney girl celebrity’s” embodiment of girlhood likewise, would have been eroticized as Durham explains, psychoanalytically the qualities of girlhood; submissiveness, innocence and purity; are linked to sexuality and consequently, girlhood in culture (particularly affective, in pornography) is linked to eroticism (Durham, 2008: 110-113). Duff dated Joel Madden, lead singer of pop punk band Good Charlotte and 9 years her senior, from 2004 to 2006 (Jakeyonce & Shelby, 2022) as captured by June 2005 Seventeen’s “Hilary Duff: The Truth About Her And Joel Madden” ([Hilary Duff’s June 2005 Seventeen cover], n.d.) and June 2006 Teen People’s “Exclusive! Hilary & Joel: Their first-ever photo shoot” ([Hilary Duff and Joel Madden’s June 2006 Teen People cover], n.d.). These headlines are dialogic with the transgressive nature of the two’s long-term romantic relationship: the potentiality of Duff’s sexual practices in relation to an older and “bad boy” celebrity as well as her exploring her own sexual and bodily autonomy through music and clothing during this time, were attractive as she was aging out of the “Disney girl celebrity” identity (Jakeyonce & Shelby, 2022). She and Madden broke up in fall 2006, and this severance from transgression as well as her return to her pre-Madden “good girl” identity, despite being a “former Disney girl celebrity”, resulted in supportive representation (Jakeyonce & Shelby, 2022). October 2006 Seventeen’s “Hilary Duff: ‘I Did Lose A Lot Of Weight’” ([Hilary Duff’s October 2006 Seventeen cover], n.d.) attacks/apologizes for and therefore disconnects Duff from, her body and self during her relationship with Madden and August 2007 Seventeen’s “Hilary Duff: Who’s She Crushing On Now???” ([Hilary Duff’s August 2007 Seventeen cover], 2013) looks forward to Duff’s “good girl” “former Disney girl celebrity” future.

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Though featured on the gatefold cover of Vanity Fair’s “It’s Totally Raining Teens”, Lindsay Lohan’s first cover appearance was in June 2004’s Interview, next to the headline “Why Is America Falling In Love With Lindsay Lohan?” ([Lindsay Lohan’s June 2004 Interview cover], 2021), dialogic with the established “Disney girl celebrity’s” gaining critical acclaim for her performance in Mean Girls (2004). Lucia informs the consequential representation of Lohan in the press: the girl celebrity’s body is a site of at the same time eroticism and anxiety about sexuality – depending on if as she ages it develops to resemble a biological woman’s, she will be a priori associated with “good girlhood” or “bad girlhood” (Lucia, 2015: 223). Like Britney, Lindsay’s body was perceived as a woman’s when she was a girl, and consequently she was linked to sexuality then “bad girlhood”. July 2004 Rolling Stone’s “Lindsay Lohan: Hot, Ready and Legal!” ([Lindsay Lohan’s July 2004 Rolling Stone cover], n.d.) glorifies the ethical sexualization of ‘adult’ Lohan, while September 2004 People’s “Lindsay Lohan: Young, Rich & In Love” ([Lindsay Lohan and Wilmer Valderrama’s September 2004 People cover], n.d.) celebrates Lohan’s serious romantic relationship with “‘Disney’ boy celebrity” Wilmer Valderrama, actor on the teen sitcom That ‘70s Show, which domesticated her sexuality.

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Two headlines from 2005 are synecdochal of Lohan’s representation in the press from that year on: May Us Weekly’s “Extreme Diets: How Lindsay & Nicole got skinny – but have they gone too far?” ([Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie’s May 2005 Us Weekly cover], n.d.)  and June Elle’s “Lindsay Lohan confronts the rumours: ‘I like men, partying & attention…what’s the problem?’” ([Lindsay Lohan’s June 2005 Elle cover], n.d.). As Lohan professionally parted ways with Disney, her “bad girl” identity determined by her sexuality, began to be reified by her transgressive sexual and bodily practices: if before now, her “badness” was theoretical, in 2005, her ‘casual’ sexual relationships, excessive alcohol and drug use and eating disorders with which such headlines are dialogic, made it practical (Tequila, 2020b). On the structuring of the “bad girl”/ “good girl” binary, Jackson and Vares define that the “bad girl” is she who acts in transgression of postfeminist boundaries of female respectability, who does not accept the limits of free choice and manage her expressions of self and sexuality, and therefore must be othered (Jackson & Vares, 2015: 3-4). Like Britney was attributed to the national issue of the (self-) sexualization of girls, Lindsay was to that of girls’ developing anorexia and bulimia, as well as alcoholism and dependencies on illicit substances. Lohan, irreconcilable with her “Disney girl celebrity” past, would go on from 2006 to 2008, to be characterized alternatingly, as a “bad girl” and a “bad girl trying to be good” (Tequila, 2020b). February 2006 Vanity Fair’s “‘I knew I had a problem and I couldn’t admit it’: Confessions of a Teenage Movie Queen” ([Lindsay Lohan’s February 2006 Vanity Fair cover], 2006) positions Lohan as working out of her “bad girl” identity with context for why it came to be; June 2007 People’s “What Happened to Lindsay Lohan? From adorable child star to out-of-control party girl arrested for a DUI. Can anyone save her?” paints her as incapable of becoming the “good girl” ([Lindsay Lohan’s June 2007 People cover], 2017) she once was even if given the appropriate support; and February 2008 Marie Claire’s “Lindsay Lohan On Rehab, [Samantha] Ronson, And Reclaiming Her Career” hesitantly positions her as post-“bad girlhood” ([Lindsay Lohan’s February 2008 Marie Claire cover], n.d.).

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As the magazine headlines representing pioneering “Disney girl celebrities” Britney Spears, Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan as they parted ways with that identity demonstrate, the American press’ support of the girl celebrity’s self and future are contingent upon whether she continues to demonstrate discernible “Disney girlhood”. Those that do, are “good girls” in opposition to “bad girls” that promote transgressive sexual and bodily practices to their girl audiences. A contradiction of the press’ denouncing the “former Disney girl celebrity’s” transgressional identity, is their sexualization – their placing upon the girl celebrity an identity of transgressive sexuality – of her when she is enacting “Disney girlhood” as a “Disney girl celebrity”. Even if the girl celebrity’s body resembles a biological girl’s body not a woman’s, the societal anxiety over girls’ sexuality and the potentiality of the girl celebrity’s sexuality, hand-in-hand produce an eroticism about the pre-sexual “Disney girl celebrity”, The mass media created by a society as Fisher proposes, is both informed by that society’s values and ideology, and informs that society’s attitudes and beliefs on a particular matter (Fisher, 2011: 308-310). How the “Disney girl celebrity” is conceived by American mass media is representative of how she is viewed by (dominant) American society and at the same time, instructs American society how to view her. How the girl celebrity is represented by mass media as she parts with Disney, as she grows out of being the “Disney girl celebrity” reflects American society’s valuing of the girl herself as well as the “Disney girl celebrity” figure. Studying how the press understood and presented Spears, Duff and Lohan when they demonstrated the “Disney girl celebrity” identity, illustrates one, how the press viewed and constructed the figure of the “Disney girl celebrity”, and two, the media discourse within which every subsequent “Disney girl celebrity” would be entered into. Likewise, studying how the press negotiated and presented the inceptive batch of “Disney girl celebrities’” growing out of/away from that identity, illustrates the framework of which every subsequent “Disney girl celebrity’s” doing the same, would be narrativized in relation to, affecting if/how later “Disney girl celebrities” would.

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Primary Sources

[Online image of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake’s April 2002 Us Weekly cover]. (2019). Us Weekly. https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/britney-spears-us-weekly-covers-through-the-years-20142111/42526-2/

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[Online image of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake’s December 2002 Us Weekly cover]. (2019). Us Weekly. https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/britney-spears-us-weekly-covers-through-the-years-20142111/42358-2/

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[Online image of Britney Spears’ April 1999 Rolling Stone cover]. (2008). Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/britney-spears-the-rolling-stone-covers-207308/

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[Online image of Britney Spears’ February 2000 People cover]. (2012). Glamour. https://www.glamour.com/story/15-ways-britney-spears-would-b

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[Online image of Britney Spears’ June 2001 Us Weekly cover]. (2017). Berklee Online – Berklee College of Music. https://online.berklee.edu/takenote/framing-britney-spears-what-it-teaches-us-about-the-disparity-between-male-and-female-performers/

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[Online image of Britney Spears’ November 2001 Entertainment Weekly cover]. (2001). Entertainment Weekly. https://ew.com/music/2001/11/09/sex-singles-girl/

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[Online image of Britney Spears’ September 2002 Us Weekly cover]. (2019). Us Weekly. https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/britney-spears-us-weekly-covers-through-the-years-20142111/

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[Online image of Britney Spears’ September 2003 Us Weekly cover]. Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Us-Weekly-September-2003-Britney/dp/B01JDBY54I

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[Online image of contemporary girl celebrities’ July 2003 Vanity Fair cover]. (2014). Cosmopolitan. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/news/a32201/evan-rachel-wood-raining-teens-vanity-fair-memories/

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[Online image of Hilary Duff and Joel Madden’s June 2006 Teen People cover]. eBay. https://www.amazon.com/HILARY-MADDEN-PEOPLE-FEBRUARY-LAGUNA/dp/B002OIRU86

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[Online image of Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan’s 2004 edition of Twist cover]. (2017). Tumblr. https://bringbackmyteenageyears.tumblr.com/post/156993123893/i-love-you-hilary-duff

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[Online image of Hilary Duff’s August 2007 Seventeen cover]. (2013). Seventeen. https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/g1713/65th-anniversary-cover-archive/slide-69

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[Online image of Hilary Duff’s June 2005 Seventeen cover]. HipComic. https://www.hipcomic.com/listing/seventeen-6-2005-hilary-duff-summer-makeover-get-your-best-butt-fn-vf/2429155

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[Online image of Hilary Duff’s March 2004 Cosmogirl cover]. eBay. https://www.ebay.com/itm/152599814463

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[Online image of Hilary Duff’s October 2004 Hollywood Life cover]. eBay. https://www.ebay.com/itm/133918761197

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[Online image of Hilary Duff’s October 2006 Seventeen cover]. eBay. https://www.ebay.com/itm/193817904424

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[Online image of Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie’s May 2005 Us Weekly cover]. FamousFix. https://www.famousfix.com/topic/us-magazine-united-states-30-may-2005

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[Online image of Lindsay Lohan and Wilmer Valderrama’s September 2004 People cover]. Wolfgang’s. https://www.wolfgangs.com/vintage-magazines/people/vintage-magazine/OMS26271.html

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[Online image of Lindsay Lohan’s February 2006 Vanity Fair cover]. (2006). Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2006/02/contents-200602

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[Online image of Lindsay Lohan’s February 2008 Marie Claire cover]. eBid. https://www.ebid.net/us/for-sale/2008-marie-claire-magazine-lindsay-lohan-cover-on-rehab-ronson-career-205485682.htm

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[Online image of Lindsay Lohan’s June 2004 Interview cover]. (2021). Interview. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/life-lessons-from-lindsay-lohan

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[Online image of Lindsay Lohan’s June 2005 Elle cover]. Magazine Canteen. https://magazinecanteen.com/products/elle-magazine-lindsay-lohan

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[Online image of Lindsay Lohan’s June 2007 People cover]. (2017). Twitter. https://twitter.com/pcd2009/status/874045927081648128

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[Online image of Lindsay Lohan’s July 2004 Rolling Stone cover]. eBay. https://www.ebay.com/itm/174747199278

 

Secondary Sources

Blue, M. G. (2017). Girlhood on Disney Channel: Branding, Celebrity, and Femininity. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315669755

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Crutcher, N. C. (2010). Mutual Appreciation: Britney Spears and the Media Machine (Publication No. 1479884) [Master’s thesis, University of Southern California]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

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Durham, M. G. (2008). The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About. The Overlook Press.

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Fisher, A. W. (2011). We Love This Trainwreck! Sacrificing Britney to Save America. In S. Holmes and D. Negra (Eds.), ln the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity (pp. 303-333). Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Jackson, S., & Vares, T. (2015). ‘Too many bad role models for us girls’: Girls, female pop celebrities and ‘sexualisation’. Sexualities, 1(19), 1-19. doi:10.1177/1363460714550905

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Jakeyonce & Shelby [Deep Dive]. (2022, March 17). The Twisted World of Hilary Duff / Deep Dive [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-UYzMLn6ps  

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Lucia, C. (2015). Hollywood’s “Proper Stranger”: Natalie Wood’s Knowing Innocence and Uncertain Experience. In R. Bell-Metereau (Eds.), Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering (pp. 220-242). Wayne State University Press.

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Projansky, S. (2014). Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture. New York University Press.  

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Tequila, M. (2020, December 6). Lindsay Lohan: The Rise of a Starlet [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcpPiVKM0ko&t=238s

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Tequila, M. (2020, December 16). Lindsay Lohan: Ready for Revival? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsoWMW-dZy8&t=1s

 

For centuries, Dante Alighieri’s formidable body of literature has been a gargantuan inspiration for aesthetic forms, The Divine Comedy, in its rich, indulgent prose, overflowing with awe-inspiring imagery, enrapturing artists and compelling them to create to honour, the intimidating majesty of the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.  In ‘Messages, Signs, and Meanings: A Basic Textbook in Semiotics and Communication Theory, 3rd Edition’, Marcel Danesi proposes a summative theory of semiotics: the meaning of signs, can be understood through the practice of signification -  meanings are first, encoded (put in) by a (sign’s) creator and then, decoded (taken out) by a reader, and it is through this lens in which the relationship of fashion (as designed by designers) to poetry, literature and ultimately, Dante’s, The Divine Comedy (sources of inspiration for designers), will be explored (Danesi 12, 19).

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Art’s Inspiration in Poetry and Literature

In ‘Language, Literature, and Art’, Alan Simpson advocates a “study in literature and art…the way in which each form may have been a source of inspiration for the other”, for such “reinforces the particular identity of each art form…(serving) to deepen understanding and illuminate appreciation” (Simpson 50-51). During the Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli’s intricately inked sketches, cruelly manifested the inconceivably torturous circles of Hell, making tangible, imminent, the epic imagery’s horror (Frey, par. 6). In the Romantic Age, William Blake’s ethereal watercolours portrayed the glorious ascension to Heaven with a delicate, whimsical lyricality, akin the cantos’ rhyme form (SHANGRIXLA, par. 7). Apart of the Realist movement, Gustave Doré’s solemn and foreboding illustrations evoked the aching sorrow of Dante’s painstaking journey, embodying the soul of the narrator (Frey, par. 14-15).

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As such classic forms of art possess a fruitful kinship with written works, amplifying the gravity of their story and flourishing the artistry of their structure, so too, does fashion - a statement perhaps better visualized, with the consideration of how aesthetic practices function. Caroline Levine considers aesthetic forms in ‘Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network’, how they, like all forms, “because they are abstract organizing principles, shapes and patterns are iterable - portable. They can be picked up and moved to new contexts” specifying also, “forms travel by moving across aesthetic materials” (Levine 4-7).

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Fashion’s Inspiration in Poetry and Literature

In ‘The Fashion System’, Roland Barthes explains how the design of a garment is motivated by “eponymous themes” - “objects or styles dignified by culture (that) give their name to the garment” (Barthes 240). The four “great eponymous themes” as he observed were nature, geography, history and art; the latter, he believed was the “richest of inspirational themes” (Barthes 240). A natural dialogue exists between fashion and poetry, a salient art form: fashion translates the imagery, themes, ideas and emotions of poetry, of which may be, of nature, geography, history and, art, into colours, shapes, prints, patterns, motifs and text, as poetry samples similarly, from the material world for its contents (Jana, par. 7-8).

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Elizabeth M. Sheehan discusses in ‘Modernism À La Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature’, what fashion and texts share as forms of expression: “offering a distinct way of knowing, stimulating particular bodily desires and inhuman forces, imagining possibilities for revolutionary self-fashioning and providing a means to grasp an historical period” (Sheehan 3). Written texts create iconoclasts that engage the mind, alight the body and soul, drive imagination and ambition and as Sheehan states, provide a tangible, visceral and, intellectual experience - naturally, from such a source rich in inspiration, should the envisioning and building of a mimetic visual and physical manifestation, develop (Horvat, par. 4-5).

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Fashion’s Contemporary Zeitgeist

Approximating the middle of the 2010s, the fluctuation and transformation of fashion - and, culture and society - had yielded a distinguishably novel fashion zeitgeist, one revolutionized by the emergence of social media, and the consequential effects it had on, the aforementioned spheres (ie. shorter trend cycles, the rise of fast fashion, the impact of influencers, diversity of ‘aesthetics’).

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Overarchingly, minimalism, comfort and ‘laissez -faire’ coolness, became the fundamental principles of dress, as embodied chronologically, by the chiefly popular, ‘Off-duty model’ (defined by graphic tees, high-waisted jeans and combat boots), Athleisure (tracksuits, spandex shorts, designer running shoes) and ‘VSCO girl’ (oversized sweaters, denim shorts, delicate jewelry) styles (McDowell, par. 12, 25). Largely in gratitude to social media platforms and influencer culture, however, there grew an equally potent desire to appear fashionable - pristine, enviable, coveted - and thusly, feminine (ruffles and tulle, pastels, charming motifs), luxurious (bodycon dresses, nude colours, gold jewelry) and glamorous (tiny crop-tops, bejewelled fabrics, mini-skirts) styles, dominated mainstream fashion analogously (De Klerk, par. 15, 22-23). Though fashion subcultures have been an omnipresent phenomenon since the inception of dressing, the interconnectedness of the digital era has propelled them into prominence, with the most prolific being the Hippie (flower crowns, fringe and crochet vests, ‘tribal’ prints), which evolved into the ‘Art Hoe’ (floral prints, political tees, ripped jeans) and then, ‘Cottage-core’ (natural motifs, embroidery and needlework, rustic fabrics) (Tessa).

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Contemporary Fashion’s Inspiration in Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’

For Luar’s Spring 2019 Ready-to-Wear (runway collection), designer Raul Lopez contrastingly, magnified oversized proportions to absurdity, such as in armour-like tracksuits, and, emphasized, bare skin with cropped, cut-up fabrics, like his ripped, ravaged slips; evoking the soul’s purification in purgatory, with abstract silhouettes, pure white and grey shades, morphing shapes, daunting seraphic imagery and monastic reference. Alexander McQueen’s Spring 2022 Menswear by Sarah Burton, focused on sartorial dichotomies, juxtaposing kitschy graphic tanks and austere, icy pastel suits, unifying the two, with delicate, Romantic jewelry but, the pinnacles of the collection were the formidable ruffles, shadowing trench coats and escapist gown, each, inspired by Canto 29 of the Purgatorio, as well as the sorrowful imagery and haunting prints, camouflaged as florals (Leitch, par. 2-3).

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Rick Owens, for Rick Owens’ Spring 2021 Ready-to-Wear, contextualized chaos and death in suffocating bodycon silhouettes and agile spandex fabrics in macabre, neutral tones, with villainous combat thigh-highs, choosing to represent hell, in apocalyptic trench coats, horror-like industrial vests, otherworldly geometric shoulders, imposingly rigid structure, dominant harnesses and zippers and rugged netting.

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Alta Moda’s Fall 2015 Couture by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, valued beauty and enchantment: fairytale motifs, gemstone bejewelled fabrics, bountiful flower crowns and large gold pendants - embodying each cantica, from gilded gold gowns and delicate wings (Paradiso), to airy tulle skirts and solemn black-lace (Purgatorio) to sinfully excessive furs (Inferno), as well as rosaries, and an opulent rendering of Christ (Blanks, par. 2). For Valentino’s Spring 2015 Couture, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli manifested true love as it was told by literature’s great romantics, through traditional Russian prints embroidered onto rough, natural linens, and billows of ruffles of tulle; their Paradise, made up of winged velvet bodices, ethereal gowns, grand capes, Medieval peasant dresses, celestial patterns, heavenly gathers of lamé and symbols of fate including, a couple lines from the Inferno (Phelps, “Valentino Spring 2015 Couture”, par. 1-2).

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Decoding ‘The Divine Comedy’s’ Influence in Contemporary Fashion

Lopez’s twisting, distorted and gashed garments, represent the eerie though transcendental, transformation of human souls, as they advance through and evolve throughout, purgatory, in preparation for their achieved ascendance to Heaven - an allegory contextualised by the designer as, “We’re all fighting this battle in society and all trying to make it to the top and to heaven” (Shang, par. 3). William Blake’s illustrations of The Divine Comedy were the fundamental concepts for Burton, guiding her aesthetic decisions, chiefly, that of Canto 29 - the drama between the glory of reuniting with Beatrice and magnitude of the Garden of Eden (XXXIX 148-151), and the austere piety, in which the narrator’s beloved represents in the epic, informing the collection, such as its disparity between grandness.

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Owens summoned the biblical of Dante’s envisioning of the Underworld, evident in the poetic ghastliness of the pieces, centring Phlegethon in The Seventh Circle of Hell (XII.44-49), as divulged by the designer, as a principal referent (Phelps, “Rick Owens in Venice”, par. 1) - the garments conquering, like the battlement of a history of evil, violent men condemned to burn eternally in the river of blood for their crimes.

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Though Dolce and Gabbana sample intentionally, from the aesthetics and imagery of the Paradiso, from Heavenly Crowns to constellations of stars and mighty roses, in achieving a retelling of a canon of classic fantasy poetry, they accidentally, too, manifest the repentance of souls described in the Purgatorio and many of the symbols in the Inferno, notably, the beasts representing sin in the cantica’s beginning (I.43-56). To be worthy of Heaven, it is foundational that a human practiced love, hope and faith while they were alive - virtues, which are significant to the structure and purpose of the spheres of Heaven: a philosophy, which Chiuri and Piccioli, illustrate through the imagery of history’s artistic visionaries’ perceptions of pure divine love, interpreted by Chiuri as, “You, are flying when you are in love (Phelps, “Valentino Spring 2015 Couture”, par. 2).”

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Bibliography:

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum, Everyman’s Library, 1995.

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Barthes, Roland. The Fashion System. Translated by Mathew Ward and Richard Howard, University of California Press, 1990.

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Blanks, Tim. “Alta Moda Comes Alive.” Vogue, 12 July 2021, www.vogue.com/article/dolce-gabbana-alta-moda-fall-2015/amp. Accessed 16 Sept. 2021.

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Danesi, Marcel. Messages, Signs, and Meanings: A Basic Textbook in Semiotics and Communication Theory, 3rd Edition. Canadian Scholars Press Inc., 2004.

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De Klerk, Amy. “The most impactful trends of the 2010s.” Harper’s Bazaar, 26 Dec. 2019, www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/fashion/shows-trends/a30193636/biggest-fashion-trends-2010s/. Accessed 19 Sept. 2021.

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Frey, Angelica. “Dante’s Divine Comedy and Its Influence on Art History.” Art & object, 24 May 2021, www.artandobject.com/articles/dantes-divine-comedy-and-its-influence-art-history. Accessed 16 Sept. 2021.

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Horvat, Katja. “Fashion & Literature.” Not Just A Label, 17 July 2017, www.notjustalabel.com/editorial/fashion-literature. Accessed 16 Sept. 2021.

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Jana, Rosalind. “Why poetry is back in fashion.” Vogue India, 20 Mar. 2019, www.vogue.in/content/why-poetry-is-back-in-fashion. Accessed 16 Sept. 2021.

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Leitch, Luke. “Alexander McQueen: Spring 2022 Menswear.” Vogue, 21 July 2021, www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2022-menswear/alexander-mcqueen. Accessed 16 Sept. 2021.

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Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015, PDF file.

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McDowell, Erin. “15 style trends experts predict will be everywhere in the next decade.” Insider, 8 Jan. 2020, www.insider.com/style-fashion-trends-popular-in-the-next-decade-2020. Accessed 19 Sept. 2021.

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Phelps, Nicole. “Rick Owens in Venice - Fashion Can’t Change the World, But It Can Change the Way People Think.” Vogue, 1 Oct. 2020, www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2021-ready-to-wear/rick-owens. Accessed 16 Sept. 2021.

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Phelps, Nicole. “Valentino Spring 2015 Couture.” Vogue, 28 Jan. 2015, www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2015-couture/valentino. Accessed 16 Sept. 2021.

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Shang, Andrew. “Luar RTW Spring 2019.” WWD, 14 Sept. 2018, wwd.com/runway/spring-ready-to-wear-2019/new-york/luar/review/. Accessed 16 Sept. 2021.

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SHANGRIXLA. “The Influence of Literature on Modern Art.” Medium, 23 Oct. 2018, shangrixla.medium.com/art-history-dante-the-divine-comedy-c2fa78f0cef9. Accessed 19 Sept. 2021.

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Sheehan, Elizabeth M. Modernism À La Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature. Cornell University, 2018.

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Simpson, Alan. “Language, Literature, and Art.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 22, no. 2, 1988, pp. 47-53, www.jstor.org/stable/3333122. Accessed 19 Sept. 2021.

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Tessa. “tumblr aesthetics from the 2010s.” YouTube, uploaded by Modern Gurlz, 22 June 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1VZIx77akE&t=146s

 

(This is probably quite familiar to most of you, but) In the early-to-mid 2010s, there was a prominent culture of finely curated “aesthetics” (clusters of ‘signs’, from fashion and makeup, to photography and visual references, to interests and themes), across visual social media platforms like - predominantly - Tumblr, which a selection of female, alt-pop musicians, embodied and helped to popularize. During the eras of each of their earliest albums, Lana Del Rey (for ‘Born to Die’, 2012), Marina and the Diamonds (‘Electra Heart’, 2012), Melanie Martinez (‘Cry Baby’, 2015) and Halsey (‘Hopeless Fountain Kingdom’, 2017), constructed their artist identities, and subsequently, music videos and performances, to portray and depict, a certain grouping of organized signs and meanings.

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Each artist personified their given, often self-originated, aesthetic to a certain degree, allowing the meaning of this produced persona to either inspire and inform, or subsume and overtake their own, independent identity: Lana, became inextricably linked to her ‘aesthetic character’, while Melanie and Marina temporarily inhabited theirs, the latter, only for the duration of an album, and Halsey, portrayed hers, solely in the confines of her art.

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Lana Del Rey’s aesthetic (personal character? - the separation between her, and her persona, is unintelligible) was defined by concepts associated with classic Americana: she oscillated, between messages of opulent glamour and romantic working-class charm (“gangster Nancy Sinatra”), incorporating signs of Hollywood, pearls and Rococo for one, motels, trailer parks and beauty pageants, the other, and death, cigarettes, cocaine, vintage cameras, Lolita and the American flag, both.

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Marina and the Diamonds, created the character ‘Electra Heart’, which contained four individual aesthetics, belonging to the ‘housewife’, ‘homewrecker’, ‘beauty queen’ and ‘idle teen’, each ‘archetype’ communicating the meaning, of its cultural significance in America; the first, representing decadence, through signs of 1950s suburbia; the second, lust, of film-noir erotica, the third, perfection, of 1940s starlets, and the fourth, rebellion, of small-town schoolgirls.

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Melanie Martinez, likewise, engineered the character ‘Cry Baby’, and while the artist is canonically, separate from her, she is extra-textual (as in, Melanie performs Cry Baby, all of the time); she is a child/doll, that inhabits a fairytale realm that communicates through whimsical, childlike signs like desserts, stuffed animals, cartoons and storybook creatures, that have been distorted - her meaning, is defined in relation to the other characters in the world but, is often innocence and sensitivity.

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Halsey, acted the role of ‘Luna Aurem’, in a fantasy, Romeo-and-Juliet story which played across her album’s lore (the universe it built): Luna, symbolizing concepts of the flesh, sin, danger and temptation, belonging to the gritty, house of pleasure and crime, was associated with the stylistic and narrative signs, greatly inspired, by Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, of fire, alcohol, crosses, sacred hearts and wasps, and combat, freedom, disobedience, bad luck and killing.

 

Upon my annual viewing of 2006’s iconic, The Devil Wears Prada, whose origins stem from the eponymous, illuminating roman à clef, by Lauren Weisberger, detailing her time as an assistant to Vogue’s esteemed, editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, I found myself beset with an emotion I had yet to encounter in my indulging of anemoia thus far: disappointment.

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I was wholly aware, of how dominant media has depicted (and, seemingly depicts) the fashion industry for most of its lifetime as vapid, haughty and callous to intentionally, suppress a practice liberating, and field rewarding for, women, but still, was disappointed by the film’s upholding, of such fallacies, albeit, without the agenda attached. Indeed, working in fashion, appositely, fashion media, is exceptionally gruelling and demanding, and perhaps, there is a subsect of publications whose work environment endorses, kinds of gossip (like Emily’s), shaming (Nigel’s) and fear-imposing (Miranda’s), but it is too meritorious an industry, to be denigrated to typification by the film, in the perceptions of so many.

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While my issues with The Devil Wears Prada have been existent since I first bared witness to it then, unfamiliar with the intricacies of fashion media, they have become increasingly resolute as my involvement within it, has expanded - the breaking point of my receptivity to its positive reading reached, when I began working at a fashion and lifestyle magazine, myself.

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Though Runway chiefly exhibits fashion, and She’s SINGLE, lifestyle (scoping a diversity hidden in its title), the publications are identical in their identity; what former assistant to editor-in-chief Lisa K. Stephenson, Grace Tesoro, describes as, “empowerment, and how that can look and take so many forms - any way you want to imagine it you have the power to create [it]”. As opposed to the former fictional title’s belittling of its masthead, to the betrayal of its proposed objective of empowering women, the latter, She’s SINGLE, alike an overwhelming majority of its real contemporaries, honoured its dedication to their uplifting, as abundantly evident, in the positive, supportive and inspiring, professional community, it sustained.

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Grace speaks upon, the core purpose of the publication, from its internal contents, to its work environment, “the value of being a woman - how important that message is, and how different that experience can be regarding, if you have a different ethnicity or whichever your adversity, (but) no matter what, women can still be there for each other, and be able to lift each other up.” She discusses She’s SINGLE’s commitment further, “that women should have each other’s backs, which is a very important aspect of feminism that needs to keep getting emphasized more in media across the board, because women are the one’s who have each other’s backs, are going to need each other’s backs, and I liked being a part of a media outlet, that explicitly explains that.”

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In intimately assisting the editor-in-chief’s editorial coordination of the magazine, from the inception of ideas to their execution’s refinement, Grace was integral, in administering its function and determining its success - chief amongst which, involved collaborating with content creators, to guide in their development of stories with diverse and significant messages.

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She remarks upon how critically, she valued the input of each, individual contributor to the title, “I also liked getting the opportunity to kind of collaborate with [them] in that regard, getting to hear pitches from some of [them]… getting to hear their ideas, and seeing if they had their own ideas, and me allowing them to go ahead and write it, and seeing what they’d come up with.” Grace touches upon how the distinct uniqueness, of each creator’s voice was central, to the impact of their stories, “and getting to just read what [they] had wrote, getting to see the people they chose to interview, how they chose to style, because everybody has a different writing style… to see how one [person] does it, compared to the other, there’s no right or wrong.”

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As then a writer for She’s SINGLE, when Grace was the editor-in-chief’s editorial assistant, I can indisputably attest to how laudably she coordinated an amiable, encouraging and understanding work environment that prioritized the personal and professional wellbeing, of all apart; a palpable disparity, from the fallacious narratives professed, by The Devil Wears Prada.

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Quite aptly, the sole components of fashion media, this article’s titular film truthfully represent, noted by Grace as, “things do move pretty quickly, you do have to be pretty adaptable” and, “its more so an industry that’s cutthroat… you’re not always going to hear back, ‘yes’”, are intrinsic to the nature of media itself, and evident, in universal forms of journalism. However, fashion is currently, the primary embodiment of femininity, as it has been historically, women’s expression, and therefore until the sociocultural atmosphere in which consistently informs the dominant media, suddenly opts to finally recognize women, and what we admire, as ‘worthy’, then fashion’s blasphemous depiction à la The Devil Wears Prada, will prevail; the industry, an isolated epitome of evil.