Picturing the Woman-Child: Fashion, Feminism and the Female Gaze 9781350059580, 9781350059627, 9781350059610

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Picturing the Woman-Child

Also by Morna Laing and published by Bloomsbury Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking, co-editor with Jacki Willson

Picturing the Woman-Child Fashion, Feminism and the Female Gaze Morna Laing

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Morna Laing, 2021 Morna Laing has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image: Dr. Heisenberg’s Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, 1998, © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Laing, Morna, author. Title: Picturing the woman-child : fashion, feminism and the female gaze / Morna Laing. Other titles: ‘Woman-child’ in fashion photography, 1990–2015 Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Revision of the author’s thesis (Ph.D.)–University of the Arts London, 2016, under the title: The ‘woman-child’ in fashion photography, 1990–2015 : childlike femininities, performativity, and reception studies. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036551 (print) | LCCN 2020036552 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350059580 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350214385 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350059603 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350059610 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Fashion–Social aspects. | Clothing and dress–Social aspects. | Fashion photography–Social aspects. | Body image in women. | Feminism. | Infantilism. Classification: LCC GT525 .L35 2021 (print) | LCC GT525 (ebook) | DDC 391–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036551 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036552 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5958-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5961-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-5960-3 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Isobel and Brian

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Contents List of Figures viii Acknowledgements xii Preface  xiv 1 Introduction

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Part One 2 3 4

Fashion Photography and Gender Childlike Femininity: A History of Feminist Critique Between Image and Spectator: Reception Studies as Visual Methodology

17 33 57

Part Two 5 6

The Romantic Woman-Child, Lost from Home Fashion’s ‘Femme-Enfant-Fatale’: Surrealism, Curiosity and Alice in Wonderland 7 Rewriting Lolita in Fashion Photography 8 Kinderwhore: From Catwalk to Slutwalk

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Conclusion

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Notes Bibliography Appendix 1: Participant Demographics Index

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List of Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6

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Elsie Wright, Alice and the Fairies, July 1917. © SSPL/Getty Images Elsie Wright, Alice and Leaping Fairy, August 1920. © SSPL/Getty Images Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las Meninas, c. 1656. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Illustration from Émile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1778. Engraved by Noel Le Mire Joshua Reynolds, The Age of Innocence, c. 1788. © Tate Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Mrs John Angerstein and Her Son John Julius William, 1799. © MAH, Musées d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, Dépôt de la République et Canton de Genève, 1984. Inventory no. 1985–0056. Photographer: Jean-Marc Yersin ‘Joanna Newsom: Songbird’. Lula, no.10, 2010. Photographer: Annabel Mehran. Stylist: Isabel Dupré. Model: Joanna Newsom. © Annabel Mehran ‘Joanna Newsom: Songbird’. Lula, no.10, 2010. Photographer: Annabel Mehran. Stylist: Isabel Dupré. Model: Joanna Newsom. © Annabel Mehran ‘Heavenly Creatures’. British Vogue, March 2006. Photographer: Benjamin Alexander Huseby. Fashion Editor: Miranda Almond. Models: unknown. © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd Film still from Heavenly Creatures, 1994. Director: Peter Jackson. Actors: Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey Film still from Heavenly Creatures, 1994. Director: Peter Jackson. Actors: Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey Film still from The Virgin Suicides, 1999. Director: Sofia Coppola. Actor: Kirsten Dunst ‘Star Girls’. British Vogue, December 2010. Photographer: Mario Testino. Fashion Editor: Lucinda Chambers. Model: Natalia Vodianova. © Mario Testino ‘Star Girls’. British Vogue, December 2010. Photographer: Mario Testino. Fashion Editor: Lucinda Chambers. Model: Sasha Pivovarova. © Mario Testino

25 26 38 40 41

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List of Figures

‘White Nights’. British Vogue, January 2007. Photographer: Tim Walker. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Model: Sasha Pivovarova. © Tim Walker Studio 16 ‘White Nights’. British Vogue, January 2007. Photographer: Tim Walker. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Model: Sasha Pivovarova. © Tim Walker Studio 17 ‘White Nights’. British Vogue, January 2007. Photographer: Tim Walker. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Model: Sasha Pivovarova. © Tim Walker Studio 18 Raffaelle Monti, A Veiled Vestal Virgin, 1846–7. Photo © Kevin Tebutt 19 John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott. 1888. © Tate 20 ‘This Side of the Blue: The Time and Place for Dreams to Begin’. Lula no.8, 2009. Photographer: Yelena Yemchuk. Stylist: Leith Clark. Models: Skye Stracke and Lola. © Yelena Yemchuk 21 ‘A Long, Long Way from Home: Stop Wherever You Find Yourself ’. Lula no.7, 2008. Photographer: Yelena Yemchuk. Stylist: Leith Clark. Model: Ali Michael. © Yelena Yemchuk 22 Advertisement for Miu Miu, 2011. Photographer: Bruce Weber. Model: Hailee Steinfeld. © Bruce Weber 23 ‘All the Real Girls: More Folk, Less Factory – Bring On the Girls Who Make Things’. Lula no.3, 2006. Photographer: Gen Kay. © Gen Kay 24 ‘Keira Knightley’. Vogue Italia, January 2011. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Stylist: Leith Clark. Model: Keira Knightley. © Ellen von Unwerth 25a ‘L’Écriture Automatique’, La Révolution Surréaliste, no.9–10, October 1927 25b L’Écriture Automatique’, detail, La Révolution Surréaliste, no.9–10, October 1927 26 Dorothea Tanning, Jeux d’Enfants, 1942. © ADAGP Paris, 2020 27 Film still from Addams Family Values, 1993. Director: Barry Sonnenfeld. Actor: Christina Ricci 28 ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Difficult and Deadpan and Wonderfully Different, Lula Dreams of Wednesday’. Lula no.7, 2008. Illustrator: Jonas Löfgren (Bildmekanik). © Jonas Löfgren 29 Elsa Schiaparelli, ‘Tear-Illusion’ dress, 1938 30 Advertisement for Orla Kiely, 2009. Photographer: Catherine Servel. Stylist: Leith Clark. Model: Skye Stracke. © Catherine Servel

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98 100 102

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116 120 121 125 126

127 130 131

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31 32 33

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42 43 44 45 46

List of Figures

Rosemary’s Baby, 1968. Director: Roman Polanski. Actors: Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. © Getty Images Violette, 1978. Director: Claude Chabrol. Actor: Isabelle Huppert Duane Michals, Dr. Heisenberg’s Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, 1998. Six gelatin-silver photographs with hand-applied text © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Duane Michals, Dr. Heisenberg’s Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, 1998. Six gelatin-silver photographs with hand-applied text © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Duane Michals, Dr. Heisenberg’s Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, 1998. Six gelatin-silver photographs with hand-applied text © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Duane Michals, Dr. Heisenberg’s Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, 1998. Six gelatin-silver photographs with hand-applied text © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Duane Michals, Dr. Heisenberg’s Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, 1998. Six gelatin-silver photographs with hand-applied text © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Duane Michals, Dr. Heisenberg’s Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, 1998. Six gelatin-silver photographs with hand-applied text. © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York ‘Forget Me Not’. British Vogue, May 2011. Photographer: Tim Gutt. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Set Design: Shona Heath. Model: Hannah Holman. © Tim Gutt Illustration to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by John Tenniel, 1865 ‘Forget Me Not’, British Vogue, May 2011. Photographer: Tim Gutt. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Set Design: Shona Heath. Model: Hannah Holman. © Tim Gutt Illustration to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by John Tenniel, 1865 Promotional image for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, 1962. Photographer: Bert Stern. Actor: Sue Lyon. © Getty Images Dakota Fanning at Marc Jacobs SS2012 After Party, September 2011. Photographer: Dimitrios Kambouris. © Getty Images Promotion for Marc Jacobs new perfume Daisy in Copenhagen, Denmark, 2015. Photographer: Francis Dean. © Getty Images John Everett Millais, Cherry Ripe, 1879

132 134

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151 152 155 163 168 170

List of Figures

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52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Eric Erlandson, Courtney Love and Melissa Auf Der Maur, 1995. © Getty Images ‘Courtney Love: The Hole Truth’. Interview magazine, March 1994. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Model: Courtney Love. © Ellen von Unwerth ‘Courtney Love: The Hole Truth’. Interview magazine, March 1994. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Model: Courtney Love. © Ellen von Unwerth Ellen von Unwerth, ‘Pretty on the Inside’. i-D no.138, March 1995. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Stylist: Joe McKenna. Model: Drew Barrymore. © Ellen von Unwerth ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’. i-D no.143, August 1995. Photographers: Davies and Davies. Models: members of girl band Fluffy. © Davies and Davies Portrait of Myra Hindley (1942–2002). © Getty Images Meadham Kirchhoff, A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, SS2012. Photographer: Stuart C. Wilson. © Getty Images Meadham Kirchhoff, A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, SS2012. Photographer: Victor Virgile/Gamma-Rapho. © Getty Images ‘Power of TWO’, British Vogue, January 2012. Photographer: Philip Sinden. © Philip Sinden Grayson Perry dressed as his alter-ego, Claire, 2004. Photographer: Dave M. Benett. © Getty Images Screen grab from Man Repeller, 2010 Meadham Kirchhoff, A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, SS2012. Photographer: Stuart C. Wilson. © Getty Images Molly Goddard, AW 2017. Photographer: Tim P. Whitby. © Getty Images Molly Goddard, AW 2017. Photographer: Niklas Halle’n. © Getty Images

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188 189 197 198 201 204 206 208 212 212

Acknowledgements I first came across Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the ‘eternal child’ when reading The Second Sex in 2008. The concept seemed to resonate with a certain genre of fashion photography in British Vogue at the time, and that led me to embark upon this research project. This book has therefore been a long time in the making and I owe a great many thanks to the people who have helped me reach this stage. I would like to express my thanks to the editors at Bloomsbury – Frances Arnold, Yvonne Thouroude and Rebecca Hamilton  – for their support, guidance and especially their patience, as I prepared the manuscript for publication. The book is adapted from my doctoral research, which was supervised by Prof. Agnès Rocamora and Prof. Caroline Evans at University of the Arts London. I continue to feel grateful for their intellectual generosity, their mentorship and the kindness they have shown me over the years. I am grateful for the support of my family as I worked on this project, and owe special thanks to my parents, Isobel and Brian, and my siblings, Karina, Felicity and Gordon. I was lucky to find a home from home in North London, thanks to Rebecca Smith, Emily Paul, Frédéric Schaeffer, Martha Rose King and Milly Watkins. I am grateful for their kindness, sense of fun and all the parties at Stapleton Hall Road. More recently, my friends in South East London have become very dear to me, and I thank Jana Melkumova-Reynolds, Katya Tarnovskaya, Rochelle Rowe and Natasha Adamou for their companionship, conversation, and the many soirées we have spent together. I have found belonging in a second sense in art schools and universities, and that is in large part thanks to my colleagues who, over the years, have become some of my closest friends. In the course of writing this book, I had the opportunity to exchange ideas with Sara Chong Kwan, Jérémie Garnier, Matina Kousidi, Rachel Lifter, Felice McDowell, Marco Pecorari, Mario Roman, Caryn Simonson and Jacki Willson. I also felt a strong sense of solidarity with my colleagues in the Cultural Studies department at London College of Fashion and the Design School at Chelsea College of Arts, particularly in the face of the growing pressures of higher education in the UK.

Acknowledgements

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The project has received financial support at several stages since its inception, and I would like to acknowledge that here. I was awarded a scholarship from UAL from 2010 to 2013, to carry out the PhD research on which this book is based. Later, in the autumn term of 2018, I was granted a sabbatical during my time in the Textiles department at Chelsea College of Arts. This provided relief from my teaching duties, offering me the headspace I needed to complete a first draft of the manuscript. The Graduate School at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon provided further assistance with image rights, which was gratefully received. Lastly, I received assistance with image rights from The New School, Parsons Paris, and I’d like to thank Karen Decter in particular, for her help with this. The book has benefitted from the illustrations I have been able to include, and I would like to thank the photographers and illustrators who so generously allowed me to reproduce their work here. I extend special thanks to Duane Michals for allowing me to use his beautiful photograph on the cover. And last, but by no means least, I would like to thank the twenty women who gave their time to participate in reception studies. Their responses were illuminating, opening up new and unexpected networks of meaning.

Publication histories Some parts of this book appeared earlier as journal articles and I am grateful for the publishers who granted permission for me to reproduce those sections here. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published as ‘Politics, Truth and Female Identity in Fashion Photography’ in the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: Global Perspectives, edited by Joanne B. Eicher and Phyllis G. Tortora (Oxford: Berg, 2010). Chapter 4 is lightly revised from ‘Between Image and Spectator: Reception Studies as Visual Methodology’, which appeared in Fashion Theory (vol. 22, no.1 (2018): 5–30). A small portion of Chapter 5 is drawn from ‘The Lula girl as “Sublime and Childlike”: Nostalgic Investments in Contemporary Fashion Magazines’ in Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty (vol. 5, no.2 (2014): 271–93). Finally, an earlier version of Chapter 7 was published as ‘Rewriting Lolita in Fashion Photography: Candy, Consumption and Dying Flowers’ in Sexualities in 2020 (vol. 23, no.5–6, 717–38).

Preface

This book looks at images of the ‘woman-child’ in British and European fashion magazines, in the period spanning 1990 to 2015. Yet, in the years that have lapsed since the conclusion of this study and the publication of the present book, the industry and fashion media have continued to evolve. One significant shift not covered by this timeframe is the change of editorial direction at British Vogue, the magazine studied most comprehensively for this project. In 2017 it was announced that Alexandra Shulman would be stepping down as editor-in-chief of the magazine, with Ghanaian-born Edward Enninful named her successor. The December 2017 issue of Vogue was the first under his stewardship, and featured British model, Adwoa Aboah on the cover, alongside a list of contributors, many of whom were people of colour. Politics, anti-racism and diversity have since become central to the vision of ‘#NewVogue’ elaborated under his direction and, as such, the magazine now looks very different from the version I studied, and critiqued, for this book. The shift in editorial focus can be located in the context of the growing visibility of politics in certain sections of the fashion media,1 in light of the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013 and spread through activism on the street and hashtags on social media.2 This mobilization sits alongside the resurgence of feminism in the early years of the 2010s, as covered in this book, as well as the founding of organizations such as Fashion Revolution in 2013, which aims to address systemic issues in the global fashion industry, such as labour rights and the transparency of supply chains. These movements are raising important questions about the nature of oppression, of both people and planet, and media representations will be a crucial conduit for shifting discourses, with the potential to influence practice and behaviour in more progressive orientations. The aforementioned change of direction at a mainstream publication like British Vogue gives us reason to

Preface

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be hopeful in terms of the potential for change and inclusivity in the industry, and the role fashion might play in a post-pandemic world. Since I have been unable to explore this shift here, it will fall to subsequent scholars to evaluate the form (childlike) femininities take on in this new context.

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1

Introduction In 2012 The Independent newspaper published an article entitled the ‘Rise and Rise of the Woman-child’. The tagline proclaimed, ‘She’s the thirtysomething who won’t grow up, and designers and directors are taking note.’1 That same year, HBO released the television series Girls, to much critical acclaim.2 Deborah Schoeneman, a writer on the series, went on to publish a Kindle Single entitled Woman-child. The advertising copy read: Meet the ‘woman-child’ who acts, dresses and consumes pop culture like a girl. A counterpart to the ‘man-child’3 stars of Judd Apatow movies […] They love the new television shows with ‘girl’ in the title, and there are a lot of those these days. The extended adolescence means marriage and kids usually arrive after 35. Easily spotted sporting sparkly nail polish and friendship bracelets, their style gurus are celebrities who often dress younger than their years: Zooey Deschanel, Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj.4

Mention of dress, nail polish and accessories points to the central role that fashion plays in media constructions of childlike femininity in the West.5 It was after all this aesthetic that prompted SHOWstudio to launch Project Girly in 2014: a series devoted to unpicking ‘the fluffy, sparkly bastions of girlishness on the runways recently’.6 Yet, this recent celebration of girliness is curious given that childlike ideals of femininity have long been critiqued by feminist thinkers for their infantilizing connotations. Mary Wollstonecraft, in the eighteenth century, lamented the way women, regardless of age, were encouraged to remain in a state of ‘perpetual childhood’: innocent and ‘pleasing’, with limited access to education.7 Later, in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir conceptualized woman as the ‘eternal child’ on account of her dependence on men, her presumed passivity and her limited influence on public life.8 Then in 1963 Betty Friedan voiced concerns about the ‘feminine mystique’ – the ideal prescribed for female behaviour in postwar North America – asking: ‘Why aren’t girls forced to grow up – to achieve

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somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?’9 For Friedan, one could not be both feminine and fully human; they were mutually exclusive categories. Taken together, these writers argued that constructing women as childlike served to cement inequalities between the sexes; women were, in effect, honorary children, and as such not fully ‘adult’, making it easy to justify their differential treatment.10 In light of this history, it is unsurprising that feminists have fought for equal – adult – standing for women alongside men. And given that women and children have historically shared ‘minority group status’,11 recent scholarship in sociology has also sought recognition of children as fully fledged ‘human beings’ rather than ‘human becomings’.12 Yet, in spite of the gains of feminism, or perhaps in tandem with them, women continue to be represented as childlike in the fashion media. In fact, the emphasis on girliness in the work of photographers such as Tim Walker, Ellen von Unwerth and Juergen Teller sits alongside a resurgence in feminist activism, with this being labelled ‘Fourth Wave’13 feminism or ‘digital feminism’.14 Hester Baer has described this as a ‘paradigm shift within feminist protest culture’,15 whereby activism on the street now converges with activism online, with hashtags connecting groups of women in dispersed geographical locations. Examples include the Slutwalk movement which began in Toronto in 2011;16 Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism Project, founded in 2012; and debate on social media through hashtags such as #YesAllWomen.17 This book therefore seeks to unravel the seeming contradiction between the visibility of female ‘empowerment’ in media discourse and the proliferation of childlike imagery of women in fashion media: particularly the ‘woman-child’ as she appears in British and European fashion magazines from 1990 to 2015. From the perspective of the present, it is possible to critique the work of earlier feminists like Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir and Friedan. In these writings, women tend to be discussed in binary opposition to men, meaning the authors sometimes fail to recognize the power differentials between differently situated groups of women. Friedan, for instance, failed to recognize how the experiences of African American women or working-class women might have differed from that of the more privileged respondents of her study.18 Such ‘false universalism’19 was a critique of Second Wave feminism more generally and has since prompted a move towards a more intersectional approach in feminist scholarship, which sees gender to intersect with other axes of identity, such as race, sexuality, social class, nationality, age, ability and religion.20 This helps to account for the power

Introduction

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differentials between differently situated groups of women, as well as explaining ‘the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of women’, as bell hooks has argued.21 Some have suggested that rather than talking about femininity in the singular it makes more sense to talk of femininities and genders in the plural. The plurality implied by ‘femininities’ places an emphasis on the differences between women, rather than merely consolidating the tired male/ female binary. Thus, whilst I have given ‘analytical priority’22 to gender in this book, I tend to refer to childlike femininities in the plural,23 so as to emphasize the intersectional nature of female identity. The work of Judith Butler helps complicate this binary,24 moving away from a ‘top-down’ understanding of power as situated in the hands of men only (the patriarchy) towards a conceptualization of childlike femininities as defined in discourse, and enmeshed in a network of shifting power relations, per the work of Michel Foucault.25 Theorizing power in this way is necessary in the contemporary context because, as Angela McRobbie has observed, following the partial gains of feminism, it is often the fashion and beauty industries that regulate feminine ideals, with those – in turn – being internalized and enforced by women upon themselves.26 Such images are thus produced by both men and women, with those same images read – and perhaps enjoyed – by largely female audiences. This was acknowledged by Ros Coward vis-àvis the ‘superwaif ’ ideal in the 1990s, personified by models such as Kate Moss. As Coward argued, ‘It is no use trying to pretend that these child-like supermodels simply pander to male fantasies of resuming control and are being imposed on a resentful womanhood.’27 I therefore take care to avoid using the term ‘infantilization’ when discussing femininities in contemporary fashion media, since this seems to imply the straightforward subjugation of one group or person by another, when the workings of power are now often more complex than this term allows.

Defining the woman-child This book has two overarching research questions: the first concerns the meaning of the woman-child, in her various incarnations, and the second concerns the possible appeal she holds for contemporary women living in the UK, following several waves of feminism. For it cannot be assumed that an image of childlike femininity in the eighteenth century, when Wollstonecraft was writing, would be read in the same way as a childlike woman today. I was therefore interested

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in evaluating whether the ‘woman-child’ was capable of shedding her Second Sex connotations and taking on new, more progressive, meanings in the contemporary context through practices of re-signification. In order to address this question, I needed not only to analyse the images themselves but also to speak to women in lived experience to find out how they ‘read’, or made sense of, the images. Reception studies in focus groups thus became a central pillar of the project: a methodological approach which remains underdeveloped in the field of fashion studies, as I later discuss. The term ‘woman-child’ is used throughout this book not to suggest that women are closer to childhood in any essentialized sense;28 instead, it serves as shorthand for the idea that childlike femininities emerge out of overlapping discourses on womanhood, girlhood and childhood. For example, the ‘woman-child’, even upon cursory examination, is a highly normative version of womanhood, tending to be young, cis-gendered, white, slender, heteronormative and able-bodied.29 This can be explained, in part, by long-standing discourses on womanhood such as the myth of the femme fatale or ideals of ‘virginal’ femininity and the Victorian ‘Angel in the House’.30 Yet, one also needs to look at the way childhood and girlhood are discursively elaborated. For instance, the ideal image of childhood in the West tends to hinge on the concept of ‘innocence’, which has worked historically to exclude working-class children and children of colour from its ambit.31 This rhetoric of innocence in turn feeds into images of the woman-child which are constructed through that lens. Body size and body weight often play a part in constructions of femininity in the fashion media, with models often possessing ‘not the bodies of actual children but rather those of ectomorphic or purposefully underdeveloped adults’, as Jobling observes.32 I would like to make two points in relation to this quote. Firstly, although I look at literature on childhood in order to unpick the discourses to which the ‘woman-child’ belongs, this book does not focus on fashion imagery featuring children; instead it concerns the childlike representation of adult women.33 It is for this reason that I have opted for the term ‘woman-child’ rather than ‘child-woman’; the latter seems to suggest a child who is presented through the tropes of womanhood, or who wears ‘the signs of adulthood’,34 rather than the inverse. Secondly, while the thin body is one element that serves to position woman as childlike, I do not explore debates on thinness, anorexia or ‘size zero’ per se.35 Instead, the focus here is on the way connotations of childhood are combined with connotations of womanhood; or, put differently, the way discourses on girl-childhood intersect and overlap with

Introduction

5

discourses on womanhood, acted out on adult bodies through fashion, make-up and adornment. Of course, the childlike woman appeared in fashion magazines prior to the 1990s, albeit under a different guise. Notable examples include the flapper girl of the 1920s, who symbolized progress and modernity36 and the gamine models of 1960s London, such as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, who represented youth culture, sexual revolution and a newfound degree of financial independence for young women.37 When it comes to the 1980s and 1990s, the representation of models as childlike has been theorized by a number of scholars,38 with Erving Goffman noting this tendency in advertising images more generally.39 Paul Jobling, for instance, posited ‘the girl’ as one of the most prominent ideals of female sexuality that appeared in publications like Vogue, Arena and The Face, during that period.40 Although these scholars acknowledge the childlike nature of femininity, as far as I am aware there has not been an in-depth study that puts their findings in dialogue with discussion of the new wave of childlike femininities that emerged in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.41 Nor has there been an extended study into the different discourses on childhood and girlhood that come into play to produce different versions of the ‘womanchild’ in fashion photography. This book addresses this gap, subsuming the many permutations of childlike femininity under four overarching headings: the Romantic woman-child, the femme-enfant-fatale, Lolita style and Kinderwhore. The Romantic woman-child in Chapter 5 presents the ‘coherent’ face of childlike femininity, tending to go with the grain of normative discourses on womanhood. Some images, such as ‘Heavenly Creatures’ (2006) by Benjamin Alexander Huseby, draw on the rhetoric of Romantic childhood as a carefree, utopian state set against a pastoral backdrop. Such images offer nostalgic investments to readers, through a vision of childhood which connotes purity, innocence and joie-de-vivre and disavows psychoanalytic discourses which posit childhood as the site of unspeakable trauma. Other images are constructed in a similar vein only this time with a distinct air of melancholy, such as ‘White Nights’ by Tim Walker (2007) or ‘A Long, Long Way from Home’ by Yelena Yemchuk (2008). Here the coherence of childlike femininity feels stuck or frozen and the girls seem lost from home, in every sense of the word. Going with the grain of normative femininity is here presented not as a space of freedom or empowerment but instead as a painful sort of ‘gender melancholia’.42 This hints at the cost of inhabiting ideals of femininity constructed as coherent, as well as a certain dissatisfaction with the way adulthood is defined and lived in the neoliberal context.

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That coherence is partially undone in images of the rebellious femme-enfant-fatale in Chapter 6. This figure emerges from discourses on Romanticism and subversive girlhood, as embodied by figures such as Wednesday Addams, Alice in Wonderland and the femme-enfant of Surrealism: all of whom appear to be on the cusp of insubordination. The question explored is why curiosity, intellect and politics must find expression on the body of a six- or seven-year-old girl (Wednesday Addams and Alice in Wonderland, respectively). It might be, as Catriona McAra suggests, that the ‘sweetness’ of the girl-child contains within itself the necessary conditions for subversion.43 On the other hand, it might suggest that writing these qualities on the body of an adult woman would simply be ‘too much’ in a society that still retains many patriarchal features. Curiosity is a central motif throughout this chapter, with Laura Mulvey’s discussion of ‘feminist curiosity’ helping me think through the empowering potential of an active, investigative female gaze. Since the release of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita in 1962, a visual shorthand has emerged, which departs significantly from the way ‘Lolita’ was constructed in Nabokov’s novel. Chapter 7 traces citations of ‘Lolita’ as both text and image in contemporary fashion photography. Particular attention is paid to an advertising image shot by Juergen Teller for Marc Jacobs’ Oh, Lola! in 2011. Discourses on Lolita absolutely and resolutely exclude the maternal, which speaks to the fashion industry’s fixation with the cusp that separates girlhood from womanhood. Childlike defiance and colourful consumables fit seamlessly into the logic of the fashion system and its dream of a never-satiated consumer. Finally, childlike femininity is parodied and redeployed in fashion photography featuring the Kinderwhore aesthetic, which emerged in the 1990s. Most famously associated with Courtney Love, Kinderwhore parodies the contradictions of normative femininity, such as that entailed by the virgin/ whore dichotomy. Kinderwhore combined elements coded as childlike – such as Mary Jane shoes, knee-high socks and plastic hair clips – with signifiers of overt female sexuality.44 That aesthetic was later re-signified by Meadham Kirchhoff in 2012, albeit without the dark connotations and so-called heroin chic, through a show of hyper-girly frou-frou in their SS2012 collection A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing. However, ‘parody by itself is not subversive’,45 with context and reception being two important determinants of meaningful subversion, as Butler notes. This became clear when the politics of representation were brought uncomfortably to the fore when Meadham Kirchhoff ’s Slutwalk was reported on the pages of British Vogue in 2012. The ‘gloss’46 added by the magazine worked to undermine the subversive elements of Slutwalk, and in so doing betrayed

Introduction

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the exclusionary logic of the fashion system as well as reproducing some of the criticisms associated with Slutwalks more generally. While the focus in this book is on the woman-child, that is not to say that only women are positioned as childlike in the media and in lived experience. For instance, Bethan Benwell points to the use of childish, puerile language in men’s magazines such as FHM, which would seem to interpellate readers to inhabit a childlike subject-position.47 In the course of my research I encountered a number of editorials where men were positioned as childlike. These included fashion designers such as Oliver Theyskens, labelled ‘The Wonderkid’48 in a British Vogue editorial, with other features depicting men who self-identified as homosexual, such as Stephen Fry and Keith Haring.49 The laddish figure of Robbie Williams appeared under the heading ‘MANCHILD: Drugs, Drink and Lots of Tears’ when photographed by Mario Testino for British Vogue.50 This characterization of masculinity speaks to Mary Wollstonecraft’s far earlier comments, where she posits man as an ‘overgrown child […] thanks to early debauchery’.51 In the North American context, Michael Kimmel has explored the phenomenon of ‘Guyland’, where contemporary young men enjoy what he terms a ‘Peter-Pan mindset’.52 It represents a life stage where men are poised between adolescence and adulthood: a space in which ‘guys gather to be guys with each other, unhassled by the demands of parents, girlfriends, jobs, kids, and the other nuisances of adult life’.53 However, the young men in Kimmel’s study are, for the most part, affluent, white and heterosexual and must therefore be differentiated from the practice of white men infantilizing Black men under slavery, as discussed by Stuart Hall. He notes that ‘the white slave master often exercised his authority over the black male slave, by depriving him of all the attributes of responsibility, paternal and familial authority, treating him as a child. This “infantilization” of difference is a common representational strategy for both men and women.’54 This is mirrored in verbal practices, such as a white man calling a Black man ‘boy’ as a means of emasculating him and asserting white supremacy. This practice is discussed by de Beauvoir who notes that ‘black slaves [and] colonial natives have also been called grown-up children – as long as they were not feared; that meant that they were to accept without argument the verities and the laws laid down for them by other men’. Childlike versions of adulthood are thus not singular but multiple, emerging from different historical discourses on femininity, masculinity and childhood. The emphasis in this book is on femininities although I do draw upon the work of moral philosopher Susan Neiman, whose book Why Grow Up? (2014) explores

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resistance to growing up in adults as a general category.55 Her discussion of childhood and adulthood in the context of neoliberalism is valuable in terms of situating representations of childlike femininities in the economic context from which they emerge. Neiman’s analysis has some resonance with the term ‘kidulthood’, which recently emerged in the popular media to describe both ‘twenty-something’ men and women in the West.56

Magazines and methodology In order to trace patterns in representation, I collected more than 2000 images of the ‘woman-child’ in the period spanning from 1990 to 2015. The 1990s seemed an obvious starting point since it was at this moment that the figure of the ‘superwaif ’ rose to prominence, most famously embodied by Kate Moss.57 The majority of images were sourced from three British magazines, namely Vogue, i-D and Lula, Girl of My Dreams.58 When deciding where to source images, I took a cue from Foucault who states ‘we must choose, empirically, a field in which the relations are likely to be numerous, dense and relatively easy to describe’.59 In line with this, the magazines I chose were those that frequently depicted models in a childlike manner. I had originally intended to leaf through every issue of these three magazines with a view to collecting and storing any image I considered to construct woman as childlike. However, as the research progressed, the extent to which femininities were articulated as childlike in these publications was becoming clear. The sheer volume of imagery I was scanning was becoming unmanageable – I was ‘drowning in data’60 – so I reconsidered my selection methods. I completed my database of British Vogue, covering the entirety of issues published from 1990-2015, and elected to collect imagery from the other two magazines more selectively, according to themes that emerged as significant in my discourse analysis. In terms of Lula magazine, I focused on the period under Leith Clark’s direction, from 2005–2013 and in terms of i-D, I focused on the 1990s, the moment where the Kinderwhore aesthetic was emerging in the context of grunge. Launched in 1916, British Vogue is one of the longest standing fashion publications in the UK. In 2015, the self-professed ‘fashion bible’61 had a combined print and digital circulation figure of 200,141 and a total readership of 1,205,000.62 Readers of British Vogue were reportedly 87 per cent female and 13 per cent male,63 with an average age of thirty-four years. The publication has a middle- to upper-middle-class readership64 and can be considered more

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mainstream than Lula and i-D – even if i-D has evolved into something that resembles a glossy magazine, as its website attests.65 Alexandra Shulman was editor-in-chief of British Vogue from 1992 to 2017, and thus the vast majority of images I studied were published under her stewardship. The magazine proved a particularly rich source of images of childlike femininities, with editorials by Tim Walker and Mario Testino regularly constructing women through the codes of Romantic innocence and nostalgia. These sat alongside spreads by photographers such as Terry Richardson, which presented unbridled femininities in the guise of childlike tantrums and ‘polymorphous’ sexuality.66 Alexandra Shulman was succeeded by Edward Enninful as editor-in-chief in 2017, although this shift falls outside the time frame of this book. The second magazine I studied was niche fashion magazine, Lula, Girl of My Dreams.67 Founded in 2005 by Canadian stylist Leith Clark,68 Lula’s pages are densely populated with childlike femininities. In 2013, the magazine was printed by independent publisher, White and Richardson, with a readership of 480,000 and a competitive online market for back copies. The production team at Lula is primarily female and in 2013 readers of the magazine were reportedly 92 per cent female and just 8 per cent male.69 Childlike femininity is inscribed through the figure of the ‘Lula girl’ or ‘Lula dream girl’, marked out as ideal through editorial features. The aesthetic under Leith Clark’s direction was the most saccharine of the three publications and tended to present women as straightforwardly childlike, often without ironic or parodic gloss.70 For instance, on the ‘Contributors’ page, practitioners are often represented by a photograph of their childhood self, accompanied by a string of childlike questions, such as ‘What’s your favourite colour’ and ‘What did you want to be when you were little?’71 Framing questions in this way interpellates, or at least encourages, contributors to assume the position of a child in articulating a response. However, there are moments when that position is refused, whether through irony or reference to womanhood. One such example consists in designer Luella Bartley’s response to the question, ‘What is the best thing about being a girl?’ (Lula no.15 2012). Bartley responded by saying, ‘Finally becoming a woman. It really terrified the living bejeezers out of me but now I’m almost there I realise it’s really rather good.’ Being in her late thirties at the time of press, Bartley refused to be hailed as a ‘girl’ instead positioning herself as a woman, albeit ‘almost’. One of the factors that led Leith Clark to found Lula was the dissatisfaction she felt with the way women were sexualized in fashion publications. In the following passage from an interview published by Dazed Digital in 2011, the journalist begins by commenting on the aesthetic in Lula magazine:

10

Picturing the Woman-Child Dazed Digital: It’s so girl-crushy. In the real world, it feels like girls are competitive, or that society engenders competition among us. But when you open Lula, everyone’s a girl and everyone likes each other. Leith Clark: I felt that fashion magazines are about women looking at women, but there seems to be this imaginary man in the room. It’s so sexualized. I don’t fully get that. I made a magazine of women looking at women, without that ­competitiveness and that hard edge that we think we need as we get older. I think it should be … trying less hard. Lula is about going back to why we liked fashion in the first place and that really starts when you’re a kid, with Halloween and ballet recitals. I was quite shy as a kid. I went to a strict ballet school and I worked well under that discipline, but when I had to perform and be free, that was hard. Then they gave me a bluebird costume, and I was fearless. I could do it. I learned really young how clothes can make you feel, how you can liberate yourself with them.72

As such, the magazine represents an attempt to sidestep the sexualization associated with the male gaze,73 and it does so through recourse to childhood. On the other hand, images of childlike femininity take on a different guise in i-D magazine. Founded by Terry Jones, the title started out as a photocopied fanzine which was ‘dedicated to the street style of punk-era London in 1980’.74 I-D is a member of the style press that emerged in Britain during that decade.75 The back page of the inaugural issue makes the following statement in typewritten text: ‘i-D is a Fashion/Style Magazine: Style isn’t what but how you wear clothes. Fashion is the way you walk, talk, dance and prance. Through i-D ideas travel fast and free of the mainstream – so join us on the run!’76 In its early years, i-D set itself apart from mainstream magazines, in terms of its market and its content: claiming to represent the ‘“reality” of youth culture in opposition to the glossy, staged fashion editorials seen within high fashion magazines’, as Rachel Lifter notes.77 In terms of fashion photography, i-D pioneered the ‘straight-up’ style of portraiture78 as well as providing, alongside The Face, ‘an extremely important conduit for avant-garde fashion photography’ contributing to the discursive production of ‘Britain as a style leader’.79 For instance, i-D claims to have been ‘the first to scout talents such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Nick Knight, Dylan Jones, Juergen Teller’.80 Teller, in particular, has authored photographs of the woman-child, both through his long-standing collaboration with Marc Jacobs and through his editorial work in i-D, British Vogue and beyond.81

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As such, images of childlike femininity in i-D represent a point of difference from those found in Vogue and Lula. The ‘woman-child’ as articulated in i-D tends not to be constructed through Romantic discourses on nature and innocence, perhaps owing to the magazine’s roots in punk and its ‘[rejection of] the romance and nostalgia which had been stressed in the fashion codes of British hippies’.82 Penny Martin has commented on the way i-D re-imagined notions of Englishness in comparison to more traditional fashion imagery by photographers such as Norman Parkinson, with its emphasis on the pastoral.83 Instead, the images of childlike femininity drawn from i-D tend to be constructed either through the codes of grunge or through Freudian discourses on childhood as a period of ‘polymorphous’ sexuality: ‘before “normality”, child sexuality is an exercise in bad behaviour, an affront to good taste’.84 This rendition of the woman-child sometimes appeared in British Vogue although not, as far as I found, in Lula magazine in the period studied. Social status is relevant here, in that writing in 1998, McRobbie noted that ‘i-D retains a focus on ordinary young, black and working-class, men and women as the source of most fashion ideas’.85 However, when it came to childlike femininities in the 1990s, they still tended to be constructed on white bodies, as was the case with Kinderwhore, for instance. The above discussion points to the British specificity of these publications, as well as many of the references therein (from Alice in Wonderland and the PreRaphaelites to gamine models like Twiggy and the subcultural cachet of punk). Yet, as the research progressed, it became clear that rather than being confined to the three publications I had chosen, photography featuring the ‘womanchild’ was a genre that cut across a wider range of magazines, tending to be promulgated by particular players, whose creative output transcended national boundaries. This included photographers, such as those mentioned above, but also stylists, such as Leith Clark, Lucinda Chambers and Kate Phelan as well as brands like Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs. As such, I found myself pushing the field of discursive enquiry outwards – in terms of the publications from which I drew imagery, as well as the intertextual references these images recalled. This scenario recalls a passage from Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, where he writes: ‘To reveal in all its purity the space in which discursive events are deployed is not to undertake to re-establish it in an isolation that nothing could overcome; it is not to close it upon itself; it is to leave oneself free to describe the interplay of relations within it and outside it.’86 Thus, in my analysis I followed chains of statements as they sprawled beyond the boundaries of the three publications I had initially chosen. This resulted in my making connections to images in the wider European fashion media, such as the French and Italian editions of Vogue

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Picturing the Woman-Child

as well as moving image available online, such as the promotional fashion film for Prada Candy in 2011. The nature of digital culture means that the images I sourced from the aforementioned print magazines were often posted on the World Wide Web, whether officially or unofficially (through Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram or WordPress), making them potentially viewable by a global audience, regardless of the ‘nationality’ of the original print publication. Finally, it is important to note that childlike femininities are not confined to discourses springing from Europe and North America. I would have liked to introduce a comparative element to this project, perhaps comparing Western versions of the woman-child with Japanese ones, such as kawaii and the Lolita subculture in Japan,87 but this was simply not possible within the confines of the project. Having collected imagery from these magazines, I then needed a methodology to help address my research questions. Studies of fashion photography have tended to employ textual analysis or semiotics only: that is the researcher’s interpretation and analysis of the imagery. By contrast, the present project combines textual analysis – by way of discourse analysis – with reception studies in focus groups. Reception studies allowed me to interrogate my own conclusions about the meaning of childlike femininities in the contemporary context, by finding out how different women, residing in the UK, interpreted them at the point of reception. The findings from these studies form a central pillar of this book: participant readings were incredibly rich in detail, bringing different ‘discursive resources’88 to bear on the imagery which sometimes led to new avenues of enquiry. This book therefore adds to existing literature on the reception of still media imagery of women,89 as well as the related scholarship on magazine-reading rituals.90 It is worth noting, at this juncture, that the emphasis in this study is on meaning-making at the point of reception, rather than being concerned with magazine-reading rituals more generally. This is, of course, an analytical distinction only since the two practices are often related in practice. Furthermore, although I focus on what it means to look at fashion images, that is, not to undermine the importance of studying the site of production;91 instead it stems from the need to draw parameters around an ever-expanding project. Reception studies also provided an opportunity to evaluate certain theories on spectatorship, such as the internalized ‘male gaze’, which has helped scholars make sense of the way women look at (moving) images of women. Yet, while in common sense parlance we tend to list aspects of identity such as gender and ethnicity as if they were fully separable, when it comes to lived experience, such axes of identity converge in each individual person. Such identifications are thus

Introduction

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‘invariably imbricated in one another, the vehicle for one another’.92 In light of this, reference to the ‘female gaze’ in the title of this book is admittedly a bit of a misnomer. I use it not to suggest that women look in any biologically determined way, or even to suggest that there is uniformity in the way women consume visual media. Instead, I argue that women look in plural and multiple ways, informed by other aspects of their identity as well as the ‘discursive resources’ or ‘(sub-) cultural capital’ one happens to hold. In light of this, the ‘female gaze’ should not be understood as singular but as plural or multifarious. That theoretical position does not, however, preclude similarly situated women from sharing certain cultural codes, which in turn lead them to interpret femininities in broadly similar ways (which speaks to Janice Radway’s notion of ‘similarly located readers’, albeit vis-à-vis romance novels).93 For instance, women’s engagement with fashion media might be seen as a sort of ‘visual pedagogy’94 or, as Lewis and Rolley put it, a life-long training in ‘assessing and responding to the desirability of other women’.95

The structure of this book The research underpinning this book is interdisciplinary in scope, drawing from the fields of cultural studies, fashion studies, media studies and sociology. The chapters build progressively, upon one another, but they can also be read as stand-alone essays: each one structured around a certain theme or set of related themes. Part One presents a framework for understanding the relationship between fashion photography, gendered spectatorship and the history of childlike femininity. Chapter 2 is devoted to unpicking what we mean by the ‘genre’ of fashion photography and the relationship it has to ideas of ‘truth’. From there, a connection is made between the gender ideals articulated in fashion images and the social subjects who confront them in fashion magazines, drawing on the work of Judith Butler in particular. Chapter 3 builds upon that discussion of gender, by tracing the work of feminist writers who have critiqued childlike feminine ideals from the eighteenth century onwards. In order to understand what is being said when one positions a woman as childlike, one has first to establish the meaning(s) of childhood itself. As such, I also explore the way Romantic childhood crystallized as a normative subject-position in the eighteenth century, contrasting it with other ways of ‘knowing’ childhood, such as Freud’s later writings on sexual drives in children. Finally, Chapter 4 lays down an experimental method for studying fashion photography, which

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Picturing the Woman-Child

combines reception studies with visual analysis. The rationale for this approach is unpacked, drawing on the principle of polysemy and the idea of the active audience. This is complemented with discussion of the ‘female gaze’ and practices of looking. Part Two moves on to analyse different instantiations of the woman-child as she appears in fashion photography from 1990 to 2015. Each chapter is devoted to a different version of childlike femininity. Chapter 5 focuses on the Romantic woman-child and the themes of nostalgia, utopia and melancholia; the femme-enfant-fatale is the focus of Chapter 6, discussed through reference to Surrealism, Alice, curiosity and violent insubordination; Chapter 7 traces citations of Lolita in fashion photography; and Chapter 8 explores the Kinderwhore aesthetic and the way it was re-signified in the context of Meadham Kirchhoff, from catwalk to Slutwalk. Taken as a whole, this book finds its spiritual home in the British tradition of Cultural Studies, which has its roots in the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart.96 Certain themes tend to be associated with research of this kind, such as interdisciplinarity or post-disciplinarity, political interventions into existing disciplines and the introduction of new objects of study into the Academy.97 Given the feminist inflection of this book, cultural studies approaches proved valuable, particularly in terms of Stuart Hall’s suggestion that ‘there is something at stake in cultural studies […] in a way that … is not exactly true of many other … intellectual … practices’.98 In my case, the ‘something at stake’ pertains to the project of feminism as well as the problematization of fashion media and the ideologies of production and consumption that underpin it. For if we accept gender not as consisting in some immutable essence, but instead as constructed through discourse – with fashion photography being posited as the ‘dominant currency’99 of images of women – it follows that unpicking and reorienting those discourses will be key to progressive social change.

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2

Fashion Photography and Gender Rosetta Brookes has argued that fashion photography is ‘the dominant currency of female images’. This chapter locates images of childlike femininity in the broader context of ideologies that underpin the fashion system.1 In particular, I look at the way ‘fashion media discourse’2 stimulates consumption through the value placed on newness, novelty and aesthetic change. I then turn my attention to fashion photography as a genre, defining its parameters for the purposes of this book, as well as unpicking the relationship photographic images hold to the idea of truth or reality. I conclude the discussion by theorizing the link between fashion photography and the way women become gendered in the social world, drawing principally from the work of Judith Butler.

Capitalism’s favourite child Writing in 1902, the German sociologist Werner Sombart described fashion as ‘the favourite child of capitalism’.3 The symbiotic relationship between fashion and capitalism can be explained by the industry’s logic of ‘planned obsolescence’, which renders garments and accessories obsolete not when functionally useless, falling apart, but when considered aesthetically passé.4 The result is a system in which the new is valued in and of itself. Roland Barthes terms this phenomenon neomania, tracing it back to the advent of capitalism.5 The rhetoric of fashion works to ‘[discredit] the terms of past Fashion, making those of current Fashion euphoric, it plays on synonyms, pretending to take them for different meanings […] it causes the present to be perceived in the form of a new absolute’.6 Reverence for the new is thus built into the definition of fashion itself, which Elizabeth Wilson defines as ‘dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles’.7 Neomania, or the drive towards making things ‘new’, leaves the fashion industry massively invested in practices of symbolic production. Unlike

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material production, which concerns the production of the article of clothing itself – textile production, pattern cutting, stitching and embellishment – symbolic production is about the meanings and values attached to clothing by cultural intermediaries.8 The fashion media thus serves as an important conduit through which new trends are communicated. In order to theorize the ideas and values articulated therein, as well as demonstrate the power vested in fashion institutions and fashion professionals, Rocamora employs the term ‘fashion media discourse’.9 The term ‘discourse’ here derives from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who describes it as the site where power and knowledge unite.10 Discourse as a concept is incredibly expansive, consisting of statements, which might be verbal, written, pictorial, filmic and so on, and which arise in both print and digital contexts.11 Fashion media discourse thus refers to statements ‘articulated in a set of different magazines, but also in the form of fashion features, fashion spreads, newspaper fashion reports or fashion advertisements’.12 Given that the very concept of fashion is founded on the designation of certain clothing and accessories as new or relevant, one might argue that symbolic production takes precedence over fashion objects in their materiality. A clear example consists in the way colourful basics, which might be materially quite similar, come to mean different things depending on a brand’s communication strategy. In the early 2000s, American Apparel T-shirts came to connote overt, even parodic, sexuality13 whilst those of The United Colours of Benetton signified social diversity, harmony and multiculturalism.14 In this way, fashion images and words become the lens through which clothing, in its materiality, is transmuted into endless semiotic permutations. Or, as McRobbie puts it, ‘The fashion media […] adds its own gloss, its own frame of meaning to the fashion items which serve as its raw material.’15 This process involves a range of cultural intermediaries – photographers, stylists, editors, art directors – who imbue forms, colours, prints and textures with symbolic value, rendering them ‘relevant’ and differentiating them from past fashions. The centrality of symbolic production to the fashion industry places the fashion press at the heart of the system.

The genre of fashion photography Fashion photography can be understood as one element within fashion media discourse. Art historian Martin Harrison dates the advent of commercial

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fashion photography to around 1890.16 Jennifer Craik offers a more expansive definition of the genre, extending it to also include social portraiture, and as such dates its appearance back to 1856.17 The fashion photograph found its forerunner in the fashion plate or fashion illustration, which had become a central feature of women’s periodicals by the 1790s.18 Early fashion photography was concerned with showcasing fashionable silhouettes, fabrics and the detail of garments. Harrison suggests that such ‘pioneer efforts’19 provided little more than ‘a literal description of the garment’:20 an approach that Carmel Snow, former editor of Harper’s Bazaar,21 characterized as showing ‘the buttons and bows’.22 When it comes to contemporary fashion photography, Alison Bancroft has suggested that garments play a less central role, particularly when it comes to the more experimental end of photographic practice. This leads her to conclude that ‘there is a paradox at the heart of fashion photography, in that it is not generally concerned with representing clothes’.23 Instead, lifestyle, narrative and identity seem to have supplanted clothing as the principal concern of such imagery.24 Defining what constitutes the ‘genre’ of fashion photography is no straightforward endeavour. Margaret Maynard notes the tendency to ‘speak categorically of the “genre” of fashion photography as having its own coherent histories, practices and expectations’.25 Her observation rings true in terms of Barthes’ writing in The Fashion System (1967), where he differentiated fashion photography from other forms of photographic practice. For Barthes, ‘The Fashion Photograph is not just any photograph, it bears little relation to the news photograph or to the snapshot, for example; it has its own units and rules; within photographic communication, it forms a specific language which no doubt has its own lexicon and syntax, its own banned or approved “turns of phrase.”’26 While this might have held true in the context of 1960s France, fashion photography in the twenty-first century is a far more fragmented affair, comprising a diverse range of aesthetic styles and practices. This led Eugénie Shinkle in 2008 to suggest there was ‘no single and easily described genre’ of fashion photography.27 This can be supported with reference to the work of Foucault, who suggests that any categorization – such as that entailed by ‘genre’ – will inevitably involve drawing boundaries and divisions around a phenomenon. Rather than viewing such categories as common sense or universal, they should ‘always themselves [be considered as] reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, institutionalized types: they, in turn, are facts of discourse that deserve to be analysed besides others’.28 From this, the ‘genre’ of fashion photography should not be viewed as a self-evident category but instead as a ‘rhetorical practice’, as Maynard suggests.29

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Christopher Breward observes that the ‘standard literature on fashion photography’ tends to be organized ‘through the art-historical prism of authorship and style’.30 Such canonized images are typically credited to the singular figure of the fashion photographer (and sometimes also the stylist). By contrast, Shinkle’s definition in the edited volume Fashion as Photograph departs from this approach. She writes: Fashion photography comprises a wide array of practices (editorial and advertising, beauty, portraiture and documentary photography, to name a few) and involves a range of skilled creatives and businesspeople (stylists, photographers, models, advertisers, artists, designers, hairstylists, creative and artistic directors, makeup artists, set builders and so on), brought together by shared goals and contexts.31

This resonates with Val Williams’ vision of fashion photography as ‘the joint product of imaginations’.32 The fact that there are many individuals involved in the creation of a photo spread or advert demonstrates the limits of an auteurial approach.33 For instance, stylists and fashion editors can develop their own aesthetic, as evidenced in the work of Leith Clark whose vision of ethereal femininity permeates the early years of Lula magazine.34 Yet her aesthetic overflows the boundaries of that publication, in light of her freelance work for other titles, such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Elle, and brands, such as Miu Miu, Chanel, Nina Ricci and Orla Kiely, not to mention her work as personal stylist to celebrities like Keira Knightley, Alexa Chung and Alison Sudol.35 Furthermore, aesthetic approaches can be developed through longstanding collaborative practice, such as that between Juergen Teller and Marc Jacobs vis-à-vis advertising campaigns. On the other hand, players working on the same shoot might have competing agendas, motives and investments in the production of any given image. For example, Harrison talks about the fashion photographer’s ‘hidden agenda’ in the face of requirements from those who commission an image.36 This presents a challenge to auteur theory: for if fashion photographs are the ‘joint product of imaginations’, it becomes difficult to locate a ‘preferred’ meaning,37 particularly if the makers of an image have conflicting visions. Whilst there might not be one uniform ‘genre’ of fashion photography there are nevertheless certain traits and qualities that cut across fashion images. One trait common to nearly all fashion photographs is ‘their simultaneous placement within the artistic and commercial realms’.38 The hybrid nature of the fashion photograph makes it near impossible to draw a strict dividing line between

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fashion photographs that are purely commercial and those that are purely artistic. Even more avant-garde fashion photography tends to be ‘commissioned and is measured by the commercial success of the product it depicts’, as Ulrich Lehmann notes.39 Furthermore, experimental fashion photography contributes to the symbolic production of fashion as a cultural practice – a process Pierre Bourdieu describes as ‘the production of the value of the work or […] belief in the value of the work’.40 This, in turn, legitimizes the continued existence of fashion as industry and practice. For the purposes of this book, I consider both fashion editorials and fashion advertisements to fall under the umbrella term of fashion photography. In combining experimental fashion photography with more commercial imagery, the project seeks to set aside value judgements about different types of photography – even if such distinctions are observed in industry parlance – and focus more on how both types of image – the seemingly noble and the seemingly banal – collectively articulate ‘truths’ about femininity. I thus consider fashion photography from a cultural studies point of view: linking images to their social context, understanding the way they function vis-à-vis both capitalism and creativity, and theorizing their role in both the fashion industry and the identity formation of those who encounter them.41 That is not to say that authorial intention is not important but rather that an auteurial approach has certain limitations and that the research questions this books seeks to address call for a privileging of the image at the site of reception in an attempt to understand the way women respond to images of the woman-child. It is worth also bearing in mind that the capacity for individuals to represent themselves on digital media platforms has shifted the politics and practices of fashion photography, as media scholars have observed.42 And fashion film has become more prevalent and readily available, marked in particular by the founding of SHOWstudio in the year 2000.43 While these forms of fashion imagery are not the primary focus of this book, reference is occasionally made to them, given the ‘convergence’ between print and online media.44

Photography and truth Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) portrays the life and experiences of nineteen-year-old Esther: a college student who has won a paid internship at a women’s magazine in 1950s New York. In the following passage we are given a glimpse of Esther’s thoughts about her work: ‘Fashion blurbs, silver and full of

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nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles in my brain. They surfaced with a hollow pop.’45 This emptiness might reflect Esther’s mental state as she slides into a major episode of depression. It also speaks to the popular perception of fashion as something shiny and without substance – a vacuous pursuit. Yet, Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton have argued that it is precisely its perceived frivolity which gives fashion photography licence to explore taboo ideas: Fashion takes its revenge against its trivialization: it gets away with murder. Extraordinary liberties are taken precisely because it is ‘only’ fashion. […] Here the outrageous, or the transgressive, particularly in relation to female sexuality, find covert expression. The cover provided by fashion’s trivialization marks it out as a cultural space in which ‘femininity’ is both made and unmade.46

The way fashion has historically been ‘feminized’ and thus trivialized has been a contributing factor when it comes to the slow or delayed entrance of fashion as an object of study in the Academy, as numerous scholars have observed.47 Yet any form of cultural production holds significance in that it springs from a particular socio-cultural context, where certain values and power relations are at play. In this regard, I agree with Harrison who states: ‘Any more than painting, architecture, or dress, fashion photography does not exist in a political vacuum.’48 In order to capture these dimensions, fashion photographs can be conceptualized as representations, which play a constitutive role in identity formation, value systems and perspectives on the world.49 The term ‘representation’ has a long tradition in cultural criticism. The art historian W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that it activates ‘a set of linkages between political, semiotic/ aesthetic, and even economic notions of “standing or acting for”’.50 So while images might refer to objects in the material world, and have some relationship or resemblance to them, they are not carbon copies of that world. Certain visual elements have accumulated strong connotations because of repetition and/or institutional codification, such as white clothing as a symbol of ‘innocence’. If an idea is repeated often enough in discourse – roses mean love – it solidifies and starts to feel like common sense. And as Catherine Belsey points out, common sense is perhaps ideology at its most potent because it appears natural, pre-given and beyond question.51 This constructive theory of meaning is quite different from a reflective theory of meaning, which supposes language – broadly construed to include images – to act like a mirror onto the world.52 Stuart Hall stresses that ‘representation is a very different notion from that of reflection. It implies the active work of selecting, and presenting, of structuring and shaping: not merely the transmitting of already existing meaning, but the more active

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labour of making things mean.’53 Producers make choices at every stage of an image’s production, from shooting, styling and framing a photograph, to postproduction cropping, airbrushing, and the addition of text to ‘anchor’ the meaning of an image.54 If we accept that the world becomes meaningful only through discourse, itself composed of representations, or ‘statements’, then the power vested in images becomes clear. The medium of photography can be considered a subcategory of visual representation, and as such has its own peculiarities. Richard Dyer notes the etymology of the word ‘photography’, which literally translates as ‘light (photo) drawing (graphy)’.55 There exists a popular perception that photography is somehow more truthful than other forms of visual representation, such as illustration or painting. Writing in 1977, Susan Sontag argued that ‘the images that have virtually unlimited authority in a modern society are mainly photographic images’.56 This can be explained, in part, by belief in the camera as an objective recording device (as per the dictum that ‘the camera never lies’). To unpack this further, it is worth looking to Barthes’ meditation on the curious ontology of the photographic image.57 Camera Lucida is a poignant text in which Barthes reflects on photographs of his mother after her death. In the course of his meditation, Barthes argues that photographs, unlike other images, evoke the absence of the object whilst also offering proof that it once existed: Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand ‘it is not there’, on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality.58

Poetic though this passage is, art historian John Tagg has disputed the idea of photographs as ‘chafed by reality’, or as proof of the past existence of a thing. Instead, Tagg contends that the photograph is no less socially constructed than any other image.59 Photographic meaning, he argues, is produced as the result of ‘chance effects, purposeful interventions, choices and variations’.60 The photograph ‘is not the inflection of a prior (though irretrievable) reality, as Barthes would have us believe, but the production of a new and specific reality’.61 Tagg therefore contests Barthes’ idea of the photograph as indexical whereby it ‘always carries its referent with itself ’.62

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When it comes to fashion photography, Craik describes how the shift from fashion illustration to fashion photography in the nineteenth century also involved a shift in the status of the image itself: ‘Illustration was associated with art schools and decorative styles while photography was classified as an “objective” technique for recording objects and events.’63 This led designers to see fashion photography as a medium through which the details of the garment could be portrayed ‘“accurately”, without the distortion of artistic style’.64 Early fashion photography was therefore viewed as ‘little more than a literal description of the garment, which was invariably displayed on a static mannequin-like figure’.65 Of course, such photographs, however ‘static’, nevertheless remain representations that privilege a particular point of view. Susan Kismaric and Eva Respini note that while the work of photographers like Irving Penn might appear neutral, the images nevertheless display ‘idealized members of an upper social class, whose chief characteristics are good breeding and refinement. In these pictures the power of privilege is understood as absolute, as are the crisp and elegant standards of beauty that are integrated with it.’66 Furthermore, being a technology of light, photography tends to privilege white faces in that ‘light shows through white subjects more than through black’.67 Yet despite this fact, the ‘white-centricity’ of the medium is ‘rarely recognized’, as Dyer observes.68 This stands testament to Tagg’s remark that ‘like the state, the camera is never neutral’.69 Digital photography has brought with it a range of new techniques of manipulation but that does not mean analogue photographs are any more ‘authentic’ than digital ones. For, as Paul Jobling notes, ‘where the traditional photomontagist relied literally on cutting and pasting together fragments of analog photographs with glue and scissors […] now the digital photographer cuts and pastes electronically’.70 The ability to manipulate even analogue photographs is evident in the case of the Cottingley fairies in Bradford, England. One afternoon in 1917 two cousins, ten-year-old Frances Griffiths and seventeen-year-old Elsie Wright, borrowed a camera from Elsie’s father and went to take some photographs at the bottom of the garden. Upon their return, the girls claimed to have seen fairies dancing and to have captured the spectacle on film (Figure 1). The photographs were declared authentic by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, in a 1920 edition of Strand magazine and many were taken in by the images (further images were taken in August 1920, including Figure 2).71 It later transpired that the photographs were a hoax; the fairies were in fact paper cut outs, which the girls had mounted on twigs using hatpins. A century later, photography retains its status as somehow more ‘truthful’ than other visual media, despite public awareness of Photoshop, Instagram

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Figure 1  Elsie Wright, Alice and the Fairies, July 1917. © SSPL/Getty Images.

filters and other techniques of manipulation. This perception is key to making sense of the ‘moral panics’72 that fashion photography has engendered at various moments in time. One such case in point is Corinne Day’s photo spread, ‘Under Exposure’, styled by Cathy Kasterine, which appeared in British Vogue in June 1993. The editorial featured a very young, thin Kate Moss, pictured in her

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Figure 2  Elsie Wright, Alice and Leaping Fairy, August 1920. © SSPL/Getty Images.

underwear in a seemingly cold and empty flat.73 The images proved controversial and were linked to the phenomenon of so-called heroin chic. Yet, Jobling argues that journalists critiquing the spread tended to confuse and/or conflate Day’s grunge-style representation of Kate Moss modelling underwear with the reality of drug abuse and under-age sex themselves. Consequently, they rehearse one of the commonest misconceptions concerning the ontological status of photography, by implying that it is one and the same thing as reality, a spontaneous trace of what exists.74

‘Under Exposure’ was part of a wider aesthetic of ‘documentary realism’ in the 1990s, which might have appeared grittier and even more ‘truthful’ when compared to the glamour of fashion photography in the 1980s.75 Yet such images should be considered not as closer to the truth but simply a different version of the ‘truth’, in a Foucauldian sense. More recently the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK has banned a number of images featuring childlike femininities. In 2015, a member of the public lodged a complaint about an image of actor Mia Goth shot by Steven Meisel for Miu Miu’s Spring/Summer 2015 campaign. The ASA upheld the complaint, noting that

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the model had a youthful appearance, was wearing very minimal make up and clothes that appeared to be slightly too large. We considered those elements contributed to the impression that she was younger than 16 years of age. She was posed reclining on a bed, looking up directly to the camera through a partially opened door, which gave her an air of vulnerability and the image a voyeuristic feel. We considered that the crumpled sheets and her partially opened mouth also enhanced the impression that her pose was sexually suggestive. We considered that her youthful appearance, in conjunction with the setting and pose, could give the impression that the ad presented a child in a sexualised way.76

The ASA concluded that the advert, which had appeared in British Vogue, was ‘irresponsible’ and ‘likely to cause serious offence’ and prohibited it from reappearing in its current form. A similar rationale was offered for the prohibition of an image of Dakota Fanning for Marc Jacobs’ Oh, Lola! in 2011.77 I chose this latter image as part of a set to show to participants in focus groups to see how they made sense of childlike femininities. What emerged was that participant readings did not always converge with the reading proffered by the ASA, as will become clear in Chapter 7. This brings to light the way different communities of readers respond to fashion photography in different ways, as well as the way the ASA attempts to police advertising discourse in a way that both observes and defines social mores, themselves culturally and historically specific. When it comes to the complaint about the Mia Goth image, the ASA explained that ‘Vogue UK said the magazine was sophisticated and their readers were educated to appreciate top photography and great fashion models. They did not believe their readers would think that the ad made any suggestion that the model was a child. They said they had not received any complaints from readers directly.’78 This hints at the idea of Vogue readers as well versed in the codes of fashion photography, making them less likely to be shocked or offended by images that push the boundaries of acceptability. That said, this is arguably a question of degree since British Vogue can nevertheless be considered a fairly mainstream, glossy publication when compared with more niche, experimental magazines.79

From fashion images to female selves As the previous section attests, fashion photography plays a key role in articulating gender ideals, in this case pertaining to femininity, beauty, age and desirability. Such statements expand not only across fashion media discourse

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in the present but also temporally, as Caroline Evans observes. She describes fashion images as ‘bearers of meaning’ that stretch simultaneously back into the past and forward into the future. Not just documents or records but fertile primary sources, they can generate new ideas and meanings and themselves carry discourse into the future, so that they take their place in a chain of meaning, or a relay of signifiers.80

It is by virtue of such chains of meaning that childlike femininity has crystallized as an idealized subject-position in the fashion media. Yet, this ideal is not confined to the field of fashion, with similar statements also appearing in film, literature and beyond, as demonstrated throughout this book. Yet, that is not to say there is any single, logically consistent discourse on femininity; instead, discourses compete with one another for dominance.81 Indeed, this played out in the context of British Vogue in the first decade of the 2000s. Images of women steeped in innocence, curiosity and wonder, by photographers such as Mario Testino and Tim Walker appeared alongside more sexualized visions of femininity, such as those found in American Apparel advertising campaigns or Terry Richardson editorials. The fragmented, non-linear format of women’s magazines is well suited to supporting this ‘schizophrenic mix’ of femininity, to borrow a term from Janice Winship.82 This format encourages women ‘to consume each element of the magazine as a separate entity’ as Ballaster et al. point out, thereby detracting from the inconsistent messages housed within the same publication.83 The idea of contradictory statements within the same publication resonates with Foucault’s suggestion that ‘we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies’.84 This applies to the woman-child in fashion photography, who appears in subtly different ways on account of her emergence from divergent discourses on femininity, girlhood and childhood. Yet, from this plurality there nevertheless emerge certain patterns and these appear as chapter headings in Part Two, under which I subsume the different permutations of childlike femininity. As evidenced above, Foucault’s framework is incredibly versatile and goes a long way towards theorizing the relationship between discourse and subjectivity.85 Yet in spite of his sustained exploration of sexuality and the self, Foucault’s writing fails to recognize gender as an axis of power at work within discourse. Instead it has fallen to subsequent theorists to deploy his work in this way.86 This

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omission from Foucault’s oeuvre is significant if one accepts gender as key to the social intelligibility of the human subject: ‘As a major social status (if not the major social status), gender shapes the individual’s opportunities for education, work, family, sexuality, reproduction, authority, and the chance to make an impact on the production of culture and knowledge.’87 Despite this shortcoming vis-à-vis gender, Foucault’s framework has nevertheless proved fruitful for the project of feminism. Foucault recognized power to reside in ‘the smallest details of everyday life’,88 which speaks to the feminist maxim, ‘the personal is political’. One scholar who presents a comprehensive reformulation of Foucault’s oeuvre, taking the politics of gender into account, is American philosopher Judith Butler. Her writing provides a lens through which to consider the way fashion images speak to the social subjects who view them, as well as foregrounding the idea of identity as intersectional. Butler introduces her concept of ‘discursive performativity’ in order to link gender norms in discourse to the sexing and gendering of subjects in the social world. Gender, by this tack, is not a noun but a verb; it consists in doing rather than being.89 In this sense, Butler builds upon Simone de Beauvoir’s earlier assertion that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’.90 The term ‘performativity’ has its origins in speech act theory, where ‘a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names’. Butler cites a biblical example of the performative, whereby God commands, ‘“Let there be light” – and light appeared.’91 In this scenario, light appears as a consequence of its being named; naming light produces light. Or as Butler puts it, ‘It is by virtue of the power of a subject or its will that a phenomenon is named into being.’92 She argues, ‘Discursive performativity appears to produce that which it names, to enact its own referent, to name and to do, to name and to make.’93 Fashion images are relevant to gender performativity because they are a form of visual discourse and performativity is about ‘the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’.94 This idea of ‘naming into being’ can help make sense of the process by which people become sexed and gendered in the social world. From the moment a doctor or nurse pronounces the sex of a baby, the infant ‘shifts […] from an “it” to a “she” or a “he” and in that naming, the girl is “girled,” brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender’.95 Yet, crucially, ‘that “girling” of the girl does not end there’.96 Instead this ‘founding interpellation’ is repeated again and again by family and friends, public institutions, strangers and colleagues throughout the course of one’s life. The very fact that in English we almost always use gendered pronouns to refer to

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individuals, on the basis of their perceived sex, points to the extent to which gendered discourse categorizes and divides social subjects. The centrality of sex and gender to the intelligibility of the human subject is demonstrated in those instances where one is unsure whether another person is, or identifies as, a man or a woman. English language requires that one ‘work it out’ in order to proceed, to use the correct singular gender pronoun (unless one adopts the still unorthodox, gender-neutral ‘they’).97 Recognition, in this sense, becomes a form of social validation that facilitates inclusion – or exclusion – from intelligibly ‘human’ subject-positions. According to Butler, a person will be culturally intelligible to the extent that they maintain coherence along the lines of sex and gender, sexual practice and desire.98 One’s sex, gender and sexuality are subject-positions constructed through binary oppositions, which necessarily entail processes of exclusion. The male/female binary intersects with a further range of reductive oppositions – such as active/passive, rationality/emotion, culture/nature – with the ‘male’ qualities usually held in higher regard.99 The ‘heterosexual matrix’ determines the subjectivities that will count as intelligible and those that will not.100 The heterosexual matrix demands that a person whose sex is female should be ‘feminine’ and, in turn, her object of desire should be asymmetrical: a man. This identity will pass as normative under social and psychic conditions as they currently exist in the West. In certain contexts, failure to assume a coherent sexed subject-position brings with it the threat of rejection, ostracism and, in some cases, death. Yet, even if one fits the logic of the heterosexual matrix (e.g. a woman who is normatively feminine, who is also attracted to men), one can never fully and completely inhabit the gendered subject-positions offered up in discourse; there is always a gap between gender as pictured and gender as experienced. This is made markedly clear when models such as Cameron Russell comment on how images of themselves in the fashion media do not correlate with how they experience, or view, their bodies in everyday life. Speaking at a TED event in October 2012, Russell stated: These pictures are not pictures of me; they are constructions. And they are constructions by professionals: by hairstylists and make-up artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants. And pre-production and post-production. And they build this. That’s not me.101

If the actual subject of a fashion photograph cannot keep up with her represented self – or feels alienated from, or by, it – what hope is there for the

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reader to approximate that ideal? The cost of such punishing ideals is rendered visible in images of the Romantic woman-child, who, despite fitting normative visions of femininity, is nevertheless melancholic: seemingly lost from home – and from herself.102 The repetitive reiteration of feminine ideals such as the ‘woman-child’ works to delimit the field of available images through which women are able to ‘think themselves’ into being. Although images constitute one site at which norms of femininity are reiterated, they nevertheless ‘offer possibilities for refiguring’, for repeating but repeating differently.103 If we follow Butler and accept gender as the sedimented effect of performative repetitions, resistance to gender norms can be effected through ‘variation on that repetition’.104 Variation in repetition is in fact the only route to subversion, given Butler’s commitment to a Foucauldian understanding of power, which can be ‘neither withdrawn nor refused, but only redeployed’.105 In this sense, ‘full-scale transcendence’ of gender structures is not a viable option; it is an ‘impossible fantasy’.106 Strategies of resistance will therefore involve ‘[affirming] the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them’.107 Disruptive performances are arguably those that ‘reveal this ostensible “cause” [the imagined interior essence] to be an “effect”’.108 It is therefore the very workings of discourse and power that provide the means of resisting gender norms. Or as Sylvia Pritsch puts it: ‘Given that no outside to gender representation exists, images must be used as a starting point from which to speak.’109 This resonates with the practice of critiquing representations of women: an important strategy borne out of Second Wave feminism.

Conclusion This chapter has theorized fashion as a phenomenon that is intimately connected to consumer capitalism and founded on an agenda of aesthetic change and planned obsolescence. Images are the lifeblood of the fashion industry, playing a central role in communicating the relevance of new fashion forms and legitimating the existence of the industry itself. Although fashion photography is sometimes dismissed as fleeting and frivolous, taken collectively these images carve out ‘truths’ that define and delimit what it means to be an ideal man or woman at a particular moment in time. The act of looking at such imagery is one way in which the ‘outside’ (discourse) gets inside. As such, looking at fashion

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photography is key to the ongoing negotiation between cultural discourse and the gendered self. Butler’s work on the heterosexual matrix helps us recognize how the male/female binary works to limit the range of behaviours, appearances and personality attributes that can be legitimately adopted by both men and women. Crucially, the male/female binary intersects with the adult/child binary, thus discursively producing woman-as-child and man-as-adult, as will become clear in the following chapter.

3

Childlike Femininity: A History of Feminist Critique The previous chapter established a link between looking, knowing and becoming a gendered subject, by virtue of discursive performativity. This chapter looks back in time, in order to trace the prominence of childlike femininity as a normative subject-position from the eighteenth century onwards. As previously noted, aligning women with children has historically positioned women as inferior to men and served to justify their differential treatment. Contemporary images of childlike femininity might partially overwrite these disempowering connotations but it is not possible to overthrow them completely. This sentiment is captured in the following quote from Stuart Hall: Since, in order to say something meaningful, we have to ‘enter language’, where all sorts of older meanings which pre-date us, are already stored from previous eras, we can never cleanse language completely, screening out all the other, hidden meanings which might modify or distort what we want to say.1

This recalls Foucault’s notion that the imprecision and insufficiency of language haunt the (late) modern subject, who is compelled to ‘[lodge] his thought in the folds of a language so much older than himself that he cannot master its significations, even though they have been called back to life by the insistence of his words’.2 The words he uses are not his own; the words she uses are not her own. In light of this, an awareness of the historical connotations of childlike femininity is key to understanding its meanings in the present. Yet, as Foucault argues, ‘where there is power there is resistance’3 and where there is discourse there is ‘reverse discourse’.4 As such, the history of the womanchild as a feminine ideal is accompanied by a history of feminist thinkers who have critiqued such infantilizing norms. This chapter looks back at some of those writers, focusing in particular on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Susan Faludi. Their writings are not without their

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critics –pertaining to both internal inconsistencies and intersectional omissions. But what they nevertheless highlight are the ways women have been infantilized historically and why this has been deemed problematic from a feminist point of view. Understanding what it means to position a woman as childlike first requires an understanding of the concept of childhood itself. While the project of feminism has done much to denaturalize gender mythologies in the West, the concept of childhood remains somewhat less obviously constructed. Yet, as with femininity or masculinity, the notion of childhood is not singular and universal, natural and pre-given, but discursively elaborated in multiple and contradictory ways. In this chapter I review different myths about childhood, that is, the different ways children, as a social group, have been constructed as objects in and of discourse. In so doing I highlight the gendered nature of childhood for, as Patricia Holland notes, ‘the image of childhood is not one but two – always crossed by the firm categorisations of male and female’.5 The longstanding myths that inform femininity in the West overlap and intersect with those on childhood and girlhood to produce the figure of the ‘woman-child’, as she appears in fashion photography and visual culture more generally.

Childhood as a social construct In 1960 Philippe Ariès published Centuries of Childhood: a text widely credited for pioneering the idea of childhood as ‘invention’ or socially constructed category.6 Ariès was a French historian and his writings were concerned with French culture and society. Yet, as sociologist Chris Jenks notes, ‘It is conventionally supposed that his thesis is generalizable […] [to] the rest of the modern Western world.’7 A distinction should be drawn, at this juncture, between biological children and the discursively constructed concept of childhood. Children have always existed. By contrast, it is the concept of childhood, as a distinct period of development, which Ariès suggests was invisible in medieval society and which gradually came to be discovered in the centuries that followed. There exist alternative accounts to Ariès’, most notably that of Linda A. Pollock,8 but, as Jenks argues, ‘critiques of Ariès rarely succeed in achieving more than a modification of his central ideas’.9 The ‘invisibility’ of childhood in the Middle Ages meant there was infancy, which lasted until the age of five to seven, and then there was adulthood.10

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In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist; this is not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken or despised. The idea of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children: it corresponds to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood, that particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young adult. In medieval society this awareness was lacking. That is why, as soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny or his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society.11

This is the idea of ‘short’ childhood. According to Ariès, it is partly for this reason that we consider medieval society to be puerile in nature: adult society was made up, in part, of those we now consider to be children.12 This idea of the ‘short’ childhood can be contrasted with childhood in contemporary societies where the ‘civilizing process’ and compulsory education have increased the distance between the behaviour expected of children and that of adults.13 Yet this ‘long’ conception of childhood, and the incumbence upon adults to safeguard it, has not been rolled out universally. For instance, Ariès notes there was something of a ‘retrogression during the first half of the nineteenth century, on account of the demand for child labour in the textile industry’.14 This persists today, only the transnational nature of production and the practice of outsourcing, means the use of child labour is less visible in the West. ‘In poor countries around the world, children as young as five are expected to labour at tasks that make real contributions to their families’ lives. In the developed world, work is the province of adults, indeed the paradigmatic activity of adulthood’, as Neiman notes.15 In the late 1990s, a school of thought emerged, called the new sociology of childhood.16 Allison James and Alan Prout characterize the new paradigm as ‘an emerging and not yet completed approach to the study of childhood’.17 The shift was led by European scholars18 and influenced by voices outside the academy such as the feminist movement and the children’s rights movement in the twentieth century.19 Its emergence can be understood as a response to the perceived inadequacies of developmental psychology and socialization theory.20 The new paradigm emphasizes the role of discourse in the social construction of childhood, and thus resonates with the approach taken in this book. For instance, writing in 1996, Jenks described the objective of his study on childhood as follows: ‘I attempt […] to realize the child as constituted socially, as a status of person which is comprised through a series of, often heterogeneous, images, representations, codes and constructs. This is an increasingly popular perspective within contemporary childhood studies.’21

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Jenks’ critique focused on Jean Piaget and Talcott Parsons as the leading figures in developmental psychology and socialization theory, respectively. He challenged their emphasis on the ‘taken-for-granted adult world’, suggesting they ‘spectacularly fail to constitute the child as an ontology in its own right’.22 For Jenks, socialization theory is premised on children’s intrinsic difference and particularity from adults yet this premise is unsupported by evidence and calls for a reinvention of the conception of the child in a positive, rather than a negative, sense: negative as in defined as that which is not adult.23 The new sociology charged these earlier approaches with treating childhood a mere ‘stage’ on the way to becoming a ‘full’ human actor.24 It therefore rejects the binarism of socialization theory which posits mature, rational, competent adult on the one hand and less than fully developed child on the other.25 The aim, as Jens Qvortrup puts it, is to recognize children as ‘human beings’ rather than ‘human becomings’.26 The dehumanizing aspect of earlier approaches to childhood is significant when it comes to making sense of images of the woman-child. Feminists have long critiqued childlike ideals of femininity for their dehumanizing implications. This common treatment of women and children stems from what Ann Oakley has termed their ‘shared minority group status’: In the first place, children and women are both members of social minority groups. Membership of a social minority group results from the physical or cultural characteristics of individuals being used to single them out and to justify their receiving different and unequal treatment – in other words, collective discrimination […] Women and children are so constituted within a culture dominated by masculine power – in other words, patriarchy.27

Key to maintaining this minority group status is the belief that women are less than ‘fully’ adult in their competencies and behaviours and children are less than ‘full’ human actors. That said, both gender and age are cut across with other axes of inequality, meaning some women and childhood will hold more power than others, as evidenced by the exclusionary ideal of Romantic childhood.

Romantic childhood Romantic childhood can be understood as shorthand for a particular way of representing girl and boy children, crystallizing in art and literature from the eighteenth century onwards.28 In the eighteenth century, and in a literary sense,

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the Romantic child tends to be associated with Genevan philosopher JeanJacques Rousseau and his work Émile (1762).29 A central tenet of Rousseau’s thought, for which he is often cited, is that the attributes of childhood should be valued in their own right, for ‘childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling [and] nothing is more foolish than to try and substitute our [adult] ways [for them]’.30 There had been a series of shifts in the iconography of childhood up until that point, with Ariès noting the emergence of a ‘coddling attitude’ from the fourteenth century onwards, which granted ‘poetic familiar significance’ to the ‘special nature’ of children.31 Then in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the child began to wear ‘special costume’ in portraiture, thus distinguishing her or him from adult sitters.32 This led Ariès to conclude that ‘a new concept of childhood had appeared, in which the child, on account of his sweetness, simplicity and drollery, became a source of amusement and relaxation for the adult’.33 There were, of course, competing discourses along the way, with some churchmen ‘unwilling to regard children as charming toys’ instead seeing them as ‘fragile creatures of God who needed to be both safeguarded and reformed’,34 with both perspectives finding their way into middle-class circles during the seventeenth century. Romantic childhood in the eighteenth century brought newfound particularities in the dress, behaviour and sensibility of children.35 While earlier paintings represented children as mini-adults in order to evidence lineage, power and transfer of property (see Figure 3), images of the Romantic child did not reference the story of adult life. Instead they offered an Edenic vessel through which adult life could be forgotten.36 The special nature of childhood is emphasized by Rousseau when commenting on the ideal education of hypothetical boy-child, Émile: ‘The child must come first, and you must devote yourself entirely to him.’37 Yet, Rousseau was arguably committed to this position only in the abstract given that ‘all five infants born to Rousseau’s lifelong companion, the illiterate washerwoman Thérèse’, were sent to French orphanages.38 There were  mitigating circumstances – in terms of Rousseau’s intermittent income and his need to move around on account of disagreements or political persecution – but as Neiman questions: ‘Given that 80 per cent of infants left in French orphanages were liable to die there, wouldn’t an inferior upbringing have been a better choice?’39 In spite of this chasm between theory and practice, Rousseau’s treatise continues to inform conceptions of childhood in the West, for ‘in 1992 the Scottish educator John Darling wrote that the history of child-centred educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau’.40

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Figure 3  Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las Meninas, c. 1656.

In his treatise, Rousseau mythologized children as closer to the state of nature, setting up a binary opposition between the ‘pure’ child and the ‘spoiled’ adult: the latter being corrupted by rationality, society and processes of industrialization. This divide is set up throughout his lengthy exposition on the ideal education of Émile. In his programme of learning, Rousseau insists that Émile be kept in a state of ‘happy innocence’41 for as long as possible; the ‘young man’s desires may be kept in ignorance and his senses pure up to the age of twenty’.42 Émile is best educated through curiosity: ‘Books, what dull food for a child of his age! […] he reads far better in the book of nature’;43 ‘Let the senses

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by the only guide for the first workings of reason. No book but the world, no teaching but that of fact’.44 From this, Rousseau argues that to educate children through reason is to ‘begin at the wrong end, [to] make the end the means’.45 Instead, he posits childhood as ‘the sleep of reason’.46 Rousseau’s mention of ‘happy innocence’ and ‘happy ignorance’ is significant given ‘contemporary historians have argued that the very idea of childhood as happy is a modern one’.47 As such, Daniel T. Cook makes an apposite point when he suggests that the ‘invention’ Ariès brought to light in the 1960s was not the invention of childhood but rather the invention of childhood innocence, as per Rousseau.48 This can be contrasted with more recent psychoanalytic discourses which posit childhood as the site of literally unspeakable trauma.49 Freud’s writings, particularly his essay ‘Infantile Sexuality’, published as part of Three Essays on Sexual Theory (1905),50 compete with conventionally received notions of childhood as ‘pure, asexual, and innocent’.51 Yet despite the influence of Freud’s writings in Britain and America, his views on sexual drives in children have not profoundly altered the prevailing view of children as innocent.52 Discourses on innocence are ‘often put in curiously argumentative form, a form which seems to reach toward absolutes, especially the absolute of “purity”’, as James R. Kincaid has observed.53 While Rousseau revered certain aspects of childhood, such as innocence, proximity to ‘nature’ and curiosity, there are moments in his text where he might be charged with dehumanizing the child – something adherents of the new sociology of childhood are keen to avoid. Rousseau firstly writes: ‘A child has only two distinct feelings, joy and sorrow; he laughs or he cries; he knows no middle course, and he is constantly passing from one extreme to the other’.54 Secondly, he reduces the preadolescent Émile to his person: ‘He is still little more than a body; let us treat him as such.’55 Thirdly, it is the adult who contrives the scenarios within which the ‘curious’ Émile will learn,56 giving the adult enormous influence over the child,57 as visualized in Figure 4. In tandem with Enlightenment thinkers, the number of artworks that focused on children increased enormously during the eighteenth century. James C. Steward argues that the child at this moment differed from previous trends in representation by way of his ‘prominence, his centrality, his emotive quality’.58 The Romantic child’s perceived proximity to nature is encapsulated, and elaborated upon, in The Age of Innocence (c. 1788) by Joshua Reynolds (Figure 5). Anne Higonnet suggests that this painting has become ‘the foundation of what we assume childhood looks like’.59 Childhood innocence is conveyed through the child’s proximity to nature, her pale skin and her light clothing, ‘which wafts in

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Figure 4  Illustration from Émile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1778. Engraved by Noel Le Mire.

pure white drifts’, concealing the erogenous zones most closely associated with adult sexuality.60 Here, ‘the Romantic child makes a good show of having no class, no gender, and no thoughts’.61 Yet, contrary to appearances, the tropes of Romantic childhood are far from neutral in their application. Such ostensible ‘blankness’62 is, in fact, the naturalization of white, middle- to upper-class childhood, articulated as the ‘universal’ ideal. The image of Romantic childhood as blank or neutral thus colludes with a discourse in which ‘whiteness as a racial

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Figure 5  Joshua Reynolds, The Age of Innocence, c. 1788.

position’ is rendered invisible.63 This has political ramifications because ‘as long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples […] they/we function as a human norm’, as Dyer observes.64 While middle-class children were the beneficiaries of a ‘long’, coddling childhood, this was not the case for poorer children. Writing from a North American perspective, Viviana A. Zelizer notes how ‘the economic value of the working-class child increased rather than decreased in the nineteenth century’ in contrast to the ‘economically worthless child’ in middle-class families.65 Images

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of Romantic childhood thus spoke to the experience of privileged children, and where working-class children were represented, this tended to be through the lens of labour rather than innocence.66 These competing attitudes to childhood lead Steward to ask whether ‘innocence simply [did] not apply to impoverished children?’67 This question also applies via-à-vis sexuality, in that both Carol Mavor and Leslie Williams have commented on the sexual exploitation and abuse of Victorian children of the lower classes.68 Williams notes the relative lack of discourse on the sexuality of middle- to upper-class children, concluding that ‘adult males of the comfortable classes imposed/permitted sexuality for those beneath them but not for their class equals’.69 In this way, privileged girlchildren existed in a protective environment where their purity was sacralized: ‘Their erotic innocence was to be hoarded, not spent.’70 The ideal of childhood innocence persists today, carrying with it the same ‘exclusionary rhetoric’ in that innocence ‘generally does not extend its privileges to all children’.71 In the context of this book, the important point becomes the ways in which images of the woman-child draw from, and elaborate upon, the discourse of Romantic innocence – in all its exclusionary tropes. As well as being presented as neutral in terms of race and social class, the Romantic child was also presented as genderless, both in Reynolds’ painting and in Rousseau’s treatise. According to Rousseau, Up to the age of puberty children of both sexes have little to distinguish them to the eye, the same face and form, the same complexion and voice, everything is the same; girls are children and boys are children; one name is enough for creatures so closely resembling one another. Males whose development is arrested preserve this resemblance all their lives; they are always big children; and women who never lose this resemblance seem in many respects never to be more than children.72

Suspending critique of that second sentence for a moment, rather than Romantic childhood being genderless, as Rousseau would have it, it might be more accurate to suggest that both girl- and boy-children were feminized during this period. An-Magritt Jensen argues that this ‘feminization’ can be explained by a number of factors. First of all, the nineteenth-century shift from agrarian to market economy led to what Furstenberg describes ‘a profound erosion of the role of fathers’.73 The Industrial Revolution led middle-class women to be located in the domestic sphere along with their children, whilst their husbands inhabited the public sphere as professionals. Secondly, there was a shift in ‘children’s role in [the] family economy’.74 Where previously there were ‘economic incentives for

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parents to beget children’,75 not to mention dynastic ones, the shift away from a land-based economy meant that education became an increasingly important determinant of prosperity. The shift in children’s status from ‘an economic to an emotional asset for parents’ meant they became ‘more a female than a male interest’ in middle-class family circles.76 Clothing played a crucial role in aligning women with children in visual representation. Higonnet suggests that filmy white clothing for children served to ‘enhance femininity while proclaiming ethereal purity’.77 This is evident in Figure 6, a painting of mother and child by Thomas Lawrence. Although the clothing seems at first sight to align mother with child, it differs in one important regard: the woman’s attire emphasizes her sexuality – her breasts and her hips are prominent – whereas the child’s garments do the opposite.78 It is also worth noting that Mrs Lawrence is pictured with her son who looks remarkably similar to the little girl in The Age of Innocence, above. The seemingly ‘genderless’ depiction of young children was soon interrupted by the subtle assignation of gender roles in paintings of the period, where, as Higonnet notes, ‘boys, apparently, quickly become men, while girls remain girls’.79 This ties in with Rousseau’s statement that boy-children grow up to be men whereas women ‘seem in many respects never to be more than children’.80 The visual culture of childhood was further feminized when Romanticism, as an artistic movement, dwindled in the mid-nineteenth century. The image of childhood ‘remained Romantic’ albeit ‘intellectually marginal’.81 Childhood in its many manifestations therefore became ‘a subject for women, a subject about women’.82

Mary Wollstonecraft: Women kept in a state of ‘perpetual childhood’ The supposedly genderless nature of childhood in visual representation conveniently elided the fact that girl children were not granted the same privileges as boy children: neither in Rousseau’s Émile nor in lived experience. A girl called Sophy does appear in the later sections of Rousseau’s treatise but only as an accoutrement to the education of Émile (and a template for the ideal wife). This discriminatory treatment was lamented by Rousseau’s English contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792, Wollstonecraft made frequent reference to the childlike character of ideal femininity. She argued that women were encouraged to have

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Figure 6  Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Mrs John Angerstein and Her Son John Julius William, 1799. © MAH, Musées d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, Dépôt de la République et Canton de Genève, 1984. Inventory no. 1985–0056. Photographer: Jean-Marc Yersin

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‘infantine airs’ and left to an existence as ‘overgrown children’.83 While Rousseau saw this as the natural order of things, Wollstonecraft suggested that women appeared childlike because they were not afforded the same access to education as men. Rather than aspiring to reason, the apex of Enlightenment values, women were encouraged to aim for beauty as the highest virtue, and schooled in how to secure a husband, something Wollstonecraft viewed as but ‘a paltry crown’.84 Although ‘man is prepared by various circumstances for a future state, [moralists] constantly concur in advising woman only to provide for the present. Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are, on this ground, consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex.’85 Woman, Wollstonecraft concluded, was ‘educated like a fanciful kind of half being – one of Rousseau’s wild chimeras’.86 Although Wollstonecraft agreed with Rousseau that children ought to be kept in a state of innocence she did not agree that women should be.87 Innocence, when applied to women, was but a ‘specious name’ for ignorance, ‘a civil term for weakness’.88 She critiqued Rousseau’s proposals for Sophy’s education, suggesting the programme prepared her to become a ‘coquetish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself ’.89 This resonates with the ‘coddling attitude’ towards children at the time. By this account, woman ‘was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused’.90 Furthermore, Wollstonecraft saw the infantilization of women as linked to the sexualization of girl-children: ‘Females, who are made women of when they are mere children, and brought back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart for ever, have not sufficient strength of mind to efface the superinductions of art that have smothered nature.’91 While I would dispute the idea of a ‘natural’ girl-child or womanly self, what is evident in Wollstonecraft’s writings is the extent to which girlishness was extolled as a feminine ideal of the time – as also evidenced in Émile. The way forward, as Wollstonecraft saw it, lay in increased access to education for girls, the cultivation of rationality, and the development of strength in both body and mind.92 A Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792 and it was not until 1848 that feminists would convene to form a revolutionary force in the fight for suffrage.93 This has led Wollstonecraft to be hailed as ‘the mother of modern feminism’.94 That said, we can critique her text from a contemporary standpoint, for failing to extend proposals for education to working-class girls, thus perpetuating class privilege even whilst chipping away at gender inequality.95 If education is taken as a marker of equality then things have

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certainly progressed since the eighteenth century, with McRobbie noting how girls now outperform boys at school in the UK.96 Yet, educational attainment is not the only marker of success, with McRobbie noting how poor mental health and body dissatisfaction undermine the wellbeing of girls and women. Yet, before we turn to focus on the twenty-first century, it is worth exploring two feminists of the twentieth century who critiqued the childlike character of ideal femininity: French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, writing in 1949 and North American feminist Betty Friedan, writing in 1962. At this juncture the fight for suffrage had been won in these nations, meaning the feminist project was now concerned with politicizing the personal, ‘[extending] the purview of justice to take in such previously private matters as sexuality, housework, reproduction, and violence against women’.97 Their writings appeared prior to widespread activism in ‘Second Wave’ feminism in Europe and North America, and they repeatedly draw parallels between femininity, as socially constructed, and the state of childhood. In so doing they draw attention to the infantilizing and dehumanizing nature of prevailing visions of femininity in their respective calls for social change.

Simone de Beauvoir: Woman as ‘eternal child’ According to Simone de Beauvoir, the role of woman in France in the late 1940s consisted in her being ‘Other’ to man: a doll-like ‘intermediate between male and eunuch’.98 These traits of character, so fundamental to ideal femininity at the time, are neatly gathered in her concept of the ‘eternal child’: Woman herself recognizes that the world is masculine on the whole; those who fashioned it, ruled it, and still dominate it today are men. As for her, she does not consider herself responsible for it; it is understood that she is inferior and dependent; she has not learned the lessons of violence, she has never stood forth as subject before the other members of the group. Shut up in her flesh, her home, she sees herself as passive before these gods with human faces who set goals and establish values. In this sense there is truth in the saying that makes her the ‘eternal child’.99

In a world authored by men, woman is condemned to immanence: ‘shut up in her flesh, her home’. Although the ‘eternal child’ denotes the disempowered aspects of idealized femininity, the discourses on childhood referenced in de Beauvoir’s text are not

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consistent. Elsewhere she sees entrance to womanhood as involving a ‘burying’ of childhood independence and imperiousness, facilitating entrance to a more submissive feminine existence.100 She notes that ‘for the young woman […] there is a contradiction between her status as a real human being and her vocation as a female’.101 This is a difficult period for the adolescent girl in that ‘up to this time she has been an autonomous individual: now she must renounce her sovereignty’; young women learn that ‘to please they must abdicate’.102 Here, de Beauvoir pits ‘childish independence’ against ‘womanly submission’.103 As such, the ‘eternal child’ seems only to encompass those elements of childhood that involve a hampering of autonomy and self-realization, as well as the relative lack of power in the hierarchy between adults (men) and children (broadly construed to include women). As such, the ‘eternal child’ aligns with discourses on Romantic childhood, not least because de Beauvoir critiques the absolutes of ‘purity’ and ‘innocence’. In a description that resonates with the girlish aesthetic that would later characterize Sofia Copolla’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), de Beauvoir writes that the young girl is ‘supposed to be white as snow, transparent as crystal, she is dressed in filmy organdie, her room is papered in dainty colours, voices are lowered at her approach, she is forbidden salacious books’.104 And this occurs all at the moment she is ‘discovering in herself and all around her the mysterious stirrings of life and sex’.105 This cultural denial, de Beauvoir argues, will later cause woman to experience a profound ‘distrust of herself ’.106 These themes are revisited in de Beauvoir’s later essay ‘Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome’.107 Here she argues that Bardot’s on-screen persona was constructed to appear both childlike and sexually autonomous. In the broader cultural context, Bardot was playfully termed ‘BB’: a homonym of bébé.108 This toddler lexicon continues to be used in relation to female celebrities today, with two of the most successful pop stars in the West being labelled Gaga and Riri: Lady Gaga and Rihanna, respectively. Despite her seemingly affectionate nickname, BB was perceived to ‘express the immorality of an age’ in her violation of taboos, particularly the taboo of the sexually autonomous women.109 The threat, de Beauvoir suggests, lies in Bardot’s ‘naturalness’: The majority of Frenchmen claim that woman loses her sex appeal if she gives up her artifices […] To spurn jewels and cosmetics and high heels and girdles is to refuse to transform oneself into a remote idol. It is to assert that one is man’s fellow and equal, to recognize that between the woman and him there is mutual desire and pleasure.110

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Unlike the vamp who ‘[stages] a ceremony’, Bardot reveals her body for what it is; she is innocent, naïve, unpretentious and impulsive.111 She is, by this reading, a free woman, an equal participant of desire. That Bardot was often pictured with animals is significant in that in The Second Sex de Beauvoir discusses ‘how splendid a refuge the adolescent girl finds in the fields and woods. […] among plants and animals she is a human being’.112 This understanding of Bardot’s femininity squares with de Beauvoir’s second reading of childhood/adolescence as a time of independence, autonomy and imperiousness, as mentioned above. This also resonates with Freudian discourse that posits childhood as a period of active and indiscriminate pursuit of pleasure.113 Perhaps it is the childlike element that saves Bardot from abjection in that her active desire aligns her with man but the childlike element secures her movement ‘in a universe which he cannot enter. The age difference re-establishes between them the distance that seems necessary to desire.’114 While de Beauvoir sees femininity as childlike in many ways, she also draws attention to the trope in common-sense parlance that girls mature quicker than boys (a notion that also emerged in my focus groups). De Beauvoir resolves this paradox by suggesting that boys require a longer apprenticeship for adulthood than girls, given that ‘the mother’s activities are quite accessible to the girl’ meaning ‘she is already a little woman’.115 This truism dates at least as far back as the eighteenth century, as it can also be found in the writings of Wollstonecraft.116 Wollstonecraft accounts for this double standard by suggesting that girls were seen to reach maturity sooner, at the age of twenty, because ‘male prejudice […] deems beauty the perfection of woman – mere beauty of features and complexion, the vulgar acceptation of the word’.117 By contrast, male beauty was permitted to have some connection with the intellect, and as such full development in men was reached only at the age of thirty. Given that female perfection was premised solely on appearance, ideal selfhood was thereby short-lived and women were rendered ‘ridiculous and useless when the short-lived bloom of beauty [was] over’ – a sentiment expressed by a male writer at the time who wondered of what use women ‘turned of forty’ were to this world.118

Betty Friedan and the ‘feminine mystique’ Fourteen years on from the publication of The Second Sex, Betty Friedan penned The Feminine Mystique, giving voice to the North American ‘problem that has no name’. For Friedan, the ‘feminine mystique’ prescribed the pursuit of femininity

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as woman’s central vocation. An ideology of difference underpinned relations between men and women,119 emphasizing female traits as ‘different’ rather than inferior: ‘The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfilment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.’120 Friedan found that when her participants were growing up as girls, they were encouraged to remain more infantile, less adept at decision-making and more likely to look to their parents for guidance and to ‘channel’ behaviours and attitudes. Friedan suggests this ‘greater sheltering’ of girl-children fostered a ‘generalized dependency’ which was effectively transferred from parents to husband upon marriage, thereby making women more docile in their roles as wife and mother in a family economy that retained many patriarchal features.121 While instructive in terms of thinking through modes of infantilization that worked to secure the inferior status of women, Friedan’s text, is not immune from the indictment of Second Wave feminism for its ‘false universalism’.122 For instance, in bell hooks’ critique of The Feminine Mystique, she argues that Friedan ‘made her plight and the plight of white women like herself synonymous with a condition affecting all American women. In so doing, she deflected attention away from her classism, her racism, her sexist attitudes towards the masses of American women.’123 This was particularly evident in Friedan’s critique of domestic life, as hooks explains: Many black women find the family the least oppressive institution. Despite sexism in the context of family, we may experience dignity, self-worth, and a humanization that is not experienced in the outside world wherein we confront all forms of oppression.124

This can be contrasted with the work of white feminists at the time, who extrapolated from their own experiences and labelled the family a universal ‘source of oppression’.125 Thus, while Friedan’s text is worth studying in terms of the parallels she draws between the ‘feminine mystique’ and the behaviour and mentality of children, it must be borne in mind that this applied to one particular group of women, who were white and affluent, rather than applying to North American women in more general terms. In terms of fashion, in her discussion of a 1960 issue of McCalls’s magazine for women, Friedan argues that ‘the image of woman that emerges from this big, pretty magazine is young and frivolous, almost childlike: fluffy and feminine; passive; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies,

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and home’.126 This articulation of femininity continues to hold currency in the twenty-first century. Samantha Holland’s research into ‘alternative’ femininities found that participants tended to invoke the idea of ‘traditional’ femininity in order to define themselves in opposition to it.127 ‘Traditional’ femininity, for these women, was described using three key terms: ‘fluffy’, ‘girly’ and ‘frothy’, thus approximating Friedan’s description of ideal femininity. Also of note is the work of Efrat Tseëlon, who found her participants linked ‘frothy’ clothing to feelings of vulnerability.128 Indeed, Holland situates these traits in the context of 1950s femininity, which involved ‘flouncy petticoats, little angora cardigans, the embodiment of a particular type of passive and conformist (yet still sexualised) femininity’.129 While ideal femininity for white women in the 1950s was ‘fluffy’ this did not necessarily entail a body that was childlike. Instead the ideal body was emphatically womanly. The New Look, launched in 1947, with its narrow waist, full skirt and ‘cantilevered’ bust, strongly accentuated womanly curves, as Christopher Breward notes.130 Yet emphasizing womanly curves in an aesthetic sense did not necessarily equate to a sanctioning of active female sexuality. Female sexuality in the post-war period has been described as passive and responsive and the New Look criticized for its ‘entrapment of women as objects of desire and decoration’.131 The womanly silhouette of the 1950s can be contrasted with the more girlish, androgynous ideals of the 1960s which, paradoxically, came to symbolize a newfound level of financial and sexual freedom for young women at the time.132 The emphasis on fashion and magazines in The Feminine Mystique points to the role consumption played in the lives of Fridan’s participants. bell hooks argues that this speaks to a certain privilege on the part of Friedan and her participants in that she did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.133

In this sense her text privileges the experience of affluent women, at the expense of articulating the experiences of less privileged social groups in North America at that time.

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These critiques notwithstanding, Friedan’s call for social change is ultimately similar to that of the feminists discussed above. She asks: ‘Why aren’t girls forced to grow up – to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?’134 Her point was that women could not be both feminine and fully human; these were constructed as mutually exclusive categories.135 This issue goes to the heart of this book, in that I seek to better understand the meaning and possible appeal of childlike femininities today, given the historical connotations of inferiority and lack of full human status. One set of theories that might shed light on this seeming inconsistency is the scholarship on post-feminist discourse.136

Backlash and post-feminist discourse What unites the above feminist thinkers is a tendency to conceptualize power as something held in the hands of men (the patriarchy) and exerted upon women. For instance, Wollstonecraft writes: ‘Men, indeed, appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner when they try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood.’137 The term ‘infantilization’ was perhaps appropriate at that time, in that it implies the subjugation of one person, or social group, by another. Yet the workings of power have become more complex and diffuse, following the partial gains of feminism. While there remain instances where women are infantilized by men, there are other times when childlike ideals are internalized and enforced upon women by themselves, without obvious coercion from another social actor.138 This harks back to Butler’s concept of discursive performativity, whereby it is discourse that provides the building blocks for gender subjectivities as experienced by men and women. Childlike images are authored by both men and women and, taken collectively, carve out the woman-child as an idealized subject-position. As we saw in Chapter 1, Leith Clark, founder of Lula, suggested that the childlike imagery in her magazine was in fact empowering because it offered a way out of viewing women from the standpoint of a man.139 For Clark, representing women as childlike was a means of sidestepping the sexualization and objectification which are so widespread in contemporary fashion media. Angela McRobbie offers an alternative interpretation for the presence of retrograde feminine ideals in the fashion media. She argues that following the

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partial gains of feminism, the Symbolic has ‘had to find a new way of exerting its authority’. [The] Symbolic discharges (or maybe franchises) its duties to the commercial domain (beauty, fashion, magazines, body culture, etc.) which becomes the source of authority and judgement for young women. The heightening of significance in regard to the required rituals of femininity as well as an intensification of prescribed heterosexually-directed pleasures and enjoyment are among the key hallmarks of this de-centred Symbolic. In the language of health and well-being, the global fashion-beauty complex charges itself with the business of ensuring that appropriate gender relations are guaranteed.140

From this, it is not necessarily men who are responsible for perpetuating childlike ideals of femininity; it is more to do with the way identity is elaborated within the fashion system. This brings us to the complex terrain of post-feminist discourse, which was seen to proliferate in Western cultures from the 1980s onwards.141 The term ‘post-feminism’ is an incredibly loaded one, with a lack of consensus as to what it signifies. English literature scholar, Gayle Greene notes the usage of the word in a New York Times article dating back to October 1982. For Greene, the word seemed to speak to a new wave of young women who no longer saw the relevance of feminism to their lives.142 This might be explained by what Susan Faludi describes as a backlash against feminism during this period. This, she argues, was brought about by a number of factors, such as the ‘new right’ governments led by Thatcher and Reagan: Just when record numbers of younger women were supporting feminist goals in the mid-1980s (more of them, in fact, than older women) and a majority of all women were calling themselves feminists, the media declared that feminism was the flavour of the seventies and that ‘post-feminism’ was the new story – complete with a younger generation who supposedly reviled the women’s movement.143

The backlash took the form of myth and propaganda, principally disseminated by the media, albeit in a non-orchestrated fashion. The press ‘cosmeticized the scowling face of anti-feminism while blackening the feminist eye’.144 It worked not only to render feminism outmoded but also to locate anxiety about social change in and around the female body.145 The backlash had a ‘vindictive subtext’ in that its ‘infantile imagery […] [urged] women to become little girls, then [mocked] them mercilessly for the impossibility of that venture’.146 One feminine ideal circulating at this moment

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was the ‘demure and retiring child-woman – a neo-Victorian “lady” with a pallid visage, a birdlike creature who stays indoors, speaks in a chirpy small voice and clips her wings in restrictive clothing’.147 She thus makes explicit the link between media representations of women in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the Victorian ‘Angel in the House’.148 Yet the difference between these two constructed ideals  lies in the notion of ‘choice’: the 1990s ideal dictates that woman ‘wear rib-crushing garments but that she lace them up herself ’.149 For Faludi, such childlike ideals were about containing women and limiting any radical desires or aspirations: Once a society projects its fears on to a female form, it can try to cordon off those fears by controlling women – pushing them to conform to comfortingly nostalgic norms and shrinking them in the cultural imagination to a manageable size. The demand that women ‘return to femininity’ is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse […] The ‘feminine’ woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.150

The notion of woman as petered-down and contained – symbolized here by the ballerina – is something that would continue to appear in the fashion media well into the new millennium. As will become clear in Chapter 5, the Romantic woman-child is not only nostalgic – in terms of going with the grain of traditional, white, middle-class femininity – but also somehow melancholic and ‘stuck’ – resourceless even in her apparent perfection. In the early years of the twenty-first century, scholars such as McRobbie further problematized the backlash thesis, positing a number of processes which surreptitiously undid  the gains of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s.151 While Faludi theorized post-feminism as involving anti-feminist sentiment in mainstream media discourse, McRobbie conceptualized it slightly differently. McRobbie theorizes ‘post-feminism’ as involving a number of processes which surreptitiously undo the feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s. The feminist position is undermined, yet this passes largely unnoticed because ‘post-feminist’ imagery and ideology are manifested as a well-informed, well-intended response to feminism as a movement.152 This approach to representing women trickled down into practices of mainstream marketing, with Goldman arguing that ‘by the late 1980s, many advertisers were bidding to reincorporate the cultural power of feminism, while domesticating its critique of sexist mass media’.153 He termed this process ‘commodity feminism’, meaning the conversion of feminism

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into a ‘sign value’. By taking account of feminism, in a diluted form, advertisers could target the growing numbers of professional women, harbouring their spending power whilst silencing, or rendering outmoded, feminist critique. Repudiation was thus effected through the ideology of freedom and choice.154 A key phrase to emerge in women’s magazines of the 1990s was the notion of women ‘in control’. However, as Imelda Whelehan points out, the notion of control seemed to be limited to ‘the right to consume and display oneself to best effect, not about empowerment in the worlds of work, politics or even the home’.155 This therefore involved a partial appropriation of the palatable aspects of feminism into media discourse, whilst its more radical or socialist content was emptied out or disavowed.156 The 2010s witnessed a renewal of the feminist project in mainstream media culture, thanks in part to the convergence between digital feminism and activism on the street.157 Sarah Banet-Weiser has described this recent wave as ‘popular feminism’: popular because ‘it manifests in discourses and practices that are circulated in popular and commercial media, such as digital spaces like blogs, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as broadcast media’.158 This means its purview extends beyond academia and niche activist circles. This is certainly a recent development since it was only in 2011 that Rosalind Gill noted how the word ‘sexist’ had come to seem ‘clunky’ and ‘unsophisticated’ in the context of post-feminist discourse.159 This has since shifted, as evidenced by initiatives like The Everyday Sexism Project, launched by Laura Bates on 16 April 2012, which allowed women from across the globe to document their experiences of sexism in daily life. Logging such instances collectively, and in one place, allowed the scale of the problem to be demonstrated, the micro-politics of gender acknowledged, even if the workings of power and oppression are now more diffuse. Taken at face value, the language of feminist critique might no longer sound outmoded or irrelevant as it did in previous decades. While post-feminist discourse tended to disavow the need for further feminist intervention, popular feminism in the 2010s has manifested itself as a ‘celebration’ of the feminist project. The two discourses might at first sight seem at odds with one another but in actual fact they hold the neoliberal context in common. Both are deeply rooted in the ideology of individualism, personal empowerment and consumption – often at the expense of more radical, collective action.160 For instance, Banet-Weiser observes that in the 2010s some forms of feminism became more visible – and therefore ‘popular’ – than others. These tended to be those which were media-friendly or backed by mainstream celebrities or corporations. Such visibility is, at first sight, a positive development

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but the problem is that ‘it often stops there, as if seeing or purchasing feminism is the same thing as changing patriarchal structures’.161 As such, in a neoliberal context, the ‘feminisms that are most easily commodified and branded are those that become most visible. This means, most of the time, that the popular feminism that is most visible is that which is white, middle-class, cis-gendered, and heterosexual.’162 Popular feminism is thus exclusionary in its foregrounding of certain bodies, never mind its tendency to rely on consumption (and economic privilege) as a principal means of empowerment. In this way, capitalist culture since the 1980s has continued to cannibalize, and cash in on, the fervour of feminism. Examples can be found across the fashion and beauty industries. For example, the Chanel runway show for Spring/Summer 2015 saw models staging a pseudo-feminist protest complete with placards bearing statements such as ‘History Is Her Story’, ‘Ladies First’ and ‘Make Fashion Not War’.163 Such ‘feminist-lite’ practices extend to the high street, with fast fashion brand H&M selling all manner of ‘feminist’ merchandize in recent years, such as the T-shirts discussed by Banet-Weiser. Here, the politics of global feminism really come into play in that the type of empowerment offered by such brands seems to extend only to those who consume the garments, rather than being applicable to the lives and labour practices of the women who actually produce them. Purchasing a T-shirt might provide momentary empowerment through the act of consumption, in turn increasing the visibility of the word ‘feminist’ whilst the garment is worn. Yet it does little to dismantle the larger structures that govern the lives and working conditions of women across the globe: prompting @ethicalbrandz to state ‘you cannot exploit women in one country to empower them in another’.164 In a similar vein, it does little to address the inequities that exist between differently situated women in the West. Finally, it must be acknowledged that the rise of popular feminism has been accompanied by the simultaneous rise of ‘popular misogyny’,165 which has taken on new, pernicious forms in the digital landscape, such as trolling, upskirting and pornographic ‘deep fakes’.166 Any image of childlike femininity appearing in the 2010s needs to be read against this complex terrain.

Conclusion This chapter has looked at the role discourse has played in aligning women with children, as well as feminist critiques of this discursive practice, from the

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eighteenth century onwards. These earlier connotations of childlike femininity underpin representations of the ‘woman-child’ in the present. Furthermore, the politics of neoliberalism and ‘post-feminism’ from the 1980s onwards, have effected a shift in the content of media imagery featuring women as well as the way it is read and critiqued. It is for these reasons that reception studies became so central to this book. They offered a means of understanding what the womanchild meant to different women today, as well as examining how they linked the images to female identity and empowerment in the twenty-first century. The reception study method will thus be the focus of the chapter that follows.

4

Between Image and Spectator: Reception Studies as Visual Methodology

In 1968 Roland Barthes famously declared ‘The Death of the Author’.1 Intended as a polemic against Auteur Theory, Barthes’ essay underlined the active role played by the reader in processes of meaning-making. ‘A text’s unity’, he argued, ‘lies not in its origin but in its destination’.2 Of course, Barthes overstated his claim when he declared the author’s intended meaning to be irrelevant but the essay nevertheless opened up the idea that readers might not draw meaning from texts in a uniform manner. Texts might be polysemic, open to more than one possible interpretation. This has implications for the study of images, for how can one be sure that the scholar’s reading is the ‘right’ one? Or put differently, recognizing images as polysemic might mean dispensing with the notion of a ‘right’ reading altogether. Barthes was writing about literature, but his notion extends equally to other forms of cultural production, including the fashion media. In fact, the reader’s interpretation of fashion writing was something Barthes himself considered in his lengthy semiotic study, The Fashion System. There he suggested that ‘the reading of Fashion utterances (in their rhetorical form) could be verified by submitting women who read them to non-directive interviews’.3 Such interviews could be used to challenge or reinforce the semiotic analysis of the researcher. Barthes was writing in 1967, yet writings on reception remain few,4 despite increased attention being paid to methodologies in the field of Fashion Studies of late.5 In this chapter I outline the reception study methodology I employ in Part Two of this book. Although the practice of aligning women with children in discourse is long-standing, it does not necessarily follow that an image of the ‘woman-child’ in the eighteenth century will be read in the same way as an image of the ‘woman-child’ today. For, as Bordo notes, images of women ‘almost always display a complicated and bewitching tangle of new possibilities

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and old patterns  of representation’.6 The reader’s response is therefore key to making sense of contemporary images of childlike femininity since ‘consistency in methods of constructing women does not imply consistency in response’, as Myra MacDonald observes.7 As researcher, I could go some way in theorizing both the meaning and appeal of these images through my own scholarly research and visual analysis of images. However, given the puzzling resurgence of childlike femininities after three (or even four) waves of feminism it seemed important to speak to women, in the social world, in order to find out how they made sense of such imagery. In the course of this chapter I outline the reception study methodology I adopted in this project, through a set of experimental focus groups conducted in the UK between 2012 and 2015. Little empirical research exists on the way women (or, indeed, men) confront gender representations offered up in the fashion media. This remains the case in spite of the centrality of theoretical discussion of spectatorship in the field of fashion studies, such as the oft-discussed ‘male gaze’.8 These issues are explored in the present chapter, starting from the premise that identity is intersectional and the female gaze is multifarious.

Reception studies Images have three ‘modalities’ at which meaning might be studied: the site of production, the image itself and the site of reception.9 The sites of production and reception can be studied through sociological methods (interviewing or observing producers and readers) whereas the image itself requires a different, semiotic approach, being ‘an object endowed with a structural anatomy’.10 James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein define reception study as the examination of the ways in which ‘texts are constructed in the process of being received’ or ‘the socio-historical context of interpretative practice’.11 The emphasis on the reader’s interpretation means that reception studies can be pitted against ‘the purely formal approach’, that is, approaches employing textual analysis or semiotics only.12 Although I use the term ‘reception studies’ in this book, the project might equally be located within the ‘new audience research’: concerned with the ‘interpretations, use and experience’ of media audiences.13 The distinction between the study of ‘audience’ and the study of ‘reception’ is somewhat unclear, as Machor and Goldstein observe.14 For the purposes of this book, I opted for the term ‘reception’ rather than ‘audience’ because I was interested in not only

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the intended audience of fashion magazines but also the way in which women, more generally, interpreted the ‘woman-child’ at the point of reception. My decision to show images to both readers and non-readers of fashion magazines was informed by my overarching research questions, namely: the different meanings of the ‘woman-child’ and the possible appeal of that subject-position to contemporary women. Furthermore, in some instances the imagery extended beyond the pages of fashion magazines, as was the case with Marc Jacobs’ Oh, Lola! (2011), which appeared on department store signage as well as the free ES Magazine in London, prior to being prohibited from reappearing in its current form by the UK Advertising Standards Authority. Existing scholarship on ‘audience’ is largely located within the field of media studies, and has tended to focus on the genre of television.15 This approach to studying television has been recuperated and channelled into the genre itself, with Channel 4’s Gogglebox being a particularly salient example.16 Work on reception also exists in the fields of art history,17 English literature18 and film studies, with Machor and Goldstein’s edited volume Reception Study presenting essays from a range of disciplines, including cultural studies.19 In terms of the way this method has been used in the field of fashion studies, a notable example consists in Diana Crane’s study of class and gender in fashion photography and advertising images.20 Writing in 2000, she observed: ‘There has been little research [into] how women interpret representations of gender in fashion photographs. The goal of this study is to examine responses to representations of gender in fashion photographs and clothing advertisements among young and middle-aged women, representing diverse ethnicities and nationalities.’21 There exists a related body of work on the reception of advertising images, with Ben Barry and Barbara J. Phillips focusing on fashion images in particular. They seek to understand how ‘male fashion consumers interpret fashion advertisements and how their perceptions influence the ways in which they shop for fashion’.22 The reception of individual images can then be put in dialogue with the related study of magazine-reading rituals.23 The attention devoted to audience studies in the Academy marks a shift away from the ‘hypodermic needle’ model of media effects, associated with communication studies in the 1940s and 1950s.24 This perspective supposed meaning to be ‘injected’ into passive audiences who were thought to accept without question the media content conveyed to them. This ‘false consciousness’ approach is problematic because it positions individuals as passive victims of media messages. It also assumes that audiences will ‘decode’ messages in a uniform manner. As such, it overstates the power of media institutions to

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manipulate the public. Yet, some theorists argue that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, with certain academics now understating the ideological power vested in media institutions. For instance, David Morley has been critical of the work of John Fiske25 for ‘documenting the total absence of media influence in the semiotic democracy of postmodern pluralism’.26 While it is important to recognize the role of the active audience in processes of meaningmaking, Morley warns against the ‘conception of media texts as equally “open” to any and all interpretations […] which readers wish to make of them’.27 Hall similarly stresses that care should be taken to avoid equating polysemy with pluralism: ‘Connotative codes are not equal among themselves. Any society/ culture tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose its classifications of the social and cultural and political world. These constitute a dominant cultural order, though it is neither univocal nor uncontested.’28 The presence of sociocultural norms and codes means that conceptualizing media texts as completely open overemphasizes the agency of audiences, at the expense of recognizing the power vested in ideological structures (media producers, institutions and publications). Hegemonic ideas, whether pertaining to neoliberalism or gender roles, will inevitably influence the production of cultural texts, their content and their reception. In light of the above, numerous attempts have been made by scholars to rein in the concept of polysemy, and limit the extent to which texts are considered semiotically ‘open’.29 One influential attempt to draw parameters around the possible meanings of a text consists in Hall’s Encoding-Decoding model.30 This model works on the assumption that media texts have three modalities of meaning – producer, text and audience. When the message reaches the audience, Hall identifies three types of reading: preferred – in line with the meaning intended by producers; negotiated – where the preferred or ‘intended’ meaning is recognized but adapted to one’s local situation; and oppositional – where the message is read through ‘some alternative frame of reference’, such as feminist theory or Marxist critique.31 Compelling though it is, not least in its neatness, there are several difficulties with the Encoding-Decoding model, as Jackson et al. point out. The first issue is the ‘linear approach to productioncontent-readership’ and the ‘conveyor belt’ of meaning implied by this.32 This is problematic, not least several decades on from the publication of Hall’s essay, where the digital world allows for user interactivity en masse. Then there is the difficulty of identifying particular ‘causal mechanisms’ that structure an audience’s preferred reading, as Evans and Gamman note.33 Finally, when it comes to fashion photography, a multiplicity of creative agents is involved

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in the production of any given image, which makes for a range of competing desires and agendas. In fact, Harrison suggests that fashion photographs, ‘at their most intelligent and compelling, operate at a level which may be beyond the requirements of those who commission them’:34 something he later refers to as the photographer’s ‘hidden agenda’.35 This multiplicity of producers poses a problem when it comes to establishing the intended or ‘preferred’ meaning of any given photograph. Yet, whilst recognizing the shortfalls of the Encoding-Decoding model, the impetus behind it remains valid: that is, the desire to limit the range of possible readings of media texts.36 In terms of my own reception studies, I wanted to recognize the fashion image as open to more than one possible interpretation; however, I also needed to acknowledge the power vested in the fashion media to define and structure normative codes about gender and identity that might influence participant readings. I addressed these concerns, firstly, by recognizing the ‘structural anatomy’ of the image.37 For, as Gillian Rose notes, there is a tendency in some audience studies to ‘pay little attention to the images themselves’.38 In my own visual analysis I elected, therefore, to be as clear as possible about the element(s) of the image that led me to a particular interpretation. This was also something I also encouraged participants to do – where possible – when they articulated a particular reading, feeling or opinion in relation to an image. Secondly, Machor and Goldstein note that ‘though reception theorists critique foundational aesthetics, they do not assume that an interpretive community lacks normative ideals’.39 In terms of my own study, the concept of ‘discourse’, as the site where power and knowledge unite, proved fruitful in this regard in that I recognized participant responses as being structured by the discursive resources available to them: themselves delimited by the field of cultural intelligibility. While the reader/viewer is the ultimate determiner of meaning, and brings her or his ‘own interpretive lens to the text’,40 there are nevertheless certain patterns in readings: otherwise it would be impossible for members of a culture to communicate in a meaningful way. Janice Radway, in her influential study on romance reading, suggests that whatever the theoretical possibility of an infinite number of readings, in fact there are patterns or regularities to what viewers and readers bring to texts in large part because they acquire specific cultural competencies as a consequence of their particular social location. Similar readings are produced, I argue, because similarly located readers learn similar set of reading strategies and interpretative codes that they bring to bear upon the texts they encounter.41

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This sense of broadly similar readings arising from similarly located readers is intuitive and ties in with Barthes’ writing on press photography. He argues that the press photograph ‘is an object that has been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional, aesthetic or ideological norms’.42 When that photograph is viewed by the reader it is ‘not only perceived, received, it is read, connected more or less consciously by the public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs’.43 From this, reading practices can be understood as a sort of negotiation between the aesthetic features of the structured image and the stock of cultural signs assimilated by social subjects to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their socio-cultural positionings. This can be applied to reading communities of fashion magazines, who might share similar ‘fashion competences’, be it shared references, an understanding of the industry, or awareness of fashion history and its evolving forms.

The Female gaze as multifarious Having decided to conduct reception studies, I then needed to find an appropriate sociological method. The value of focus groups for television-based audience studies is well established in media studies and I selected this format for my own reception studies.44 Focus groups facilitate discussion and collaborative meaning-making, whilst keeping moderator input to a minimum – allowing for rich and interesting data to unfold. I conducted six focus groups between 2012 and 2015, with a total of twenty female participants. All participants were resident within the UK and aged between sixteen and fifty-eight. In terms of ethnicity, thirteen participants were white British; three were Asian British; two were Chinese; one was Black British; and one was white Scottish. The women were invited to choose a pseudonym and these have been employed throughout the book. Although participants were diverse in terms of age and ethnic background, there was less diversity in terms of social class (the majority were middle class), sexual orientation (the majority self-identified as heterosexual) and able-bodied-ness (none of the participants identified as disabled). In terms of familiarity with fashion media, the majority of participants read fashion magazines or women’s magazines, although these tended to be mainstream titles such as Elle (UK) or British Vogue. Further details of participant demographics and engagement with magazines can be found in Appendix 1. The reception studies were experimental, both in purpose and in scope, which meant there were limitations in terms of what the data stood for, as I return to discuss, below.

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The interpretative constructionist approach, employed in this book, not only highlights the subjective nature of participants’ pronouncements but also stresses that the researcher is not neutral in her data collection; instead, her ‘ideals and personality [necessarily] affect the research’.45 This ties in with the writing of cultural historian Ludmilla Jordanova and her discussion of the political nature of research and the inevitability of human bias: ‘There is no such thing as unbiased history, but there is such a thing as balanced, selfaware history.’46 She emphasizes the importance of one’s ‘passions and values’ being ‘constantly subjected to scrutiny; they need to be tempered by evidence – for a conviction to be heartfelt need not imply it is unreflexive’.47 Although Jordanava is here discussing historical research, it pertains equally to research in cultural studies and the social sciences. It was important for me to be aware of the subject-position from which I was speaking, that is, a privileged position as a white, middle-class, Scottish woman, conducting research within an arts context. The project is underpinned by feminist theory and is therefore part of a wider conversation about the politics of gender. It was necessary to bear in mind that participants did not necessarily share my views about gender roles, and I was thus careful to avoid imposing my own judgements or politics upon them. Reciprocity between researcher and participants is also important, particularly in feminist social research because it represents one channel through which women’s voices, historically excluded from the academy, can be heard.48 I was therefore mindful to minimize the extent to which I instated another hierarchy – this time between researcher and participants – in the course of my social research. The participants recruited for the study were female, only, because my research questions concerned the meaning of childlike femininity and its appeal to contemporary women. Conducting audience research exclusively with women does have its shortfalls in that it ‘[risks] reproducing static and essentialist conceptions of gender identity’, as Ang and Hermes acknowledge.49 Yet, I would argue that giving ‘analytical priority’50 to women in this way does not necessarily reify the category of ‘women’ as fixed and biologically determined. Instead, following Butler, the important point is that the term ‘women’ is used ‘tactically’ and its exclusions ‘[taken] stock of ’.51 In other words, in my research I took care to foreground the differences between women, rather than treating them as a homogenous group. Just as it makes sense to speak of ‘femininities’, it also makes sense to speak of the ‘female gaze’ in the plural rather than the singular. For, as Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment point out, theorizing the ‘female gaze’ through the lens of gender alone is done ‘at the expense of theorizing the subject in terms of class, race, generation – or feminism’.52

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‘Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) has become seminal to debates on the gendered nature of spectatorship, both in Film Studies and beyond.53 In the essay, Mulvey introduces the oft-cited concept of the ‘male gaze’ building on the work of Freud and Lacan: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.54

Appearance, styling and femininity are here discussed in the context of cinema but Mulvey’s writing would later become central to debates on the female body in fashion studies, as demonstrated in Revisiting the Gaze, a collection of writings I recently co-edited with Jacki Willson.55 While Mulvey’s first essay was chiefly concerned with the ‘male gaze’, in her subsequent essay ‘Afterthoughts’ she discussed the way female viewers learn to negotiate and inhabit a spectatorial position which has been coded as male. Female spectatorship, she argued, involves an ‘internal oscillation of desire’ that ‘lies dormant’ until activated by the narrative and visual pleasures offered up in a Hollywood film.56 As such, female viewing involved an oscillation between a masculine position (identification with the ‘active’ male character or male spectator) and a feminine position (masochistic identification with the female character as fetishized object of the gaze).57 The result is a cinematic viewing position that is highly unstable: ‘for women (from childhood onwards) trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily becomes second nature. However, this Nature does not sit easily and shifts restless in its borrowed transvestite clothes.’58 The idea that women internalize the visual preferences of men is a conclusion also reached by John Berger in Ways of Seeing, albeit with recourse to Marxism rather than psychoanalysis. He argues that the long-standing conventions of representing the female body in visual culture have led to the scenario whereby ‘men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female’.59 Yet, since the publication of this literature, the idea of the ‘male gaze’ has been subject to much debate. For instance, being an object of the gaze is not always experienced negatively by women. As Jacki Willson notes: ‘Our thingness, how

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we take up space – how we are seen, validated, recognized, admired and made visible – is how we count socially and sexually.’60 In this way, a desire to ‘court the gaze’61 need not necessarily undermine the empowerment of women as social and sexual subjects. Secondly, the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Mulvey’s theory have been challenged, with Sean Nixon pointing to the incompatibility of psychoanalysis with Foucauldian thought, concluding that psychoanalytic accounts of spectatorship, although offering some useful insights, are ultimately ‘too ahistorical and totalizing’.62 From this perspective, psychoanalytic accounts of gender might be at odds with the women’s movement and its bids for social change, as Rosemary Betterton has observed.63 In terms of my own position, I look to the writings of Butler and the way she reconciles Foucault’s work with the work of Jacques Lacan. Butler recognizes Lacan’s work on the Symbolic as important for the project of feminism, in that it ‘[tempers] a certain kind of utopianism that held that the radical reorganization of kinship relations could imply the radical reorganization of the psyche, sexuality, and desire’.64 Combining discourse with psychoanalytic notions allows for recognition of ‘more deepseated constraining and constitutive symbolic demands’.65 In this sense, I do not see psychoanalysis as necessarily incompatible with the feminist movement for, as Mulvey points out, psychoanalytic theory can be used as a ‘political weapon’.66 She studies film through the lens of psychoanalysis in order to ‘highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it’, in an attempt to move the debate forward.67 That being said, the specificity of fashion magazines, as a medium, might foster a slightly different form of ‘institutionalized looking’68 to that identified by Mulvey vis-à-vis cinematic spectatorship, not least because ‘women’s fashion magazines were the first medium to present images of women for the consumption of women, rather than men’, as Martin Harrison observes.69 Moreover, while Mulvey’s work on Hollywood cinema tended to focus on a heterosexual viewing position, Diana Fuss suggests that the institutionalized nature of women’s engagement with fashion magazines is quite different. She writes that the position ‘mapped by contemporary commercial fashion photography can be read […] as feminine, homosexual, and preoedipal’.70 Homoerotic desire is produced and ‘licensed’ through fashion images, only to be ‘evacuated’ when the viewer identifies with the woman: same-sex desire is thus introduced, but then carefully managed and controlled in the fantasy space of the magazine, so as to sustain the heterosexual position as normative in lived experience.71

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When it came to the reception studies I conducted for this book, there was evidence of an internalized male gaze in the comments of some participants. For instance, one participant, Amber (twenty-six), seemed to evaluate the desirability of Dakota Fanning in Oh, Lola! from the perspective of an imagined male spectator. Explaining why she found the image enticing, Amber stated: ‘It’s kind of like, women would want to be her, and men would, kind of, want to get with her.’ Another participant, Emily (twenty-seven), compared the image of Fanning to another, grungier feature from i-D, stating: I think guys prefer pictures of girls that are, you know, they look more, like … naturally nice rather than like bedraggled […] They look like they’d be a force to be reckoned with, like … I think they’d be less cooperative than the other ones [in Oh, Lola! and ‘Heavenly Creatures’]. I think they’d maybe make, like, the rules. And a lot of guys find that difficult, I think.

These excerpts demonstrate how these particular women seem to have internalized the perceived preferences of men vis-à-vis the appearance and behaviour of women. This speaks to the ‘visual pedagogy’ women undergo when engaging with – and evaluating – the desirability of female bodies.72 While a case can be made for one’s gender and sexuality influencing the way one ‘reads’ images of women, other facets of subjectivity might also be at play. For as journalists Jacqui Roach and Petal Felix argue, ‘we live in a culture in which the dominant gaze is not only male, but white’.73 In a similar vein, bell hooks argues that the predominance of white beauty ideals leads women of all ethnicities to internalize this as the cultural norm. She recounts her experience of visiting friends who were living on a colonized island. The daughter of these friends was approaching adolescence and becoming increasingly interested in her self-image: Her skin is dark. Her hair chemically straightened. Not only is she fundamentally convinced that straightened hair is more beautiful than curly, kinky, natural hair, she believes that lighter skin makes one more worthy, more valuable in the eyes of others. Despite her parents’ efforts to raise their children in an affirming black context, she has internalized white supremacist values and aesthetics, a way of looking and seeing the world that negates her value.74

As such, hooks argues that the psychoanalytic model of spectatorship fails to account for the experiences of Black women, who might find themselves occupying neither side of the active/passive binary.75 Instead, women of colour, she argues, might adopt an ‘oppositional gaze’ in their engagement with film (and by extension, visual culture more generally). This might involve ‘resistance,

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struggle, reading, and looking “against the grain” of the cinematic narrative’.76 That is not to essentialize viewers on account of their gender, race or sexuality but rather to suggest that one’s social positionings will have an influence on the way one experiences the world, including the way one looks at images of women. Alexandra Shulman was editor-in-chief of British Vogue for the majority of the period covered by this book.77 Yasmin Jones-Henry, writing for The Guardian, notes that ‘during Shulman’s 25-year reign, out of 306 covers, only 11 featured women of colour’,78 which speaks to the centrality of whiteness as the dominant beauty ideal during that period. When it came to my reception studies, there were moments when participants made reflexive reference to their own ethnicity when discussing the images before them. For instance, in relation to Dakota Fanning in Marc Jacobs’ Oh, Lola!, Shanaz, a 36-year-old woman of Bangladeshi origin, stated: ‘And even as an Asian person, I don’t, wouldn’t recognise an Asian … an Asian modelling for them, I’d be like: “Oh, what’s that? That’s a bit … strange”. Whereas, if it was someone white I’d think: “Oh, that looks nice! That looks normal”.’ This statement was met with agreement from two other participants, one of whom was Black British (aged forty-one) and the other who identified as Asian British Bangladeshi (aged twenty-seven). This demonstrates the extent to which whiteness in the fashion media has been internalized as the ‘norm’ by these women, to the extent that non-white ethnicities appear ‘strange’ or out of place: a sort of internalization of ‘Otherness’. This supports the argument that the power relations that work to marginalize certain social groups in lived experience, such as the politics of race, can also feed in to practices of looking at visual culture.

Reading images in focus groups Informed by the literature on female spectatorship, as well as the idea of multiple interpretations, I selected six photographs to show to women in reception studies. I chose images that were representative of the key themes that had recurred in the images I collected from fashion magazines, which numbered approximately 2,000. In collecting that imagery from Vogue, Lula and i-D I had needed to establish criteria as to what constituted a childlike version of femininity. This was largely based on my literature review on childhood, girlhood and childlike femininity. If unsure whether to include a particular image I asked myself: ‘does the structuring of the image encourage me to view the woman as childlike?’ Factors I considered ‘childlike’ included, but were not limited to: markers

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of Romantic childhood; inclusion of sweets or toys; vulnerability; childlike behaviours, such as tantrums, playing or playfighting; Freudian ‘polymorphous’ sexuality; intertextual reference to fairy tales or Lolita; versions of the ‘superwaif ’ or ‘Kinderwhore’; and ambiguity as to age (i.e. inability to determine whether the model was above or below the cultural threshold of adulthood – the age of consent – which is 16 years in the UK). From there, when selecting the six images for reception studies, I looked to Patricia Holland’s notion of the ‘resonant’ image as a guiding principle. In her book exploring images of children in newspapers, advertisements and greeting cards, Holland argues that despite the disposability of much visual culture, the same kind of images tend to recur across mediums. The ‘resonant image’ ‘[refers] to a repeated and generalised representation,which can be teased out of a sequence of pictures or traced across multiples of similar pictures which appear in different media’.79 This term encapsulates the idea of discursive norms articulated through multiple iterations on a similar theme. I showed images to respondents in a staggered manner, one after another. Where possible, I kept the images in their original ‘media context’, the magazine, given context as an ‘important determinant of photographic meaning’.80 This was possible where I owned the magazine from which the image derived but where I did not, I relied on high quality photocopies – in colour and to scale – of the double-page spreads in question. Where I presented participants with the magazine as a whole, they tended only to flick through the magazine briefly, before quickly returning to the image under discussion. So, in practice, it seemed to make little difference whether I presented the image in its original context (the magazine), or as a colour photocopy of the double-page in question. In the name of experimentation, I adopted a different approach in my final focus group. Instead of leaving the magazine on the table for participants to flick through I, myself, slowly flicked through the fashion spread in question – ‘White Nights’ photographed by Tim Walker for British Vogue (January 2007) – allowing time for participants to make comments, and stopping at images that seemed to interest them. This approach worked well and was a fruitful way of presenting editorial spreads, which often carry a narrative, to participants. I would argue for the value of holding reception studies at different points in the research process, rather than conducting them in one block. Different images emerged as significant at different moments in my research, and the two additional images I showed to my final focus group (conducted in 2015, three years after my other five focus groups) led to readings that differed significantly from my own, thus challenging the theoretical conclusions I had reached.

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Meaning-making in focus groups is collaborative and it therefore made sense to reflect the interactive character of the discussion when writing up my findings.81 Quoting generously from transcripts is one way of achieving this; it also helps support key points82 and gives readers of the research the opportunity to ‘reconstruct alternative meanings’83 based on the dialogue cited. As can be seen from the excerpts throughout this book, in quoting from focus group transcripts, I presented dialogue between participants in a way that ‘[preserved] some of the messiness of talk’: such as ‘you know’, ‘kinda’, ‘it seems’ and the nearubiquitous ‘like’.84 Devault suggests that the ‘standard practice’ of smoothing over less well-articulated pronouncements is ‘one way that women’s words are distorted; it is often a way of discounting and ignoring those parts of women’s experience that are not easily expressed’.85 Furthermore, I found that the moments where participants struggled to articulate their thoughts in relation to images sometimes signalled something unspeakable, such as subjectivities that were non-normative and less ‘intelligible’,86 such as an image of two women in partial embrace.87 The various strands of my visual methodology were united through Foucault’s concept of discourse:88 a concept with an expansive reach. It covers the images themselves, the magazine copy and the words of my participants. Like the images I collected, I considered participants’ words to be statements within discourse: statements which stem from, and contribute to, long-standing discourses on women and fashion. Writing about talk and narrative, Iris Marion Young states: ‘The discourse we use when we describe our experience is no more direct and unmediated than any other discourse; it is only discourse in a different mode.’89 A difference does consist, however, in the vitality of verbal narrative as a mode of discourse: ‘It is alive and active as a cultural force, not just as a kind of literature. It constitutes a major reservoir of the cultural baggage that enables us to make meaning out of a chaotic world and the incomprehensible events taking place in it,’ as Bal notes.90 In my own study I found that participants’ comments breathed life into the images, as did the joking and reflections that stemmed from them. Showing images to groups of women activated their own sets of ‘cultural baggage’, some of which they voiced in order to make sense of the images before them. I thus understood participants to articulate their responses through the ‘discursive resources’91 available to them. For instance, when discussing their reception studies of ‘midriff ’ advertising images, Helen Malson et al. commented on participants’ familiarity with feminist discourse as a kind of critical resource they could bring to bear on the media imagery before them. James Curran similarly

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stresses that one’s ability to critique media imagery might relate to the ‘variable degree of social access to ideas and meanings which facilitate contrary “readings” of the media’.92 In my own reception studies I found discursive resources to vary between participants: the Central Saint Martins students from China (in their twenties) had proverbs I did not know, while the group of white British women aged from forty-one to fifty-eight had media references I was not familiar with, such as television adverts for Cadbury’s Flake in the 1970s and 1980s. Some women made sense of images through their own memories of childhood, which were then relayed through the mythologizing lens of ‘Romantic childhood’. Images, then, are not perceived in any objective fashion, but are instead filtered through one’s past experiences, identity positions and (sub)cultural competences. My reception studies were experimental, both in purpose and in scope, and as such inevitably have their limitations. The findings can be understood as a set of ‘contingent truths’, which Rubin and Rubin define as ‘truth that seems to hold at a particular time under specified circumstances’.93 While not generalizable to a broader population, ‘contingent truths’ nevertheless serve an exploratory purpose. As Fran Tonkiss acknowledges, it would in fact be inconsistent with the Foucauldian principle of discourse ‘to contend that the analyst’s own discourse was itself wholly objective, factual or generally true’.94 In discourse analysis Tonkiss suggests one should aim for ‘internal validity’.95 This involves aiming for ‘coherence and consistency’ as well as supporting arguments with adequate data garnered from discourse analysis.96 The resulting study should be critically ‘persuasive’ and offer ‘insightful, useful and critical interpretation of a research problem’.97 In my case, this was to reach a better understanding of the meaning and appeal of childlike femininities to contemporary women, following several waves of feminism.

Investing in childlike femininity When it came to analysing the words of participants, I found the women articulated a range of different investments in childlike femininity. Ien Ang and Joke Hermes define ‘investment’ as ‘an emotional commitment, involved in the taking up of certain subject positions by concrete subjects’.98 A person might be invested in a range of subject-positions at any given time, with some of these investments being conflicting or contradictory. The concept of investment is useful in that it avoids biological determinism as well as the idea that one simply ‘chooses’ to identify with subject-positions in media imagery in a wholly rational way:

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Investment suggests that people have an – often unconscious – stake in identifying with certain subject positions, including gender positions […] People invest in positions which confer on them relative power, although an empowering position in one context (say, in the family) can be quite disempowering in another (say, in the workplace), while in any one context a person can take up both empowering and disempowering positions at the same time.99

The key point is that investments generally involve ‘some satisfaction or pay-off or reward […] for that person’.100 From this, empowerment and subordination are not mutually exclusive categories. Furthermore, as Grimshaw notes, ‘it is perfectly possible to agree in one’s head that certain images of women might be reactionary or damaging or oppressive while remaining committed to them in emotion or desire’.101 In feminist literature, the concept of investment can be applied, for instance, to Joan Riviere’s discussion of ‘womanliness as a masquerade’.102 In her essay of 1929, Riviere recounts the experience of psychoanalytic therapy with one of her patients. The patient was an intellectual woman, adept at public speaking, who had a tendency to ‘put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men’.103 The woman sought male reassurance through ‘flirting and coquetting’ after public speaking, which Riviere interpreted as a bid to avoid ‘reprisals’ and ‘retribution’ for her intellectual prowess.104 Thus, while the woman in question might seem to relinquish her power in relation to these men she was nevertheless invested in a coquettish subject-position to the extent that it provided her with reassurance from ‘father-figures’ in the audience. Masquerading as innocent was therefore a way of securing psychic safety after a show of intellect, culturally coded as ‘male’. As will become clear in the final four chapters of this book, the women I spoke to had a range of different investments in the ‘woman-child’ of fashion photography: ranging from nostalgia for childhood, curiosity, intrigue, fascination, a sense of empowerment, feelings of comfort, aspiration, escape, identification with sadness, opportunity for articulating feminist critique and so forth. However, as Ang and Hermes remind us, investments in subjectpositions might also stem from unconscious motivations.105 Thus, while I could analyse the discursive statements of participants, there were inevitably ideas that participants chose not to articulate as well as a whole host of investments operating on an unconscious level, to which I did not have access – such as the idea of pre-oedipal longing, discussed by scholars such as Fuss, McRobbie and Radway.106 Furthermore, magazine-reading is often a solitary pursuit and may

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involve practices of daydreaming, fantasy, free association or abstract feelings, which simply cannot be articulated in words. As such we might consider Barthes supposition that ‘what I can name cannot really prick me’.107 Where a person encounters ‘punctum’ it may be difficult if not impossible to put that feeling into words. Transporting images from their normal reading context – whether that be reading in isolation or reading with friends – to the more critical context of a researcher-led focus group inevitably effects a change in meaning, which must be acknowledged, but is difficult to avoid.108

Conclusion This chapter has made the case for the usefulness of reception studies in making sense of childlike femininities in the fashion media. Differently situated women understood the ‘woman-child’ in different ways and articulated different investments in response to the imagery. While participant readings sometimes fell in line with my own, there were instances where they differed radically. In this way, reception studies have the potential to push the field of discursive enquiry outwards, beyond the researcher’s point of view, making for richer and more nuanced visual analysis. The divergent readings of participants gave weight to the idea of polysemy as well as the active role of the reader in making sense of fashion images. Although it is never possible to de-centre the researcher entirely – given that all data is filtered through her interpretative lens – I nevertheless found value in the reception study method and its capacity to challenge my own theoretical conclusions about the prevalence and appeal of the ‘woman-child’ in contemporary fashion photography. Looking beyond this particular project, there is scope for more scholarship on the reception of fashion media (and even fashion in its materiality). For instance, it would be interesting to see how the reception study method could be adapted for studies of ‘new media’, such as fashion film, Instagram, blogs and so on. More sustained attention to audience reception would provide a better sense of the role fashion media plays in the lives of people in the social world. This might avoid the scenario whereby ‘the study of cultural representations alone, divorced from consideration of their relation to the practical lives of bodies, can obscure and mislead’.109 Or, as Pritsch frames it: ‘the crucial question … is how to get from image to social reality’ – and vice versa.110 The findings of my reception studies are presented in the chapters that make up Part Two of this book.

Part Two

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The Romantic Woman-Child, Lost from Home

In an appendix to The Fashion System, Roland Barthes briefly discusses the ‘romantic’ genre of fashion photography: The second style is romantic, it turns the scene into a painted tableau; the ‘festival of white’ is a woman in white in front of a lake bordered by green lawns, on which float two white swans (‘Poetic apparition’); night is a woman in a white evening gown clasping a bronze statue in her arms. Here life receives the guarantee of Art, of a noble art sufficiently rhetorical to let it be understood that it is acting out beauty or dreams.1

This passage is instructive in that it flags three themes that emerge in the course of this chapter. First of all, mention of the word ‘romantic’ is significant. Although Barthes does not capitalize this term, his reference to the fashion image as ‘tableau’ along with his discussion of art, nature and dreams ties it to Romanticism as a movement. Secondly, the ‘festival of white’ is noteworthy in that white clothing has been used to discursively align women with children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as previously discussed. Whiteness also relates to skin colour in that the Romantic child is a very white aesthetic, excluding non-white ethnicities, and less privileged individuals, from its ambit. In this chapter I explore how these discourses converge on the figure of the Romantic woman-child in British Vogue and Lula magazines. This figure is elevated as ethereal creature, abstracted from the humdrum, everyday world. In some cases this abstraction depicts her as carefree but in others it does not appear to be so pleasant. Barthes’ mention of ‘poetic apparition’ is significant in that the Romantic woman-child often appears as already inscribed with her own demise: or at least the impending demise of her girlhood self. Loss is made visible through reference to Pre-Raphaelite visions of ‘white death’2 such as Millais’ Ophelia (1851–2), and The Lady of Shalott (1888) by Waterhouse. Reference is

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made to films such as Heavenly Creatures (1994) and The Virgin Suicides (1999) alongside Russian folklore as reimagined in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (1877). These visions of ethereal yet deathly feminine beauty inform constructions of the Romantic woman-child and work to signify the loss of childhood and traditional gender roles. A longing for a pre-industrial, pastoral age is also evident in this imagery. Here woman is repeatedly positioned as lost from home: be it the home of one’s youth, the domestic sphere or a sense of being in touch with oneself – in both body and mind. What threads the discussion together is the concept of nostalgia. Elsewhere I have explored the pleasures that nostalgia might offer to contemporary readers of fashion magazines.3 I will briefly recap on these ideas in the first section of this chapter before developing them further by thinking through gender melancholia in relation to the ‘constructed coherence’ of the Romantic woman-child.

The Lula girl as sublime and childlike Barthes, writing in 1967, viewed fashion as a discourse that echoed ‘the mythic situation of Women in Western civilization, at once sublime and childlike’.4 His statement continues to be relevant in the context of the contemporary fashion media, where both facets – the sublime and the childlike – find expression in the Lula girl who inhabits the pages of Lula magazine. ‘The Songbird’ is one such example, where Californian musician Joanna Newsom is introduced through the following text: Since featuring her in our very first issue, Joanna Newsom has been a girl of Lula’s dreams: bewitching and beguiling us with her wondrous music, her spectacular voice, and the magic that her music weaves. As she prepares to release her third album, she spoke to Lula of everything from home and harps to fashion and family.5

The accompanying photographs see Newsom exalted as near-transcendent being through many a rarefied guise: angelic or birdlike with ivory wings; gracefully en pointe, in opalescent shoes; posing sweetly – white heart in hands – amidst a bathtub of white fluffy feathers (far preferable to dirty bathwater, Figure 7). This characterization of Newsom as ‘elevated’ fits with wider media discourse on the musician. Will Hodkinson, in a review for The Guardian in 2010, recounted that ‘taking centre stage behind an enormous harp, with her flowing locks and floor-length gown, Newsom came across like a pre-Raphaelite muse’.6

The Romantic Woman-Child, Lost from Home

Figure 7  ‘Joanna Newsom: Songbird’. Lula no.10, 2010. Photographer: Annabel Mehran. Stylist: Isabel Dupré. Model: Joanna Newsom.

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Elevated creatures are of great import to ‘high’ fashion, being a world ‘peopled with “divine beings” […] and “fairy princesses”’, as Rocamora has observed.7 A winged Newsom approximates the divine in Figure 8, underlined by our knowledge of her playing the harp: that ‘orchestral instrument once most closely associated with angelic behaviour’.8 Being otherworldly, whether angelic or caught in a fairy tale, Lula Girls sidestep the contradictory interpellations that stem from the virgin/whore dichotomy that informs much societal discourse on what it means to be a woman.9 By combining discourses on ‘high’ culture with those on Romantic childhood – both of which construct their objects as ‘pure’ – the Lula girl is distanced from active, womanly sexuality through an ethereal, almost virginal rendition of femininity. This brings us back to divine femininity, since virginity has been mythologized as ‘an angelic state that […] existed in paradise before the Fall. It is a mediator between the human and the divine.’10 Yet, the sense of Newsom as divine is conveyed not only through her PreRaphaelite aura and artistic pursuits but also through a wider media discourse that positions her as childlike, beyond the pages of Lula magazine. Expressing disappointment with such reportage, Newsom stated: ‘I was bummed at everyone saying that my songs were innocent and nursery-rhyme-like […] and coding my eccentricities as childlike and naïve. I felt like it minimized my intelligence.’11 Newsom’s mention of ‘innocence’ is significant since it harks back to the myth of Romantic childhood, and the way it places childlike ‘purity’ in binary opposition to adult ‘knowledge’ – sexual or otherwise.12 Herein lies the difficulty in depicting women as ‘sublime and childlike’:13 while the language of sublimity ‘elevates’ Newsom from the contradictory demands of normative femininity, the language of childhood – such as innocence, naivety and nursery rhymes – while emphasizing ‘purity’ and joie-de-vivre, simultaneously works to undermine her intellect, her status as an accomplished musician and her literary prowess, thus reducing the content of her oeuvre to the ‘divisions of a highschool girl’s learning’.14 This rendition of femininity might be reassuring since it goes with the grain of language and normative discourses that align women with children, in opposition to men.15 In turn, the ‘constructed coherence’ of this subjectposition is naturalized, seeming to stem from some interior feminine ‘essence’;16 little is done to unravel the politics of childlike femininity and Romantic innocence, in all their exclusionary tropes. As explored in Chapter 2, under the force of the heterosexual matrix, a person will be intelligible to the extent that she or he maintains coherence along the lines of sex and gender,

The Romantic Woman-Child, Lost from Home

Figure 8  ‘Joanna Newsom: Songbird’. Lula no.10, 2010. Photographer: Annabel Mehran. Stylist: Isabel Dupré. Model: Joanna Newsom.

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sexual practice and desire.17 Coherence is ‘desired, wished for [and] idealized’ by the subject in order to maintain the ‘integrity’ of one’s sexed and gendered identity.18 Being gendered can be uncomfortable, even painful, because it often cuts off important parts of the self – those characteristics assigned as belonging to the ‘opposite’ gender. Furthermore, one can never quite fully inhabit the positions outlined in discourse; there always remains a gap between the is and the ought.19 In this way, belief in the coherence of femininity – and, by extension, masculinity – might represent the workings of disciplinary power at its most naturalized. For, as Barthes notes, ‘in passing from history to nature, myth […] abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics […] it establishes a blissful clarity, things appear to mean something by themselves’.20 This fictive coherence is key to understanding the appeal of the Romantic woman-child. She facilitates nostalgic escape, temporarily disavowing the contradictions of womanhood, whilst doing little to subvert its structures.

‘Heavenly Creatures’ in Vogue The ‘blankness’ of the Romantic woman-child21 is a theme that recurs in ‘Heavenly Creatures’: a spread photographed by Benjamin Alexander Huseby that appeared in British Vogue in March 2006. When I presented Figure 9 to school-age participants in reception studies, they described the women through all the tropes of Romantic childhood: innocence, blondeness and ‘naturalness’. One participant stated: ‘It doesn’t, like, do anything. I don’t not like it but … It’s just, like, in the middle.’22 This suggests a gender construction that is so naturalized that it comes across as banal or unremarkable. On a separate occasion, when asked what came to mind when looking at the image, Zoe (twenty-four) stated: ‘Just beautiful, I guess. Not really particularly anything’, before adding, ‘They seem, like, kind of far away, in a way. They’re almost in another world.’ This comment ties in with discourses on the Romantic child as abstract, asexual and even transcendental. Divinity is evoked through the title of the spread: ‘Heavenly Creatures’.23 This is also conveyed visually, as one participant, Emma, points out: ‘They’re all dressed in white: pure … innocent … But there’s something about the, kind of, blonde hair, blue eyes, white, emm, clothes which is very kind of angelic. ’ The photographic medium lends itself well to representing dazzling divinity, in that it allows the image to be ‘“embellished” (which is to say in general

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Figure 9  ‘Heavenly Creatures’. British Vogue, March 2006. Photographer: Benjamin Alexander Huseby. Fashion Editor: Miranda Almond. Models: unknown.

sublimated) by techniques of lighting, exposure and printing’, as Barthes notes.24 Divinity melds into abstraction by virtue of the colour white, with one participant, Amber (twenty-six) stating: ‘I think, like, it’s quite a nice colour, I suppose, like, well, it’s not a colour, is it? But, uh, like … [laughter] D’you know what I mean …

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a shade.’ The link between blondeness and divinity can be traced back through the textual history of Christianity, if not further, with Marina Warner noting its connotations of ‘heavenly effulgence … It appears to reflect solar radiance, the totality of the spectrum, the flooding wholeness of light which Dante finds grows more and more dazzling as he rises in Paradise.’25 Yet, the seemingly unremarkable or neutral character of these identities, as voiced by participants, perhaps speaks to what Richard Dyer describes as ‘the invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white (which is to say dominant) discourse’.26 This perpetuates a ‘regime of representation’27 in which white people are constructed as ‘the norm’ or ‘standard’ against which other people are positioned as ethnically ‘different’ in varying degrees. ‘Heavenly Creatures’ arguably belongs to a type of visual representation in which white femininities are made to ‘glow’.28 This is underlined through the use of white garments throughout the spread as well as lighting techniques such as soft focus, sun flare and backlighting. White beauty standards, such as these, have been articulated so widely that they come to be internalized as the norm, as argued by bell hooks29 and supported by participants Shanaz and Yvette in Chapter 4, vis-à-vis Oh, Lola! The second aspect of identity which is naturalized in the imagery is social class. The discourse on divinity and Christianity, mentioned above, harks back to the Victorian ‘Angel in the House’, an ideal that divided women along the lines of respectability: ‘The pure “womanly” woman stood in contrast to her opposite, the impure whore, the repository of those unacceptable desires and sexual behaviour whose displacement kept the virtuous woman and the home she inhabited pure and unsullied’.30 This implied a sort of asexuality (however paradoxical) on the part of the Victorian lady, which extended to any children who happened to be under her wing. And this served once more to place women (and children) in opposition to men; lust and active sexuality could be swept away from Victorian ladies and located squarely in the hands of men. The spread’s title, ‘Heavenly Creatures’ perhaps references the 1994 film of the same name, directed by Peter Jackson (Figures 10 and 11). Based on true events that took place in 1950s New Zealand, the film tells the story of an obsessive friendship and fantasy world built between two teenage girls: Pauline and Juliet (played by Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet). When threatened with separation – owing to changing family circumstances, and perhaps concern about the romantic nature of the girls’ friendship (given the 1950s context) – the girls plot to kill Pauline’s mother, lest they be separated. The film culminates in the brutal murder of Pauline’s mother, whom the

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Figure 10  Film still from Heavenly Creatures, 1994. Director: Peter Jackson. Actors: Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey.

Figure 11  Film still from Heavenly Creatures, 1994. Director: Peter Jackson. Actors: Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey.

girls lead to a remote location before striking a blow to her head with a brick concealed in a stocking. The representation of white girlhood, coupled with a tragic turn of events and a dreamy deployment of light, is echoed in The Virgin Suicides, as visualized by Sofia Coppola in 1999 (Figure 12). Adapted from the 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Coppola presents the Lisbon sisters’ girlhood through white dresses, whose simplicity appears against the backdrop of the girls’ dark emotional world. The complexity of their feelings stands in opposition to the seemingly straightforward representation of boyhood in the film, as Masafumi

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Figure 12  Film still from The Virgin Suicides, 1999. Director: Sofia Coppola. Actor: Kirsten Dunst.

Monden notes.31 The Lisbon sisters are subject to strict parenting and limited outings, particularly where boys are concerned, and the eventual suicide of all four girls can be read as a tragic attempt to assert their agency in the face of parental control. This harks back to the writings of Foucault, particularly his discussion of suicide and the ‘determination to die’.32 In contrast to the power to kill, wielded by the sovereign of times past, in the present era ‘death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it’.33 The fatal consequences of the Lisbon sisters’ expression of agency echo the murderous consequences of agentic girlhood in Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. Coppola herself has strong links to the fashion industry, not least in terms of her long-standing collaboration with Marc Jacobs. In 2001, Coppola was chosen as the face of Marc Jacobs’ first fragrance, in a campaign shot by Juergen Teller. She later directed the commercial for a trio of Daisy scents in 2014, the clip34 being described in Harper’s Bazaar as ‘quintessential Coppola: otherworldy and full of wanderlust, as an innocent-looking model traipses in the sun through bright Bavarian fields and gazes longingly into her lens. (Think The Virgin Suicides meets Little House on the Prairie).’35 Also anchoring Coppola’s aesthetic to the fashion context is the reference made to The Virgin Suicides in an interview with Leith Clark for DazedDigital. In response to Clark’s mention of the ‘secret boys’ who read Lula magazine – ‘A lot of them say the Lula girl is their crush’ – the interviewer goes on to liken Lula’s male

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readers to the boys who spy on the Lisbon girls, to which Clark replies: ‘It’s exactly like that.’36 This would seem to contradict Clark’s earlier comment in the same interview about Lula attempting to sidestep ‘the imaginary man in the room’. Yet, while The Virgin Suicides presents a heteronormative version of girlhood, Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures might be considered a queer film, given the sexual relationship between the two girls. This is something that can be read into the ‘Heavenly Creatures’ spread, which featured an image of two women in partial embrace.37 Participants had difficulty pinning down the nature of the relationship between the women and this was signalled by gaps in their speech and the phrase ‘I don’t get it’, which was used by participants on two separate occasions. That participants struggled to articulate their thoughts in relation to this image perhaps signalled something unspeakable, such as subjectivities that were less intelligible, in Butlerian terms.

Nostalgia: From place to time to the home of one’s youth Nostalgia was a theme that recurred throughout my reception studies of ‘Heavenly Creatures’ in Vogue. The idea of nostalgia is more recent than that of memory, as Raffaella Baccolini observes.38 Etymologically, the word ‘nostalgia’ links the Greek term nostos (return) with algos (pain), and essentially stands for the painful desire to return home. Coined by Swiss medical student Johannes Hoffer in 1688, the term originally denoted a medical condition suffered by Swiss mercenaries whilst serving away from home.39 ‘Nostalgia’ began to lose its medical connotations in the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century had come to stand for a more general condition – similar to, but not the same as – regret.40 Over time, the object of nostalgia shifted from being about space, in the geographical sense, to being about time: that is, the past. Immanuel Kant, in the late eighteenth century, noted that homesickness in mercenaries tended to be accompanied by recollections of home as a carefree place where one could enjoy ‘neighborly company’ along with the simple pleasures in life.41 Yet upon returning home, mercenaries were often disappointed because it was not a place they were longing for. According to Kant, what was felt was indeed a desire for home, but not in a geographical sense. Instead, the nostalgia felt was for the home of one’s youth: a temporal home, which could not be brought back. The ‘carefree’ nature of the girls in ‘Heavenly Creatures’ (Figure 9) speaks to several aspects of nostalgia as conceptualized by Kant: companionship, simple

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pleasures and carefree abandon. When confronted with the image in reception studies, participants tended to reflect on their own childhood pasts: Excerpt I Emily: It definitely takes you back to, emm … like, a fun time, like, something like that, but I don’t know how often that would happen now. Morna:  mmm Amber: Yeah Amber: It seems like they don’t really have a care in the world, they kind of … […] They just seem, like, young and, happy and carefree, whereas, I suppose, like, cause I’m older, you kinda think, like, ‘that, that’s really nice; that’s really idyllic kind of thing to do’, you know that thing that they’re doing. Emily: You’ve got to plan for that time now. Amber: Yeah [laughing] it’s not as easy.42

Here childhood is idealized through words like young, happy, carefree and idyllic, all of which are articulated from an adult point of view. The comments made by Amber and Emily square with Higonnet’s comments about the Romantic child as a vehicle for forgetting the vicissitudes of adult life.43 In many of my focus groups, the only relevance this scene had to their adult lives was in terms of holidays or annual leave: a kind of ring-fenced moment of pleasure in the capitalist calendar, marked out as separate from work and one’s regular schedule. Janice Winship argues that while pleasure might ‘[feel] like an individual and spontaneous expression, it has had to be learnt. […] It depends on being familiar with the cultural codes of what is meant to be pleasurable, and on occupying the appropriate social spaces.’44 As with pleasure, one might argue that our experience of nostalgia is also culturally constructed. Childhood envisioned through the lens of nostalgia might involve what Susan Stewart terms ‘nostalgic reconstruction’.45 Nostalgia posits past experience as better or somehow more authentic than experience in the present. In this sense, it involves longing for an idealized version of childhood that is unlikely to match the experience and feelings we actually had as a child. This leads Stewart to conclude that ‘nostalgia is sadness without an object’.46 It eclipses alternative discourses that point to the relative lack of power held by children in a society governed by adults. For, as Fass observes, ‘Freud turned memory and its consequent nostalgias for childhood […] into much more complex products of repression, redaction, and fantasy’.47 Yet an understanding of childhood as ‘Edenic state from which adults fall, never to return’,48 happens to fit nicely with the logic of the fashion system. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini point to the increasing presence of the word

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‘utopia’ in the commercial imagination, with companies operating under names such as ‘Utopia Bank Loans’ and ‘Utopia Furniture’.49 And in the fashion context, there is Arcadia: a British fashion conglomerate promising pastoral paradise. The childlike woman, articulated through the tropes of Romantic innocence, might therefore disavow the ‘dirt’ of an industry that sells products with an agenda of ‘planned obsolescence’, not to mention hidden conditions of production, environmental degradation, incineration of garments, and the physical and mental health of factory workers and models.50 The invisibility of labour in the symbolic production of fashion recalls Karl Marx’s comprehensive critique of commodity fetishism and the alienation of labour.51 Symbolically producing fashion through the lens of ‘purity’ ties in with the material production of commodities, whereby ‘any ghostly presence of labour that might haunt the commodity is cancelled by the absolute pristine newness and the never-touchedby-hand packaging that envelops it’, as Mulvey has observed.52 Consequently, the mythic gaze as ‘unpolluted’ or ‘innocent’ serves to ‘cleanse’ or disavow fashion’s less palatable aspects. In this sense there is a certain irony in picturing adult models in Western magazines through the lens of a ‘long childhood’53 whilst certain parts of the industry continue to rely on child labour to produce its wares, with those children being denied a ‘long’ childhood the first time round.54 As for the reader of fashion magazines, traditional femininity, or indeed one’s childhood lost, is open to be recuperated through shopping.55 Yet, in many cases the clothing presented in magazines like Vogue is beyond the means of its readership – the garments in ‘Heavenly Creatures’ range from £170 for Jil Sander plimsolls to £2,550 for a pleated georgette dress by Hermès. Barthes suggests that where ‘the garment cannot be obtained, denotation becomes vain’.56 The magazine must then ‘compensate for [denotation’s] uselessness with a system strong in connotation, whose role is to permit the utopian investment’ but ‘though utopian, the dream must be near at hand’.57 Applying this to ‘Heavenly Creatures’, participants commented on how they could not really see the clothing pictured. This is testament to a fashion editorial strong in connotation – Romantic childhood – but weak in denotation – the actual detail of the garments. Furthermore, every adult was once a child and if one has grown up in the West then one will inevitably have encountered discourse on Romantic childhood, given its ubiquity. The idea of childhood as Edenic (or, in the words of participants, ‘carefree’, ‘no worries’, ‘fun’) is therefore a dream ‘near at hand’, permitting facile utopian investment in the idea of childhood lost. Yet, that is not to say that readers are blind to this logic, as the following excerpt attests:

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Picturing the Woman-Child Excerpt II Morna: Do you think there’s anything we’re meant to think about them? SLK: Mmm, just that they’ve got carefree, they’ve got no worries. Gill: They’re happy. Cause it does make you think of not worrying about anything, doesn’t it? Penny:  And being a child. SLK: So maybe if you wear these clothes you’ll also be carefree … [laughter] … and go back to your childhood days of running around in a field. Gill: Like magic. Penny: It certainly would remind you of your childhood, anyway. SLK: It’s like the three of us playing around in the fields, or something.58

Here Gill and SLK ironize the image, poking fun at the logic of fashion and its promise to transport its readers back to childhood, ‘like magic’, through consumption, while Penny ties the image to her daughters’ personal experience of growing up in a rural environment. Yet growing up in the countryside was not a pre-requisite for nostalgic longing, as in the case of Jean who expressed nostalgia in relation to the image even though she had been a ‘town girl’. Gill’s mention of ‘magic’ is significant in that de Beauvoir characterizes magic as a ‘passive force’, linking it to the adolescent girl and the embellishment of her body: From this narrow and paltry existence she makes her escape in dreams […] she masks an intimidating universe under poetic clichés, […] she makes of her body a temple of marble, jasper and mother-of-pearl; she tells herself silly fairy stories. She sinks so often into such foolishness because she has no hold upon the world […] Magic involves the idea of a passive force; because she is doomed to passivity and yet wants power, the adolescent girl must believe in magic […] As for the real world, she tries to forget it.59

De Beauvoir’s point is that the adolescent girl has no choice but to escape through dreams, fairy tales and the ‘passive force’ of magic because the ‘real world’ is so inhospitable for her. Fashion has a vested interest in this kind of magical thinking because consumption promises to ameliorate that state of neverending longing.60 The consumer can escape through the wardrobe to Narnia, entering the collectively elaborated realm of Romantic childhood: a dream ‘near at hand’. The kind of escape and pleasure offered up by ‘Heavenly Creatures’ is one that involves forgetting adulthood, and its potential for empowerment, instead locating pleasure and freedom in the long-lost past. It is in this regard that ‘nostalgia is not just a sentiment but also a rhetorical practice’.61 The politics

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of nostalgia can immobilize one from acting in the present and working to make things other than they are.

‘Nostalgia for whiteness’ The whiteness of the models’ clothing in ‘Heavenly Creatures’ was commented upon in every one of the focus groups I conducted. This resonates with Barthes’ aforementioned comments on the ‘festival of white’ in fashion photography. Yet when it comes to the ‘woman-child’, it is not just the models’ clothing that is white; it is also their skin. The whiteness of childlike femininity might be attributed to the way it is discursively underpinned by the ‘exclusionary rhetoric’62 of Romantic innocence. The vogue for childlike femininity dovetailed with the ‘nostalgia for whiteness’ that Angela McRobbie observed in fashion photography of the early 2000s.63 According to McRobbie, the form taken by this whiteness depends on the publication: in ‘high end’ fashion publications, such as British Vogue, it tends to appear as a ‘powder puff ’ whiteness, most notably in the celebration of ‘white beauty’ in ‘the new generation of East European and Russian models’.64 This involved a reinstatement of boundaries between white women – as the nostalgic ‘norm’ – and non-white ethnicities, marked out as ‘Other’. Ultimately, ‘this new “powder puff ” whiteness emerges as more emphatically untouched by the requirement of white to register itself as ethnic’.65 It is a ‘re-colonizing mechanism’ which ‘re-instates racial hierarchies within the field of femininity by invoking, across the visual field, a norm of nostalgic whiteness’.66 McRobbie was however writing in 2009, and the subsequent appointment of Edward Enninful as editor-in-chief of British Vogue in December 2017 represents a turning point in the aesthetic of the magazine, following Alexandra Shulman’s twenty-fiveyear reign. Two prominent figures in the new wave of Russian models were Sasha Pivovarova, whose modelling career began in 2005, and Natalia Vodianova, whose modelling career began c. 2006.67 Both women are featured in ‘Star Girls’, a spread shot by Mario Testino for British Vogue in December 2010 (Figures 13 and 14). The editorial ‘toasts the supermodels of the decade in a starry portfolio’.68 A teary-eyed Vodianova is draped in Romantic innocence, her ballet pumps reminiscent of Newsom’s feet, en pointe in Lula. A caption accompanies the image, stating: ‘Russia’s fairytale princess, she is the wide-eyed, innocent beauty with a steely focus and philanthropic largesse.’ Mention of Vodianova’s philanthropy reinforces the logic of the fashion system; from a structural point of

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Figure 13  ‘Star Girls’. British Vogue, December 2010. Photographer: Mario Testino. Fashion Editor: Lucinda Chambers. Model: Natalia Vodianova.

view, free market capitalism can carry on as usual, because there exist non-state interventions through which the poor can be helped: through charities, food banks and the generosity of private individuals such as Vodianova. Pivovarova appears in the same feature, wrapped up in layers of white tulle and metallics. The copy once more emphasizes her nationality: ‘The Russian’s intense, ice-queen stare masks her true sweet, smiley nature. She holds her body with athletic precision, her elfin, porcelain beauty taut and frozen.’ The emphasis on coldness (ice-queen, frozen) and control (steely focus, athletic precision, taut porcelain beauty) is reminiscent of the way the ‘origins’ of whiteness have been linked to the mountains in the context of European discourse in the nineteenth century.69 Bernal notes the way such landscapes were revered by the Romantics, who saw them as ‘small, virtuous and “pure” communities in remote and cold places: Switzerland, North Germany and Scotland’.70 Such places, Dyer explains, had a number of virtues: the clarity and cleanliness of the air, the vigour demanded by the cold, the enterprise required by the harshness of the terrain and climate, the sublime, soul-elevating beauty of mountain vistas, even the greater nearness to God above and the presence of the whitest thing on earth, snow.71

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Figure 14  ‘Star Girls’. British Vogue, December 2010. Photographer: Mario Testino. Fashion Editor: Lucinda Chambers. Model: Sasha Pivovarova.

Indeed, Vogue even describes Pivovarova as having ‘porcelain beauty, taut and frozen’, chiming with the word ‘tautness’ used by Dyer to describe the mythic white body and its ‘battle with the elements’.72

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Lost from home: ‘White Nights’, alienation and death One spread in which the various nostalgias coalesce is ‘White Nights’ by Tim Walker, which appeared in in British Vogue in January 2007. The spread takes the viewer on a journey to Pivovarova’s Russian motherland: a trip doomed from the get-go, if we accept the object of nostalgia as being a time rather than a place.73 As if to signify the rose-tinted workings of nostalgia, the spread opens with the following words: ‘White Nights: Bathed in the ethereal light of Northern Russia’s midnight sun, model Sasha Pivovarova explores the dreamy landscape of her homeland. Tim Walker captures its romance on camera, while Michelle Duguid tells the story of an extraordinary shoot’ (Figure 15). In the protracted text accompanying ‘White Nights’ we are told that Tim Walker approached fashion editor Kate Phelan with an idea for a photo spread, based on the island of Karelia in Russia.74 Walker was ‘drawn by the idea of the “white nights”: around the summer solstice in July, darkness never comes to

Figure 15  ‘White Nights’. British Vogue, January 2007. Photographer: Tim Walker. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Model: Sasha Pivovarova.

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the northern-most areas’. This speaks to the association between white skin and Northern light,75 with Pivovarova bathed in light in way reminiscent of ‘Heavenly Creatures’ by Huseby and Coppola’s rendition of The Virgin Suicides. Both text and image in ‘White Nights’ are suffused with nostalgia for the past. The loss of tradition in rural Russia is verbalized in Duguid’s telling of the fashion tale; she contrasts the ‘cosmopolitan cities with an appetite for luxury goods and fashion’ with rural life in Russia where ‘it seems normal not to have running water’. Yet, true to the workings of nostalgia, such hardships are glossed over in favour of a romanticization of the pastoral past, as outlined by Barbara Burman Baines in her study of fashion revivals: As in most revivals of dress, wishful thinking often clouds the original reality, and current tastes modify those of other eras or places; in looking at rural revivals throughout the years, it is as if the countryside has been peopled twice over, once with those who work the land, in the brutish historical truth of short lives, dispossession and Enclosure Acts, sweating summers and frozen winters, and then peopled all over again by fashion with golden lads and lasses, gentle swain piping to their flocks in the valleys and contented milkmaids festooned with flowers in never-ending sunshine.76

Such dress revivals involve an abstract longing for times past, without specifying when exactly this time might be or what it meant to till the land. One such example is found in one of the location houses, which is home to four generations of the Maximov family. Duguid writes: ‘The two sisters sing us old Russian folk songs, which tell of the death of traditional country life; this is a subject close to our hosts’ hearts. Moved, Sasha starts crying.’ Being suffused with nostalgia (the painful desire to return home), as well as literally involving a homeward trip for Pivovarova, ‘White Nights’ is permeated with the concept of home. While many of the images are shot in the domestic realm, Sasha appears drastically at odds with this environment. In one image we see Pivovarova ‘dropped in’ to the heart of the home: the kitchen. Yet, she does not appear as mother, or even as adult, but somehow remains ‘stuck on the pin’ of childhood (to borrow Faludi’s term). She resembles the little girl who has been playing princesses (she wears a gold metallic party dress, with oversized bow), who is now ‘helping’ her mother bake a cake. Her contribution is messy, tokenistic, as she sits on the kitchen worktop amidst a raft of broken eggshells. She is the little girl ‘in training’ who will one day become a woman, observing the role she will later be expected to fill. Pivovarova’s childlike guise in ‘White Nights’ is reinforced by her appearance elsewhere in that same issue of Vogue.

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In one Prada advertisement77 she lies half-dressed amidst a sea of Prada ballet pumps in primary colours: a toddler amidst her toys. Alienation from domesticity and adulthood is echoed in ‘A Life Less Ordinary’, photographed by Paolo Roversi and styled by Lucinda Chambers for British Vogue in May 2010. The spread has a clinical feel, conveyed through minimalism, pale colours and muted lighting. As with Pivovarova, the model is shot from below, which creates a sense of distance or lack of intimacy between model and viewer. The model, Dorothea Barth-Jorgensen, appears in baby pink tulle, looking anxious with tense hands, sitting by the sink as if waiting to be washed by her mother. This meaning is anchored by the text, which invites the reader to ‘play dress up in Chanel’. The light behind her lends an air of ethereality, offset by the clinical, utilitarian feel of the kitchen around her. This is not a home that is particularly hospitable. While these childlike figures might interpellate the viewer as mother figure, I would argue that this is not necessarily the case. Both images are shot from below: the opposite of what one might expect if the reader were to be interpellated as mother. I would argue, in line with the nostalgic articulations of participants vis-à-vis ‘Heavenly Creatures’, that the models instead invite a nostalgic identification with the models’ enactment of childhood as well as a rejection of domestic chores and motherhood.78 For participants in focus groups, the image of Pivovarova amidst the eggshells was interpreted as domestic hell: Yvette:  She looks fed up. [laughter] She’s in her ballgown and she wants to go out but she’s got to make omlettes! [wild laughter] Yvette:  Do you know what I mean? Poor thing, I feel for you. Emma:  All dressed up and nowhere to go. Yvette:   [laughter] Exactly. Sayda:  It’s like for a hundred people, or something … Yvette:  Like ‘get me out of here!’ [laughter] […] Yvette:  It’s like being a domestic goddess, isn’t it, that kind of whole thing when you’re supposed to look amazing even if you’re still sort of doing cooking and cleaning. You’re supposed to do it in your high heels.79

This sense of Pivovarova making omelettes for a hundred people in her high heels is almost a parody of the ‘post-feminist’ sensibility of ‘having it all’ and the disservice this has done to women (i.e. they should not have asked for this, per the backlash thesis).80

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Figure 16  ‘White Nights’. British Vogue, January 2007. Photographer: Tim Walker. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Model: Sasha Pivovarova.

Yet, underpinning the images of Pivovarova as childlike is a melancholy mood, conveyed by the model’s watery eyes, her stiff body and her dressed-up self, so seemingly at odds with the backdrop of her homeland. In Figure  16 the photograph has a weathered finish and shows the model clutching a white dress up against her body. The dress is reminiscent of the ‘vintage white wedding dress with tiers of lace’81 worn by Cecilia in The Virgin Suicides. The pale garment, signifying Romantic innocence, seems to no longer fit, and

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Pivovarova looks wistfully towards the viewer with her back to her past self, reflected in the mirror behind her. There was a strong sense of unease when I showed this image to participants in reception studies: Excerpt III Yvette:  I don’t like this one; I hate this one. Morna: What’s creepy about it? Yvette: Because look, she’s naked there, she’s sitting there with this, almost as if she’s covering up … Sayda: She looks scared almost, like … Yvette: That’s her wedding dress almost, kind of forced. It’s almost like child marriage. Shanaz:  And also her hair, looks like someone just chopped it off. Emma: Oh, it does, actually. Shanaz: As if she had really long hair once and someone just went ‘you’re not having that anymore’ and just cut it off! Yvette: Yeah, yeah, yeah […] Emma: You know that, emm, who’s that woman in – this is ridiculous – is it Dickens? No … Is it Miss Havisham who’s that … the older lady who she was going to get married … […] Emma: She still wears the wedding dress and everything in the house is kind of the same as it was. I know she was a much o … older lady but there’s something about kind of, […] like, all the vintage-y stuff and her kind of being a bit stuck … Yeah, I dunno. […] Yvette: Oh look, there’s a brush on the floor as well which she used to use for her long hair … No longer does she use it cause they were chopped off! [laughter + ‘awww’]

This passage ties together several strands from this chapter so far. Miss Havisham is the jilted bride in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861). She is stuck bitterly in the past and brings up her daughter Estella to despise men and depend only on herself. Estella ‘in her anaesthetized coldness of heart’ is unable to respond to Pip’s romantic advances, as Angus Wilson observes.82 Miss Havisham has moulded her daughter into ‘a beautiful, richly-endowed instrument of revenge upon the hearts of men’.83 Commenting on the intrigue of Miss Havisham, journalist Lorna Bradbury, citing Dickens, writes: ‘It is her appearance that is so haunting, dressed all in white, but of a white which had long ago “lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow”; a cross between a waxwork

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and a skeleton.’84 This sense of discoloured clothing, lacking lustre, speaks to the presence of vintage clothing and objects that populate this, and many other spreads featuring the Romantic woman-child.85 Emma’s observation about Miss Havisham is astute in that Duguid’s text accompanying ‘White Nights’ states that the owner of the dacha (Russian for a traditional wooden cottage), in which the images were shot, tells the writer that ‘nothing has changed since 1955, when her grandfather built it’.86 This idea of freezing time finds expression in the body of Pivovarova, which is presented in a series of stiff poses, at times approximating the doll-like. This sense of relinquishing one’s desire (like Miss Havisham) – or one’s femininity – is further symbolized by Pivovarova’s shorn locks, which appear to have been chopped off as some sort of punishment à la Rapunzel.87 The model is in a bind, imposed from we know not where, her reddened cheeks reminiscent of the made-up ‘pommettes’ of prostitutes, used to mark them out as whores. Perhaps the image can be read through the language of the backlash: feminism has snatched your femininity, your choices. Either way, there is a sense of being trapped. Pivovarova could almost be embalmed in Figure 17, with its accompanying caption reading: ‘Armed warriors from Russia’s past loom on a wall at the Maximovs’; while Sasha’s armour is a tulle veil and ruff.’ This harks back to comments made by Susan Brownmiller, who writes: ‘Feminine armor is never metal or muscle but, paradoxically, an exaggeration of physical vulnerability that is reassuring (unthreatening) to men.’88 This is certainly one way of reading the ‘woman-child’, but in this instance Pivovarova is presented to a primarily female audience – who may, nevertheless, have internalized the predilections of the male gaze. It might be that the comparison between the armoured warriors (not pictured here) and a styled Pivovarova says something about female strength and the difficulties of signifying or visualizing it. Tulle might seem a flimsy material but spider webs are  strong in spite of their translucence. She channels Pierrot through her clown-like clothing: his sorrow, his suffering, his lost love. Her slightly smudged red lips, ruffled eyebrows and direct, almost accusatory gaze evoke a sense of the model as a corpse, whose eyes have just locked open: a creepy china doll. Her head seems almost detached from her body, reminiscent of ‘the face in the wilderness’, discussed by Coward in relation to magazine covers.89 This seems to suggest that she is cut off from herself; she is a mind without a body, alienated from herself because of ‘shoulds’ from the outside (the outside being discourse and the self being performatively produced through those very ‘shoulds’). In response to this image, participants described it as: ‘Eerie.’ (Shanaz); ‘Creepy. It’s a bit strange. Trapped.’ (Sayda); ‘It looks

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Figure 17  ‘White Nights’. British Vogue, January 2007. Photographer: Tim Walker. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Model: Sasha Pivovarova.

extremely uncomfortable. Can you imagine? Trying to get it all on? You’d get claustrophobic, wouldn’t you?’ (Yvette). These comments conjure a sense of being stuck that recurs at various points throughout the spread. This ties in with the work of Malson and her interviews with anorexic women.90 One of Malson’s participants, Teresa, stated that being anorexic ‘was something to do with not, not being in my body […] transcending my position,

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my sexuality’.91 Teresa felt that being anorexic allowed her to transcend a female subject-position  – historically associated with the body and sensuality  – and instead occupy the Cartesian space of the mind, with its ‘powerful, independent and disembodied subjectivity’.92 The idea of denying the flesh by virtue of abstinence and the exercise of will ties in with the discursive wedding of whiteness to the ‘spirit’ – through the Virgin Mary and Christ himself, as discussed by Dyer.93 Sasha’s cut-off head might therefore imply a critique of current feminine demands: there has been a plea for women to be recognized as equal to men in terms of their intellectual capacity yet this should not be achieved at the expense of the body. The link between transcendence and the thin body ties in with another element of the veiled Pivovarova: her eerie resemblance to a vestal virgin (Figure 18). Malson points to the stoicism and abstinence that the thin body requires and this ties in with the sacrifices made by vestal virgins, who had to commit to maintaining their virginity for the entire duration of their post (around thirty years). These virgin priestesses were some of the most senior religious leaders of their time but this power came at great cost to their personal lives, as Classics scholar Corey Brennan notes: ‘They had no family; they were totally on their own. This was unique for women in Rome […] they were also constrained by their positions as guardians of the sacred fire.’94 Pivovarova in ‘White Nights’ might therefore signify the loss of the more radical elements of the feminist project. As Nancy Fraser writes, Second Wave feminism was not only about critiquing the ‘androcentrism of the family wage’95 but also sought to end ‘the systematic devaluation of caregiving and the gender division of labor, both paid and unpaid’96 – not to mention the reorganization of kinship relations. However, writing from the perspective of the present it is possible to see that ‘second-wave feminism coincided with a historical shift in the character of capitalism, from the state-organized variant […] to neoliberalism’.97 While the former saw the state as key to tempering market forces, advocates of the latter sought to ‘use markets to tame politics’.98 This involved policies of privatization and deregulation of markets; welfare was replaced with competition and ‘publicly championed by Thatcher and Reagan’.99 The backdrop of neoliberal economics facilitated a resignification of Second Wave ideals in the interests of capitalist society. The media played a role in this process of resignification since ‘for the majority of people their experience of feminism is an entirely mediated one’.100 As a result, in the context of the West, some of the capitalism-friendly elements have been absorbed into neoliberal ideology, putting increased pressure on

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Figure 18  Raffaelle Monti, A Veiled Vestal Virgin, 1846–7. Photo © Kevin Tebutt.

women by making the two-earner family the norm although not necessarily through work that is fulfilling or adequately paid. Yet, alienation might apply to men as well as women. If we look to the work of Lacan, ‘his account of identity […] presents a self that is not whole and coherent but split and alienated’, as Caroline Evans observes.101 Discussing the designs of Schiaparelli in the 1930s as well as the figure of the New Woman, Evans argues that ‘in periods of rapid social change meaning mutates to the surface of things,

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and representation itself becomes a stadium in which competing definitions (here in relation to images of women) slug it out. The scopic regime of the mirror becomes the place in which the script of the self is written.’102 Repetitive reiterations of childlike femininity in the fashion media – particularly those cold, cut-off versions – might therefore tell us something about the punishing demands of inhabiting a female subject-position in the present social climate. Yet, white, affluent women, like those pictured, above are arguably those who have gained most from feminism, in light of their being the beneficiaries of other axes of power, on the grounds of skin colour and social class. The sense of melancholic loss conveyed by ‘White Nights’ can thus be unpacked with reference to Angela McRobbie’s reading of Judith Butler’s text, A Psychic Life of Power.103 McRobbie not only draws upon Butler’s work but also departs from it in that she mainly considers how gender melancholia plays out in the context of normative femininities, rather than the non-normative or ‘unintelligible’ subjectpositions that are the focus of Butler’s work. McRobbie’s analysis is particularly salient here in that she considers how melancholia and the internal struggles of contemporary young women are made visible, dramatized and played out in the medium of fashion photography. Gender melancholia ties in with nostalgia for girlhood or, in psychoanalytic terms, nostalgia for the lost object of same-sex desire.104 Such melancholia can range from disorders – such as obsessive dieting, anorexia, self-harm, binge drinking – to a negative attitude towards the self, which might involve ‘female self-beratement, low self-esteem and post-feminist discontent’.105 Crucially, this female melancholia has been naturalized as simply part and parcel of what it means to be a (normal) girl in the contemporary context. Furthermore, commenting on a report from the British Medical Association in 2000, McRobbie highlights the institution’s finding that ‘seeking to achieve a feminine identity makes women and girls ill. Being, as Butler would have it, “culturally intelligible” as a girl makes one ill.’106 This harks back to a scene in The Virgin Suicides where Cecilia is admitted to hospital after attempting suicide. As Monden notes: ‘The doctor asks her “What are you doing here honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets”. She replies calmly, but clearly “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a 13 year-old-girl.” This bespeaks a possibility that at least for Cecilia, being an adolescent girl is enough to take one’s own life.’107 In spite of Cecilia’s suicide attempt, the doctor downplays her depression because she’s ‘only’ a girl. The melancholia in ‘White Nights’ involves displacement from one’s home: be it the domestic sphere of times past, the home of one’s youth, the same-sex object of desire (one’s mother) or even the dearth of hospitable subject-positions

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Figure 19  John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott. 1888.

for contemporary young women. Yet, girlhood ‘pathology as normality’108 or ‘normative discontent’109 coexists with a post-feminist discourse purporting ‘girls have never had it so good’.110 The ‘common sense’ underpinning this discourse ‘serves to undercut the need for any new feminist initiative since in many regards women are after all doing better than some of their male peers’.111 It is therefore worth questioning whether doing well academically is the same thing as doing well in terms of mental and physical wellbeing. Fashion photography is a site in which this melancholia can find form: an important function given that ‘the source of pain [in gender melancholia] remains so nebulous and opaque’ in the contemporary context.112 Testament to the ‘dramatic form’113 given to feminine melancholia in fashion photography, ‘White Nights’ reaches towards death. The idea of the alienated self, always mediated from the outside, ties in with The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Tennyson.114 The Lady of Shalott, in her tower, can only experience the world as mediated through her mirror and through the tapestry that she weaves: ‘“I am half sick of shadows,” said the Lady of Shalott.’ This is echoed, visually, in the opening pages of ‘White Nights’ where Pivovarova appears in a rowing

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Figure 20  ‘This Side of the Blue: The Time and Place for Dreams to Begin’. Lula no.8, 2009. Photographer: Yelena Yemchuk. Stylist: Leith Clark. Models: Skye Stracke and Lola.

boat with white sails of heirloom lace (Figure 15). This can be read in parallel with The Lady of Shalott (Figure 19) as visualized by John William Waterhouse in 1888. Waterhouse’s painting has been termed a ‘revival of a revival’, owing to its many layers of nostalgic longing.115 This speaks to the nostalgic tone of ‘White Nights’, which involves a thwarted longing for a non-mediated body, a pre-discursive self. The painting takes its name from Tennyson’s 1832 poem, which itself was based on Arthurian myth (a preoccupation of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood). Not only does Waterhouse’s painting reference the poem and the medieval folklore on which it was based, but it also pays tribute to the earlier PreRaphaelite work Ophelia (1851–2) by John Everett Millais (which in turn drew inspiration from Shakespeare’s Hamlet): a complex network of references which dispels the idea of intertextuality as a distinctly ‘postmodern’ phenomenon. These paintings have a ‘strange affinity’ in that they both visualize ‘a woman’s death by drowning’.116 Like Rapunzel, mentioned earlier, the Lady of Shalott is confined to her tower. Surrounded by stone she sees the world in a mediated way only: through the mirror by her side and, in turn, through the tapestry she

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weaves. But she defies the conditions of her existence by looking at the world directly, and through the window she sees a man, Sir Lancelot, with whom she falls in love.117 Her direct gaze makes the mirror crack, marking ‘a break in her narcissistic shield, or self-assurance’, as Elisabeth Bronfen notes.118 A curse befalls her and she is punished with death: passing to ‘the other spectrum of dyadic relations, the absolute cancellation of her existence’.119 The Lady of Shalott then drifts towards her watery death: ‘She places herself, like Snow White, into this floating coffin, and dies, singing a mournful carol, just as she enters Camelot.’120 There is a sense, once more, of woman as ‘perfect’: passive, beautiful, whiter than white, frozen in her death boat. She is back at home in ‘the deep blue sea of passive femininity’:121 punishment for her direct, ‘active’ and curious gaze. This idea of frozen perfection is reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan (2010). The protagonist Nina plays the principal role in Swan Lake and obsessively seeks to be perfect in her work, and in herself. Perfection in this case is achieved through a deterioration in her mental health and, ultimately, death by obsessive petrification. What links The Lady of Shalott with ‘White Nights’ is the presence of a pale, ethereal woman, the idea of watery demise and the importance of fabric to both tales. The tapestry woven by the Lady of Shalott is draped over her rowing boat in the tableau by Waterhouse and this is echoed in ‘White Nights’, with ‘heirloom lace’ draped over Sasha’s boat by set designer Shona Heath. Both fabrics signify the past: one being a record of the world seen through a looking glass; the other belonging to family members of times past. Yet the nostalgic, backward-looking inflection of The Lady of Shalott in Figure 19, as rendered by Waterhouse, does not preclude an experimental approach to painting for, as Barringer et al. point out: ‘An “impressionistic” brushstroke replaces the precision of the PreRaphaelite touch, and the colours are softer and duskier – one might call them nostalgic, as if the early Pre-Raphaelite style were recollected in a dream.’122 This ties in with the ‘dreamy’ aesthetic of devastating girlhood in The Virgin Suicides and Heavenly Creatures. This intertextual baggage is brought to bear on Tim Walker’s ‘White Nights’, which visualizes the death of tradition in rural Russia. This is apparent in an image of Pivovarova as ‘today’s Odette’ in swan apparel: the tragic heroine of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, itself based on Russian folklore. The ballet sees the Princess Odette turned into a swan by a sorcerer’s curse. Forced to live on a lake composed of her mother’s tears (who grieves at news of Odette’s capture), the tale culminates in the death of Odette and her lover, who choose to drown

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themselves so as to be unified for eternity in the afterlife. Pivovarova is the ghost of Odette-as-swan, an illustration of Barthes’ ‘festival of white’ in which ‘two white swans’ appear as ‘Poetic apparition’.123 The ghostly coldness, feeling of loss and sense of being stuck converge elsewhere, in ‘This Side of the Blue’ in Lula magazine (Figure 20). Taking its title from a song by Joanna Newsom (of ‘Songbird’, Figures 7 and 8) the spread separates out the facets of the ‘womanchild’, presenting a melancholic child model with an eerie resemblance to her adult counterpart, Skye Stracke. The two figures might be two sides of the same self: one of which is irretrievably lost.124 The medium in which these images are rendered is significant, given Barthes’ suggestion that ‘the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially’.125 Yet, in spite of its melancholy themes, the ‘White Nights’ editorial was received positively in focus groups, with participants tending to prefer it to the ‘happy’ scene in ‘Heavenly Creatures’. Shanaz, for instance, saw the spread as ‘edgy’ on account of its eeriness and the model’s anger, seeing Pivovarova as ‘not your standard model with blue eyes and blonde hair, posing in a nice dress’. I then asked what was appealing about the edginess, prompting the following exchange: Shanaz: I like the fact that it’s a bit eerie in some places and she’s angry and then … I like that. Morna: What is it about the eeriness that appeals to you, do you think? Shanaz: It’s different, also … Emma: Kind of not perfect … Shanaz: Not perfect. […] Yvette: There’s got to be a story behind it, that’s why. If you’re happy, no one wants to know why you’re happy. If you’re sad, it’s like ‘oh, why?’ Is it intrigue, like, maybe people can, uh, kind of umm … Emma: Identify? Yvette: Yeah, identify more when there is sadness.

For these women, the sadness in the spread piqued their interest and made it easier to identify with the model, perhaps because, as Emma suggested, ‘it’s more about the person’. Shanaz saw Pivovarova as looking different from ‘standard models’, seemingly on account of the wig she was wearing as well as her emotional expressions in the imagery. Yet Pivovarova is nevertheless quite normative for a fashion model, being relatively young, with white skin and a slender frame. Shanaz is of Bangladeshi origin and Yvette is Black British, yet

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they did not comment on the ethnicity of the model in this case, which can be contrasted with their response to Dakota Fanning in Oh, Lola! (Chapter 4) as well as the representation of Meadham Kirchhoff ’s Slutwalk in British Vogue (Chapter 8).

Lost from home: Cold and resourceless The theme of home carries over into Lula magazine, with one example being ‘A Long, Long Way from Home’ (Figure 21). Published in 2008, the spread opens with a girl walking towards the viewer on what appears to be a disused railway track.126 This brings to the fore nineteenth-century anxieties about industrialization as articulated in Turner’s painting Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844). Such anxiety was also articulated in revival paintings that nostalgically depicted the past as pastoral as well as writing of the period, such as that by Victor Hugo and his contemporaries who ‘complained that train journeys had made the landscape evaporate’.127 The model’s high-collared dress in the opening image hints at Victorian attire: reinforced by the black-andwhite finish of the photo (although simultaneously dispelled by the model’s bare

Figure 21  ‘A Long, Long Way from Home: Stop Wherever You Find Yourself ’. Lula no.7, 2008. Photographer: Yelena Yemchuk. Stylist: Leith Clark. Model: Ali Michael.

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Figure 22  Advertisement for Miu Miu, 2011. Photographer: Bruce Weber. Model: Hailee Steinfeld.

arms). Her gaze is direct and her hands are awkwardly clasped as she walks in the direction of the viewer. Yet her push towards the future seems melancholy, as if through the ruins, rather than involving vigour and a lively best foot forward. One gets the sense, by virtue of her direct gaze, that she blames the viewer for her state of destitution. The train tracks recall a Miu Miu advertisement from 2011 (Figure 22) in which a tearful fourteen-year-old Hailee Steinfield sits on the train tracks, designer handbag in tow. The image was later banned by the British ASA following a complaint after it appeared in the September 2011 issue of Tatler.128 A sense of loneliness permeates the other images in the spread. The model seems cold (huddled in a blanket at one stage), lost from home, fragile and unhappy. This is reinforced by the editorial’s title: ‘A Long, Long Way from Home: Stop Wherever You Find Yourself ’. This might have been the chance for an adventure, but the distance from home is not experienced as freeing; she has negative liberty (absence of external constraints) but not positive liberty, in the sense of self-realization and freedom from internal constraints.129 Her distance from home embodies what McRobbie describes as ‘a certain coldness, froideur, disappointment, a profound reluctance to embrace domesticity, and

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a preference for some undisclosed state of otherness’.130 She is ill-equipped to look after herself; she lacks the resources to look after her basic needs (keeping warm). It is as though she needs a man (or better, a mother) to come along and cover her up with a warm jacket. This is a girl who struggles to direct the freedom she has been granted; she is a long way from home – told to ‘stop wherever you find yourself ’, presumably a call for enjoyment and pleasure – but she does not seem able to direct this. She is like the depressive who is told to be positive, and knows she should be making the most of the world and what it has to offer, but is simply unable to engage in activities that bring pleasure, instead being stuck in the repetitive, monotony of dejection (Lacan’s obsessive would sooner die than actively participate in the world). It is almost as though she feels compelled to do something with the freedom she has been granted (by her feminist forebears?), like a mother’s order to ‘go outside and make the most of the sunshine’. The railway evokes the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, while the lost, inadequately dressed girl evokes Andersen’s fairy tale, The Little Match Girl (1845).131 It tells the story of an impoverished little girl who cannot return home because she has not sold any matches and fears being beaten by her father: ‘She crept along trembling with cold and hunger – a very picture of sorrow, the poor little thing!’; ‘she grew colder and colder […] and at home it was cold too.’ The girl consoles herself by lighting matches, imagining her late grandmother to appear in the glow, before taking her hand and ascending to heaven. This idea of fashion models playing street urchins ties in with the representation of Keira Knightley as ‘Orphan Annie’ in the next chapter. Yet at least the little match girl finds the internal resources to comfort herself. This might be contrasted with ‘post-feminist’ femininities. McRobbie notes that in contrast to ‘pre-feminist selfhood […] understood in terms of absence of autonomy and dependence on male approval’, the normative ‘post-feminist counterpart requests of the female subject that she, with the support available to her, finds the resources within herself to regain the self-esteem which is always and inevitably lost’.132

Why are adult subject-positions so inhospitable? This sense of being dead before even reaching adulthood can be read through Neiman’s discussion in Why Grow Up? Here she argues, building upon Goodman, that ‘having failed to create societies that our young want to grow

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into, we idealize the stages of youth’ whilst ‘forgetting the fear and frustration that accompany every bit of progress, from standing upright to drawing a stickfigure’.133 Nostalgic visions of childhood seem preferable to a world that falls short of one’s expectations; for, ‘what troubles adolescents is the fact that there is no decent work to grow up for’.134 The trudge towards the future, as represented in Figure 21, might therefore be read as a protest against an economic model that Neiman described as ‘not only vastly unequal, and destructive to the planet; it undermines the fundamental human value itself, the desire to create something of value’.135 That these themes should be articulated on the bodies of women is significant if we take into account both Fraser’s and McRobbie’s comments on the incorporation of the ‘palatable’ aspects of feminism into the logic of neoliberalism. In other words, ‘Feminism has unwittingly supplied a key ingredient of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call “the new spirit of capitalism”.’136 Elaborating on this, Fraser argues that because women have poured into labor markets around the globe, the effect has been to undercut once and for all state-organized capitalism’s ideal of the family wage. In disorganized neoliberal capitalism, that ideal has been replaced by the newer, more modern norm of the two-earner family. Nevermind that the reality that underlies the new ideal is depressed wage levels, decreased job security, declining living standards, a steep rise in the number of hours worked for wages per household […] Disorganized capitalism turns a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement and gender justice.137

Fraser’s point is that the incorporation of feminism into neoliberal discourse has, on one level, involved a worsening of the economic situation of both men and women rather than ‘overcoming gender injustice [which] required ending the systematic devaluation of caregiving and the gender division of labour, both paid and unpaid’.138 In this regard ‘the discourse [of feminism] becomes independent of the movement’.139 The railways and industrial backdrops in ‘A Long, Long Way from Home’ are interspersed with pastoral scenes and as such convey a similar message to revival paintings in the nineteenth century. They express resistance to processes of industrialization, exploitative conditions of production and the shift away from craftsmanship towards the production of goods for its own sake. As such, the images speak to the Arts and Crafts movement, beginning in the 1890s, whose concerns overlapped with those of the Pre-Raphaelites.140 This interpretation ties in with the emphasis on craft in Lula magazine. One such example is a feature

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Figure 23  ‘All the Real Girls: More Folk, Less Factory – Bring On the Girls Who Make Things’. Lula no.3, 2006. Photographer: Gen Kay.

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from 2006 entitled ‘All the Real Girls: More Folk, Less Factory – Bring On the Girls Who Make Things’.141 The editorial presents photographs of ‘Lula girls’ who practise craft, such as painting, illustrating or designing. Yet their creativity is conveyed through a tone that is distinctly childlike in nature: 28-year-old Belle poses sheepishly, like a school girl being reluctantly photographed by her  parents (Figure 23). This image was juxtaposed with another featuring 27-year-old Edeline, clothed in Romantic innocence (white dress, Peter Pan collar) and nestled in the grass in a way that recalls ‘Heavenly Creatures’ in Vogue. The childlike imagery is reinforced by the backward-looking inflection of the questions put to the women, such as: ‘What were you like as a little girl?’ and ‘What was your favourite ever art project at school?’ While this celebration of craft might be a progressive counterpoint to ‘planned obsolescence’, the pairing of craft with childhood might be read as problematic. As Neiman points out, ‘the very word “craft” has become associated with “hobby”, something done as diversion by young children or Alzheimer’s patients precisely because they produce nothing of value’ in a capitalist economy.142 This sense of craft belonging to the past is mirrored elsewhere in Lula such as in the text accompanying a Pre-Raphaelite-inspired spread: Flowers in hair are a throwback to the make-your-own fun days of childhood and all the whimsy and wonder that came with it. A period when a rollicking good time required nothing but your imagination and the world was your arts and crafts drawer. It’s a gesture of innocence and adventure that goes hand in hand with being a child.143

Thus, not only are arts and crafts relegated to the past but that childhood is simultaneously hailed as a universal and idealized state, as per discourses on Romantic innocence. Locating craft as the preserve of childhood is problematic in a second sense; it precludes actual change in the present and future. If we accept Neiman’s premise that growing up involves using reason to bridge the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be then nostalgic longing for childhood is not a call for action. Instead, the lost girls in ‘White Nights’ and ‘A Long, Long Way from Home’ seem stuck in the nihilism of adolescence: the second stage in the development of reason, as outlined by Kant and characterized by Neiman as ‘the peculiar mixture of disappointment and exhilaration that accompanies a teenager’s discovery that the world is not the way it should be’.144 Rather than seeing craft, pleasure, wonder and curiosity as something irretrievably lost it might be more fruitful to think about how adulthood could be re-imagined

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to include more of what one feels is worthwhile rather than perpetuating the agenda of planned obsolescence. Such notions sound naïve because they do not resonate with prevailing economic discourses in the West: ‘Ideas of a more just and humane world are portrayed as childish dreams to be discarded in favour of the real business of acquiring toys.’145 As for fashion, the relation it bears to toys is scarcely masked in the fashion media, particularly when it comes to perfume and accessories (I am thinking here of Prada Candy as well as the countless editorials aligning fashion accessories with toys or sweets).146 In contrast to the ‘real girls’ in Lula who tie in with discourses on Romantic childhood, Neiman’s mention of toys seems to tie in with a discourse on children as over-indulged or brattish, like the discourse on Lolita in fashion photography, explored in Chapter 7. Read in this light, the curiosity and wonder associated with Romantic childhood might not necessarily have negative connotations for adults, given that writers like Rousseau actually revered such qualities in children. Supporting this notion is an interview with Iris Apfel, led by Tavi Gevinson for Lula magazine in 2012.147 I have discussed this at greater length elsewhere,148 but the main point is Apfel’s reverence for the childlike, which she describes as ‘all the better qualities of childhood. The wonder. Wonder is something that seems to have gone out of fashion. Everything is so material and so scientific and so technological and I think it throws humanism down the drain, which to me is a terrible thing.’149 In this way, Apfel’s definition of the ‘childlike’ approximates Rousseau’s ideal of Romantic innocence – articulated in opposition to the ‘adult’ world perceived as material, technological and scientific. In this way, the lure of the Lula girl might be understood as a sort of dissatisfaction with the analytical dividing line drawn between the feelings and experiences of adults and those of children. Elizabeth Wilson argues that ‘it is […] the very irrationality of fashion – its most often criticized aspect – that gives it significance. It bears witness that the magical is more than just the refuse, the useless rubbish of the rational Enlightenment world’.150 Furthermore, wonder need not be separated from rationality – the two are not mutually exclusive; it was Aristotle, after all, who noted that wonder first led men to philosophize.151 Fashion photography offers a space for investment in feelings of wonder, curiosity and escape that have been analytically excluded, or ‘forgotten’, from definitions of adulthood since the eighteenth century. A dreamy reconnection with one’s childhood self might even permit a freer interpretation of what it means to be an adult in the present.

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Conclusion The Romantic woman-child is a normative subject-position, whose ‘constructed coherence’ goes with the grain of language in its naturalization of ‘pure’ and delicate femininity. ‘Heavenly Creatures’ held potential for nostalgic escape to the home of one’s youth yet as the chapter progressed I presented images that betrayed the melancholy underside of such normative subject-positions. These photographs seem to present the neoliberal model of womanhood as one that deadens desire and pleasure, supporting the view of scholars who argue that this recuperated version of feminism is not exactly what we asked for.152 Instead, pleasure is located in the long-lost past of childhood or in ring-fenced moments of fun such as holidays or annual leave. Not only does this eclipse the trauma and frustrations of childhood in lived experience, but it also attributes power and freedom to a time when one’s autonomy was in fact hampered by the dictates of adult authority. By contrast, it is adulthood that offers possibilities for self-realization. Neiman notes: ‘As Kant said of Adam and Eve […] however comfortable it was to stay in the garden, the departure from home was the first step to freedom, and thence to progress. Like any departure, it is also a loss.’153 In the imagery discussed in this chapter, adulthood is not presented as a site of freedom or empowerment but instead as a painful melancholia. ‘White Nights’ and ‘A Long Long Way from Home’ present a version of the ‘woman-child’ who seems stuck, regressive and unable to look after herself. She is lost from home in every sense of the word. However, as Lula’s Romantic idealization of craft attests, nostalgia does not have to be stultifying: ‘For it is desire for change, for a better place, and a better life, that moves Utopia, and it is desire for a lost place and a lost time that informs nostalgia’, as Baccolini argues.154 In this way, the ‘never more’ of nostalgia is intimately connected with the ‘not yet’ of utopia.155 The nostalgia for childhood articulated through fashion imagery might therefore tell us something about the problems of femininity, work and our social landscape in the present. This oscillation between past and present might be termed ‘a critical, progressive nostalgia’156 that can be used ‘in a dialectical way – to change and illuminate present conditions and both individual and class consciousness in a way that might lead to political action and social change’.157 In order to move from past to future, Neiman underlines the importance of rationality as a means of bridging the gap between the world as it is and the world as we would like it to be. Or, in terms of the politics of gender, Jacobus argues that ‘feminist nostalgia looks back not only to what feminism desires but to what it desires different, now’.158

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I would however question fashion’s capacity159 to critically imagine utopia in the mainstream, as it would seem that for fashion, the better life is attainable through consumption, which does little to unpick the economic conditions under which we live. So, as for nostalgia-inducing fashion images, the better life of traditional femininity or one’s childhood lost, are open to be rediscovered through shopping. And of course, fashion has a vested interest in nostalgia because forgetting is so fundamental to fashion’s repetition of forms. The following chapter explores whether feminist curiosity might offer a way out of the ‘trap that one is inevitably in’.160 For, as Mulvey notes: Pandora is stuck in her myth but feminist curiosity can push forward. Such feminist curiosity and meaning-making might allow for a shift away from ‘the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning’.161

6

Fashion’s ‘Femme-Enfant-Fatale’: Surrealism, Curiosity and Alice in Wonderland

When I first encountered the image of Keira Knightley in Figure 24, I read it as emerging primarily through discourses on innocence and virginal femininity, much like ‘Heavenly Creatures’ in the previous chapter. It was shot by Ellen von Unwerth for Vogue Italia (January 2011) and the pale pink dress, bare feet and porcelain skin appeared emblematic of Joshua Reynolds’ painting, The Age of Innocence (1788).1 The room seemed to belong to a stately home, tying in with the privileged character of Romantic innocence: a reading reinforced by Knightley’s roles in English period dramas directed by Joe Wright, such as Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007). In light of discourses on Romantic childhood, I thus concluded that constructing Knightley as curious and wondrous positioned her as infantile in opposition to ‘adult’, male subjectivities as bastions of knowledge and rationality.2 Or as one participant, Smithy, put it, ‘she’s almost like a fairy at the bottom of the garden, that’s just been captured and dropped into a man’s library!’ Yet as my research progressed, the readings of my participants began to complicate this vision of Romantic innocence. For instance, Amber and Emily commented on the way the ‘purity’ of Knightley’s Chanel dress was interrupted by its black patches as well as her dark make-up and painted nails. These elements were described as ‘jarring’ and both participants read Knightley as secretive, mystical or ‘up to something’. These readings prompted me to revisit my initial interpretation of the image, situating it within a different discourse on childlike femininity: that of the surrealist femme-enfant. The figure of the femmeenfant was an important trope in Surrealism, and emerged out of a number of intersecting discourses: Freudian discourses on childhood and the unconscious, Romanticism, medieval mysticism, and long-standing discourses on the femme fatale. Reading Knightley’s femininity through the lens of the femme-enfant thus

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Figure 24  ‘Keira Knightley’. Vogue Italia, January 2011. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Stylist: Leith Clark. Model: Keira Knightley.

provided a means of reconciling the contradictory elements of the image, leading me to question whether the femme-enfant of fashion photography might be an instance where childlike femininity was re-signified to more empowering ends. While in the previous chapter the Romantic woman-child was shown to represent nostalgic escape from the weight of the present, the surrealists sought a different kind of escape through the femme-enfant: transcendence of bourgeois values and rationality. It is not my intention to survey the many manifestations of the femme-enfant of Surrealism within the confines of this chapter. Instead, I will focus the discussion in the following way. Firstly, I look to André Breton’s

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manifestoes of Surrealism to establish the early tenets of Surrealism and the discourses from which it sprang. From there, I consider the emergence of the femme-enfant as a symbol of subversion, described in Breton’s Arcane 17 (1945) as a figure who ‘sends fissures through the best organized systems because nothing has been able to subdue or encompass her’.3 I then consider feminist critiques of the male-authored femme-enfant, before looking at the ways this version of femininity was re-signified by female members of the movement, such  as Dorothea Tanning. I then relate these ideas to representations of the woman-child in contemporary fashion photography.

André Breton and the emergence of Surrealism Art historian Whitney Chadwick notes that the figure of the femme-enfant ‘[dominated] Breton’s vision throughout the 1930s’.4 In order to understand Breton’s reverence for this figure, one must first recognize the conditions under which Surrealism, as a movement, emerged. According to Chadwick, Breton returned to Paris in the aftermath of the First World War to ‘confront a society he had come to despise’.5 He was unemployed and disaffected, holding ‘his culture and values personally responsible for the recent and senseless slaughter of tens and thousands of young men’.6 He abhorred the French education system for its glorification of war and conquest and saw the literary establishment as ‘effete, complicitous, and isolated from political and social realities’.7 Inspired by what Chadwick terms ‘Apollinaire’s call for an art of revolt’,8 Breton turned to poetry as a means of confronting these issues and in 1924 he published his first Manifesto of Surrealism. In that first manifesto, Breton outlined the cornerstone of his vision: ‘I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak’.9 This involved a critique of Enlightenment logic and a search for alternative versions of knowledge and truth: ‘Under the pretence of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices.’10 The ‘beloved imagination’, in Breton’s view, was being dulled by the tendency to analyse, to classify and to make the unknown known.11 The reverence for childhood expressed in Breton’s manifesto harks back to Rousseau’s writing in Émile, where he conceptualized childhood as being closer to the ‘state of nature’. Similarly, Breton asserted that the imagination in childhood ‘knows no bounds’ but as the child grows older it becomes hampered by notions

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of utility until finally, at the age of twenty, it ‘[abandons] man to his lusterless fate’.12 The supreme value of childhood was made clear in the opening paragraph of the manifesto, where Breton rehearsed the tenets of Romantic innocence, where one could enjoy ‘the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything’.13 It is perhaps childhood that comes closest to one’s ‘real life’; childhood beyond which man [sic] has at his disposal, aside from his laissez-passer, only a few complimentary tickets; childhood where everything nevertheless conspires to bring about the effective, risk-free possession of oneself. Thanks to Surrealism, it seems that opportunity knocks a second time. It is as though we were still running toward our salvation, or our perdition.14

Breton thus hailed Surrealism as an opportunity for man15 to escape enslavement to ‘practical necessity’16 and rediscover his childhood sense of self. Yet, there is a certain irony in Breton’s condemnation of practical necessity. Surrealism defined itself in opposition to the values of the bourgeois, yet it tends to be the bourgeois alone who are sufficiently privileged to distance themselves from practical concerns and participate in ‘the games of culture’, as Pierre Bourdieu has shown.17 Romantic childhood was not the only discourse that Breton drew upon: he also looked to psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on dream worlds, childhood and the unconscious. Lauding Freud’s ‘discoveries’, Breton proclaimed that ‘the imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights’.18 Breton’s reverence for psychoanalysis is noteworthy, given the seeming incompatibility between Romantic innocence and Freud’s theories on child sexuality. Moreover, Breton’s vision of childhood as a carefree state contradicts Freud’s view on childhood as the site of trauma. Nevertheless, these inconsistencies were glossed over through Breton’s emphasis on dream worlds and the imagination. The relationship between psychoanalysis and Surrealism has been described by Hal Foster as ‘ambivalent’ and the relationship between Freud and Breton as ‘a magnetic field of strong attractions and subtle repulsions’.19 Yet, one preoccupation common to both men was the ‘enigma’ of woman, with Breton famously declaring: ‘The problem of woman is the most wonderful and disturbing problem there is in the world.’20

The Surrealist femme-enfant The numerous discourses informing Bretonian surrealism eventually collapsed onto the hybrid figure of the femme-enfant, which became central to Breton’s vision in the 1930s.21 This figure, in her hybridity, allowed myths of childhood

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and  femininity to be recalled simultaneously. As enfant she could channel Romantic innocence, virginity, ethereality and the celestial. And as femme she could channel the movement’s revolutionary fervour through woman as ‘sorceress, erotic object, and femme fatale’.22 Woman became a symbol of transcendence, mythologized as ‘a creature of grace and promise close in her sensibility and behavior to the two sacred worlds of childhood and madness’.23 In this way, she became the vehicle through which the concept of ‘the marvellous’, as introduced in Breton’s first manifesto, could be explored: a concept which would eventually supersede automatism as the first principle of Surrealism. An early iteration of the femme-enfant can be found in an edition of La Révolution Surréaliste from October 1927 (Figure 25). Chadwick describes the photograph as: ‘A prototype of the femme-enfant, or woman-child, that enchanting creature who through her youth, naiveté, and purity possesses the more direct and pure connection with her own unconscious that allows her to serve as a guide for man.’24 Appearing under the heading L’Ecriture Automatique, the femme-enfant is clothed almost completely in black but for her white collar and petticoats. She resembles a schoolgirl perching awkwardly at her desk, ‘midway between child and vamp with her rosebud mouth’.25 Her black hair is cropped – befitting the fashions of the age; her eyes are locked open, like a china doll; her gaze is directed upwards, away from the viewer, whilst her left hand seems animated of its own accord (automatic writing). Her limbs look stiff and wooden, conveying a sense of the femme-enfant as ventriloquist’s dummy. This befits Breton’s use of ‘Woman’ as a vessel through which to expound his theoretical ideas. It was through his mythological Woman that Breton would transcend the values he held responsible for the First World War. Woman represented man’s ‘salvation’ and as such can be understood as ‘inseparable from the pain and anger that gave birth to Surrealism’, as Chadwick has argued.26 Breton’s femmeenfant thus takes her place in the long line of women who are posited as object rather than subject of the gaze, as muse rather than creator, as body rather than mind. The agency of women as actors in the world is wiped out in favour of the symbolic Woman, who comes to signify something beyond herself, at the behest of her creator. In this regard, Breton’s essentialized vision of Woman as closer to the unconscious, closer to madness and closer to Romantic childhood served to render women’s needs enigmatic and beyond rational comprehension. This brings us to a further issue: namely, the relationship between the symbolic femme-enfant of Surrealism – Woman as mythical muse – and reallife female members of the movement. Chadwick suggests that the trope of the

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Fashion’s ‘Femme-Enfant-Fatale’

Figure 25a and 25b  ‘L’Écriture Automatique’, La Révolution Surréaliste no.9–10. October 1927.

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femme-enfant ‘[worked] to exclude women from the possibility of a profound personal identification with the theoretical side of Surrealism during the next decade’.27 She points to the way certain members of the movement, such as MarieBerthe Aurenche and Marie Laurencin, were posited as real-life femme-enfants. For instance, Apollinaire ‘invoked Symbolist polarities to express the duality of feminine nature […] and constructed an image of his longtime companion, the painter Marie Laurencin, as an eternal child’.28 Furthermore, art historian Catriona McAra notes how Max Ernst, in his novel Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (1930), represented his wife Marie-Berthe Aurenche ‘in the guise of a little girl of a similar age and in similar attire to John Tenniel’s Alice illustrations’.29 Thus, the femme-enfant at first sight seems simply to re-inscribe the position of woman – in art history and elsewhere – as voiceless muse. By contrast, in the social world the position of women was changing. The war had freed many women from the confines of the home and this provided opportunities for paid employment after the war, as well as reigniting the quest for universal suffrage. Although Breton and his followers perceived themselves as breaking radically with convention, when it came to female emancipation, they remained ambivalent, as Chadwick notes: They believed in the liberation of women but were unwilling to join the clamor and support a movement promoted by the very individuals whom they held personally responsible for the current state of literary and moral bankruptcy. Moreover, their adolescent images of women had derived from literature, and from nineteenth-century literature at that.30

There was therefore a disconnect between the progress being made by women in the social world and the status of women within the Surrealist movement. For Natalya Lusty, ‘the paradox defined here by Chadwick is the simultaneous absence and presence of “woman” within Surrealism. That is, her historical absence from overviews and accounts of the movement despite her heightened visibility as an subject of desire, indeed as the very emblem of Surrealist revolutionary practice.’31 Lusty departs from Chadwick, however, when it comes to the position of women artists within Surrealism. She draws a distinction between the early part of the movement, in which women were mostly posited as ‘muses, scribes and emblems’, and the later phase of the movement – in the 1930s and 1940s – where women came to play a more active role as artists, intellectuals, and political activists.32 Other scholars, such as Catriona McAra recognize the way women within the movement were positioned as childlike, whilst also looking for moments of empowerment through alternative readings

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of the femme-enfant.33 For instance, she suggests that male members of the movement may have self-feminized through identification with the femmeenfant, thus allowing for the fantasy of increased integration of the feminine and masculine parts of themselves. This resonates with comments made by Lois Drawmer in relation to Lewis Carroll and his character Alice: ‘In mediating and indeed fetishising the point of view of [a] pre-adolescent young girl, Carroll effectively ventriloquises Alice’s identity.’34 This harks back to Butler’s discussion of assuming a sexed and gendered subject-position under the force of the heterosexual matrix. Whichever position one inhabits – whether coded as male or female – it will necessarily entail the exclusion of another, or others, to the cost of the subject.35 Or as Foucault puts it, ‘How much does it cost the subject to be able to tell the truth about itself?’36 These scholarly re-readings of the femme-enfant demonstrate how discourse holds within itself the possibility for re-signifying gender ideals. In the introduction to this chapter I noted Breton’s description of the femme-enfant as a figure who ‘sends fissures through the best organized systems because nothing has been able to subdue or encompass her’.37 Mention of ‘fissures’ is significant in that Butler uses this term when discussing strategies of resistance. Given that ‘coherent’ gender identities are the sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice […] it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm.38

In contrast to the naturalized coherence of the Romantic woman-child as she appears in imagery such as ‘Heavenly Creatures’ (Figure 9), the contradictory discourses underpinning the Surrealist femme-enfant might hold more potential for unsticking the fictional coherence of ‘woman’ as a gendered being. Scholars such as Lusty and McAra suggest that the femme-enfant can be resignified to more feminist ends: making visible, in the process, the ‘mechanism’ of gender construction.39 Even before we move on to look at fashion photography, under the umbrella of Surrealism the figure of the femme-enfant was not chained to a fixed signified. Instead the meaning of this emblem evolved over time, with artists such as Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington later adopting the femme-enfant in order to subvert hegemonic discourses on gender, sexuality and social class. For instance, Carrington’s fairy tale Little Francis might be read as ‘a criticism of her femme-enfant status’ within the movement.40 Significantly, as

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Lusty notes, these female surrealists have ‘only more recently become subjects of intellectual inquiry and evaluation’ and recent feminist re-evaluations have ‘inevitably shifted the contours of the movement and its relationship to the wider cultural and historical zone of modernism’.41

The femme-enfant in fashion photography A spread shot for i-D in April 1999 provides an example of how the different strands of Surrealism come together through the figure of the femme-enfant in fashion photography.42 Photographed by Juergen Teller and styled by Venetia Scott, the model Jen Dawson appears in intermittent states of boredom and mischief, play and despondence. I have been unable to include the images here (for rights reasons) but will unpack the visuals since they are central to my argument. The spread is presented in black and white, but for one image where Dawson appears in a crimson T-shirt, echoing the bright red mushrooms beside her. These details, along with Dawson’s youthful appearance and paper crown (elsewhere in the spread), anchor the editorial firmly in the realm of Alice in Wonderland. This reading is reinforced by the spread’s title, ‘So she sat, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland’: a quote from Lewis Carroll’s tale.43 Alice was a ‘recurrent motif ’ in Surrealism, with Breton’s interest in Carroll being piqued at around the same time as the femme-enfant emerged as a central symbol for the movement.44 Surrealists mobilized Alice as an ‘investigatory trope’45 whose sense of wonder was revered by Breton, along with the ‘nonsense and dream narration’46 that surround her. Another image sees Jen Dawson’s long black hair billowing upwards, recalling Dorothea Tanning’s femme-enfant in Jeux d’Enfants (Figure 26), whilst Dawson’s body is clothed in the black-and-white garb of the femme-enfant automaton. Her gaze is fixed upwards, suggesting a trance-like state; her feet hover above the ground, suggesting levitation or departure from lucidity. The model’s flat Comme des Garçons Mary Janes echo those of the automaton whilst simultaneously subverting girlhood through reference to the tomboy, implied by Comme des Garçons (even if the actual French for tomboy is garçon manqué).47 Her dark clothing combined with her insouciant gaze means Dawson bears more than a passing resemblance to six-year-old Wednesday from the macabre Addams family (Figure 27). So while Breton sought to ‘lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion’,48 the Addams family represent the antithesis of North American family values. Reference to Wednesday Addams remains latent in the i-D spread

Fashion’s ‘Femme-Enfant-Fatale’

Figure 26  Dorothea Tanning, Jeux d’Enfants, 1942.

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Figure 27  Film still from Addams Family Values, 1993. Director: Barry Sonnenfeld. Actor: Christina Ricci.

whilst in Lula magazine the reference is made concrete. There, the six-year-old Wednesday is proffered as a role model for readers under the heading: ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Difficult and Deadpan and Wonderfully Different, Lula Dreams of Wednesday’ (Figure 28). Menace is central to surrealist visions of girlhood, as Mary Ann Caws has observed.49 In Jeux d’Enfants (1942) by Dorothea Tanning, rebellious girl-children claw at the wallpaper lining the home: a drive towards the unconscious, a spurning of bourgeois politesse. (This is echoed in the spread by Juergen Teller, where Dawson’s fingers dig into the wall behind her as she levitates: lost in trance-like reverie whilst simultaneously poised to attack.) Jeux d’Enfants is a scene of terror, depicting two pubescent girls in the act of peeling back wallpaper to reveal fleshy female bodies beneath. One girl – clothed in the muddy white of innocence lost – strips back the paper to reveal a female stomach and pubic area, while a second girl finds her hair drawn upwards into the dormant flesh, like the lick of a flame. A third body is discernible only by its legs: seemingly jettisoned, unconscious or already dead. The bodies are ‘convulsed and sexualized, lined up against the wall in rapidly receding perspective’,50 clad in ‘pseudo-Victorian’51 attire. Wallpaper is a significant motif, in that ‘Tanning once referred to her hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, as a place “where nothing happens but

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Figure 28  ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Difficult and Deadpan and Wonderfully Different, Lula Dreams of Wednesday’. Lula no.7, 2008. Illustrator: Jonas Löfgren (Bildmekanik).

the wallpaper”’.52 The image might therefore represent a critique of Tanning’s bourgeois background and the domestic role ascribed to women therein, given the function of wallpaper as lining for the home. Returning to Tanning’s image, critique of bourgeois femininity through the tearing of wallpaper is particularly poignant in that it recalls the gothic short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, entitled The Yellow Wallpaper. Written in 1892, the tale is told through the eyes of the protagonist – a woman suffering from symptoms of ‘hysteria’ – who is confined to an upstairs bedroom, upon the advice of her physician husband. Forbidden from writing or looking after her children or home, the woman has only the wallpaper with which to occupy her mind. Descending gradually into psychosis, she becomes fixated on the wallpaper: its pattern, its smell, its overbearing and sickly nature. As the narrative unfolds, she comes to see the front and back patterns in motion, eventually concluding that there is a woman, or women, trapped behind the paper. In an attempt to save them, she resorts to tearing down huge widths of the wallpaper, finally declaring, to her aghast husband, ‘I’ve got out at last … in spite of you and [the maid] Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’ Leonora Carrington similarly critiqued her bourgeois origins through the figure of the femme-enfant. One notable example consists in her short story

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La debutante (1939). It tells the tale of a girl who is tired of conversing with girls her own age and instead seeks intellectual solace with a hyena she met at the zoo. The girl is meant to be attending a debutantes’ ball, organized in her honour, but she has no desire to be there. Having voiced her despair at this predicament, the young girl proceeds to hatch a plan with the hyena. The hyena will take the girl’s place at the ball, lured chiefly by the prospect of delicious food. Returning home, the debutante begins preparing the hyena for the ball. Things are going well, save for her mother’s complaints about the foul odour emanating from the bedroom and the hyena’s reservations about the extent to which they can disguise her bestial face. Yet, all is not lost – the girl and hyena arrive at a grotesque solution: they will kill the debutante’s maid, and the hyena will wear her face to the ball. This leaves the debutante free to stay at home, reading Gulliver’s Travels, while her animal friend has fun at the dance. Unfortunately, the plan is not entirely successful and the debutante’s mother returns home, furious. The identity of the hyena had been revealed at dinner, when s/he retorted: ‘I smell a bit strong, eh? Well I don’t eat cake.’ Following this, she or he ripped off the maid’s face, ate it, and fled through a nearby window. Taken at face value, La Debutante can be read as a critique of bourgeois ‘coming out’ rituals, the marriage market, and the pleasantries and potential absence of desire entailed by this.53 Lusty argues that Carrington succeeds in subverting the idea of the femme-enfant as ‘erotic spectacle’ through the beastliness and ‘failed transcendence’ of the hyena-maid she depicts.54 That Carrington uses the motif of the hyena is noteworthy in terms of its ‘mythological and zoological status as a sexually hybrid creature’.55 For instance, in female spotted hyenas, the clitoris is elongated, meaning it resembles a penis. As a consequence, for centuries it was assumed hyenas were hermaphrodites. The female hyena is known to dominate her male counterparts and it was against this discursive backdrop that MP Horace Walpole called Mary Wollstonecraft a ‘hyena in petticoats’, following the publication of her subversive treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.56 Taken together, the imagery of Carrington, Tanning and Perkins Gilman can be read as a pointed critique of femininity, which is subject to the control of men, in terms of both confinement to the domestic sphere and the way women were pathologized through the ‘catch-all’ condition of hysteria.57 Given the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Surrealism, Tanning’s femme-enfant may also speak to frightening desires, which are repressed, denied and evaded. ‘The voice of the unseen’, writes Caws, ‘[conjures] something we do not want to, or cannot

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face’.58 Tanning’s paintings – with their ‘tearing, pulling, execrating, banishing – only hint at the terror behind that wall’.59 In Tanning’s haunting image, there is a duality of surfaces: the girl’s back is cleaved, splitting in two, like a piece of dry wood, whilst the girls claw at the surface of what appears to be a giant body, revealing yet another layer of flesh. And in La Debutante an aggressive beast lurks behind the human face of the maid. The tears of flesh in Jeux d’Enfants are reminiscent of Elsa Schiaparelli’s Tear-Illusion dress from 1938 (Figure 29): a designer with links to the Surrealist movement in Paris. Caroline Evans notes competing readings of the trompel’oeil motifs: ‘They are the colors of bruised and torn flesh; yet it is completely unclear whether the illusion is meant to suggest torn fabric or flesh. Is the cloth below the “tears” textile or skin? Do the rips designate poverty (rags not riches) or some form of attack?’60 The violence of repression is discussed in Butler’s work where she argues that in order to inhabit a coherent sexed and gendered subject-position, one must necessarily disavow other possibilities: painful exclusions and sacrifices must be made, in the name of coherence. The violence of these exclusions – or ‘tacit cruelties’61 – can be articulated through metaphors of the fashioned body. Writing about the work of Nick Knight, Bancroft suggests that the ‘clothed body in particular is an eloquent expression of something that is usually inarticulable. In short, the body is speaking because there is something unsayable to be said.’62 In Tanning’s painting, the desperation to grasp hold of one’s core identity is palpable but this venture is futile since there is no interior essence to be unearthed, only further layers of flesh. The disjointed relationship between inside and outside, as visualized by Tanning and Schiaparelli, resurfaces in an advertisement for Orla Kiely from 2009, photographed by Catherine Servel and styled by Leith Clark (Figure 30). The model’s black dress with white Peter Pan collar echoes that of the femmeenfant automaton and Jen Dawson in i-D. The Orla Kiely model is posed stiffly on a straight-backed chair with a small bouquet of roses in hand. Formally, the image resembles a portrait of the good Victorian daughter, posing for her school photograph: the bouquet indicating sweetness, florescence and the transience of youth. Yet the portrayal of sweet and delicate girlhood is compromised by a disquieting undercurrent. The roses are yellow, shrivelled and not convincingly alive. The girl’s dark eye make-up and direct gaze jar with the formal aspects of the image which signal innocence. Her unrelenting regard conveys a sense of menace, threat and danger, in place of the submissiveness one usually associates with an upward gaze.63 The girl is no shrinking violet

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Figure 29  Elsa Schiaparelli, ‘Tear-Illusion’ dress, 1938.

and would seem instead to be on the cusp of violent insubordination, à la Wednesday Addams. This hints once more at what Caws describes as ‘the voice of the unseen’: the disjuncture between inside and outside and the threat of ‘something we do not want to, or cannot face’.64 The threat encapsulated in the Orla Kiely image is redolent of the role played by Mia Farrow as expectant mother in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s

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Figure 30  Advertisement for Orla Kiely, 2009. Photographer: Catherine Servel. Stylist: Leith Clark. Model: Skye Stracke.

Baby (1968), adapted from the 1967 novel by Ira Levin.65 Throughout the film, the pregnant Rosemary is clothed in innocence: white, baby blue or yellow smocks; Peter Pan collars; floral prints (Figure 31). Yet beneath her pretty 1960s wardrobe, Rosemary unwittingly carries the devil’s child. The stiff pose of the Orla Kiely model is reminiscent of the scene where the frail Rosemary finally stands up to her husband about her concerns surrounding the pregnancy.

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Figure 31  Rosemary’s Baby, 1968. Director: Roman Polanski. Actors: Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes.

Although she is clothed in innocence and seated daintily, like a schoolgirl or dutiful daughter, the viewer knows that there is something lurking beneath her fragile exterior: the spawn of Satan. The Orla Kiely image conveys a similar atmosphere through the juxtaposition of innocence with darkness. Something threatening is trying to get out. Rosemary acts on her suspicions – she reads books, she contacts an alternative doctor, she tries to uncover the truth about her neighbours – but her investigations are in vain; they do not save her from birthing the devil’s child.

The femme-enfant-fatale What ties together the above images of the femme-enfant is the way a sense of menace overlaps with an outward innocence. This overlap is significant in

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that English literature scholar Andrea Rummel notes the way femininity has been simultaneously idealized and demonized in literary history, giving rise to ‘two complementary types of stereotypical femininity, the femme fatale and her aesthetic counterpart, the ideal woman or femme fragile’.66 For the purposes of this book, the question becomes: What does the addition of the category of childhood – or more specifically girl-childhood – add to the construction of the femme fatale in fashion photography? And how does this fatal girlhood sit alongside the concept of innocence, so central to Romantic idealizations of childhood? In the context of Surrealism, McAra employs the term femme-enfant-fatale in order to capture this additional dimension. She argues that the subversive potential of this figure lies precisely in ‘the image of “sugar and spice and all things nice” [as] the received ideal or taboo necessary to the transgressive function of the curious girl’.67 The femme-enfant-fatale is arguably more threatening than the traditional femme fatale because she masquerades beneath ‘the colours of innocence’, a notion de Beauvoir discusses vis-à-vis Brigitte Bardot: Decent or unwanted women could feel at ease when confronted with classical Circes who owed their power to dark secrets. These were coquettish and calculating creatures, depraved and reprobate, possessed of an evil force. From the height of their virtue, the fiancée, the wife, the great-hearted mistress and the despotic mother briskly damned these witches. But if Evil takes on the colours of innocence, they are in a fury.68

The sense of evil masquerading beneath the colours of innocence is what the category childhood is capable of adding to the image of the femme fatale. Like the outwardly innocent Rosemary who carries the devil’s child, ‘it is impossible to see in [BB] the touch of Satan, and for that reason she seems all the more diabolical to women who feel humiliated and threatened by her beauty’.69 Paradoxically, then, it seems that innocence both increases the threat of the femme fatale (by masking the danger) and decreases the threat by confining rebellion and revolt to girl-children only, as per Wednesday Addams in Lula magazine. In the early stages of Surrealism there was a tendency to valorize the marginal and the femme-enfant was no exception. In his Second Manifesto, Breton stressed the movement would do everything in its power to ‘lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion’.70 Poetic surrealism – so central to Breton’s definition of Surrealism in the First Manifesto – would free ‘interlocutors from any obligations of politeness’.71 Surrealism ‘was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and […] expects nothing save from violence’.72 There is some irony in this call to

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Figure 32  Violette, 1978. Director: Claude Chabrol. Actor: Isabelle Huppert.

arms given that Breton founded Surrealism in response to the senseless killing in the First World War. Nevertheless, one way in which the principle of ‘violent revolt’ played out was in the tendency of male surrealists to valorize criminally deviant young woman. One early example is the eighteen-year-old Violette Nozière who poisoned her parents in 1933, leading to the death of her father and, ultimately, her conviction for murder.73 Nozière’s parricide was appropriated as a symbol of revolt by surrealists as was the Papin sisters’ crime of the same year, which involved the murder of their employer’s wife and daughter.74 McAra posits Nozière as an example of the femme-enfant-fatale, and her crime was mythologized in Claude Chabrol’s film, Violette of 1978 (Figure  32). Violette was played by Isabelle Huppert, and Chabrol deploys lightness and darkness in a way strikingly similar to Keira Knightley as represented by Ellen von Unwerth in Figure 24. Fashion is used in Chabrol’s film to convey a split in Violette’s identity. At home she is an innocent child, as signalled by her white floaty clothing and the absence of visible make-up, whilst on the streets of Paris she is the sexually provocative child-vamp, signalled by her black clothing and clandestine application of dark make-up and nail polish. By ‘putting on the signs of adulthood’75 in this way, Violette is committing a sort of ‘status offence’.76 This is signalled by the condemnation of those around her, such as her neighbour, who remarks that Violette’s appearance is ‘too adult’ for a girl of her age. Nozière’s dark make-up and femme fatale garb, combined with the money she takes for sex with men,

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situate her firmly within interwar debates on appearance and identity as well as more long-standing discourses on the virgin/whore dichotomy.77 Nozière committed her crime in 1933 and the film should therefore be read through the lens of debates on the New Woman. The sexually independent woman was particularly anxiety-provoking because she ‘destabilized the conventional association between appearance and identity’, with the democratization of fashion and cosmetics making it harder for ‘social commentators to distinguish between prostitutes and respectable women’.78 These anxieties about the potential ‘mismatch’ between the inside and outside play out on Keira Knightley’s dress in Figure 24, in a way not dissimilar to Schiaparelli’s Tear-Illusion dress from 1938 (Figure 29). When it comes to Knightley in Vogue Italia, participants Amber and Emily first read her appearance as ‘pure’ and ‘innocent’, on account of her pale dress and curious gaze. Yet as the discussion progressed they felt there was something about the image that jarred. In the following passage they muse on the image and its contradictions, such as the play of darkness and light, and the disjuncture between inner and outer identities. I quote at length from the transcript here because it introduces a number of themes that are woven together and which I go on to unravel in the rest of the chapter. The excerpt opens with Amber and Emily commenting on Knightley’s make-up and the connotations it holds: Excerpt I Amber: You can’t really see that much of her... face, umm. In fact, it’s almost weird that she’s got that amount of make-up on, because she looks quite... fragile ‘n’ umm completely different again, like, complete contrast to the image on the right. Emily: She’s got black nail varnish on as well, which is kinda… Amber: It’s... almost gives a bit, like, cause if it was pure, the dress, it’s like, I don’t know, it would give it... kinda the black bits give a bit more … Emily: Bit like a secret Amber: Mischievous Emily: Yeah, and like the nail polish... Amber: Yeah Emily: ... and the black room, as well. Morna:  What do you think that does to the... Amber: It makes it so that she’s not that... the black kinda gives it more... of an adult, like feel, like, whereas if it was all pure and she wasn’t wearing a ring, she wasn’t wearing make-up... emm... and she didn’t have, like, the black bits on her dress, she would look really, like super young, whereas I think the, kinda, the blackness kinda gives a bit of like wise kind of feel.

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Morna: mmhmm Amber:  ... a bit like there’s an underlying... although there’s innocence, innocence, there’s also an underlying, kind of... Emily: She’s more in control... [inaudible] Morna: That’s really interesting, actually. Cause it does change something … Emily: Darker Morna: ... doesn’t it, the black? Amber: Yeah, cause it’s quite, like, it’s completely contrasting, isn’t it? With the dress, and, emm, the way she’s stood, and everything. Emily:  It’s confusing, cause I feel like... she’s being innocent on the outside but she’s not really. Mmm... like... that she’s actually, it’s actually a lot darker, I dunno, I just get the impression that we’re meant to... we’re meant to know that she’s not really looking at a book. Amber: mmm Morna: So it’s like it’s, emm, like it’s like she’s acting? Or she’s playing? Or... Emily: Yeah, like she’s playing up. It’s weird like, although it looks a very good pose, I... like, I don’t believe it.79

In this exchange, Knightley is read as duplicitous, with participants oscillating between categories constructed in binary opposition: innocence versus deception; the made-up woman versus the fragile woman; the pure woman versus the secretive or mischievous woman; childlike purity versus adult wisdom. Many of these categories also tie in with the darkness/lightness polarity; without the dark, contrasting elements, Knightley would fit neatly within the rhetoric of Romantic innocence. Yet, the presence of darkness not only disrupts the innocence of the image but also suggests something has gone awry. This unease is crystallized in Emily’s closing statement: ‘I don’t believe it.’ Knightley is a femme fragile, barely concealing the spectre of a femme fatale. Although Amber and Emily felt it was a ‘weird’ or ‘confusing’ image, it seemed to elicit a sort of fascination on the part of the participants, similar to the ‘intrigue’ felt by participants in the previous chapter in their discussion of ‘White Nights’. Emily concluded: ‘I like the one on the left [Figure 24] possibly more because it’s, it’s very contrasting. It’s like I can’t quite make up my mind about it.’

Magic and superstition Women have long been mythologized through the categories of darkness and lightness. For instance, Anseaume in his essay ‘La Femme est Changeante’80 claimed that female traits changed according to time of day. ‘During the day

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a woman’s behaviour is said to be charming, elegant, engaging, caressing and obliging; during the night it is turbulent, enervating, petulant, distressing, and provoking,’ as Elizabeth K. Menon explains.81 By this logic, when night falls the innocent woman may morph into the fatal woman, by virtue of her inherently changeable nature. She is therefore not to be trusted. As for the overexposed image of Knightley, she is illuminated in an almost divine fashion yet she stands amidst the shadows, prompting the question: Is she for good or for evil? Knightley’s divine aura resonates with Mulvey’s comments on the ‘scopophilic draw of cinema’ where ‘the flickering shadows, the contrasts between light and  dark became concentrated in and around the female form’.82 As such, ‘Framing, make-up and lighting stylised the female star’, allowing her to ‘slip into “to-be-looked-at-ness”’.83 However, such lighting practices do not pertain to all femininities equally. Instead, as Dyer notes, it tends to be ‘idealised white women [who] are bathed in and permeated by light. It streams through them and falls on to them from above. In short, they glow’.84 From this, the medium in which whiter-than-white female subjectivities are rendered is not insignificant, given that ‘photography and cinema, as media of light, at the very least lend themselves to privileging white people’.85 Overlapping with discourse on darkness and lightness, and woman as ‘changeable’ is a discourse on darkness/lightness as a metaphor for reason versus superstition. For instance, Rousseau abhorred superstition, attributing it to ignorance about the workings of the world.86 As such, he advocates ‘night games’ in the hope that Émile will grow up free from superstition and unafraid of the dark.87 This coupling of superstition with darkness pre-dates Rousseau, with Neiman suggesting ‘it goes all the way back to Akhenaten, the Egyptian pharaoh who preceded Moses in establishing monotheism’.88 The extent to which this metaphor has been naturalized is evident in the way ‘the words for “light” and “clarity” are built into every European word for “Enlightenment” itself ’.89 In this way, light – in the literal sense – has come to signify ‘the human possibilities of knowing and spreading knowledge’.90 However, this ideology was not always mobilized in a just or positive way, for as Dyer notes: ‘All forms of lighting innovation were introduced by the European nations to their colonies, the only sense in which imperialism brought light to the darkness.’91 Although Breton shared Rousseau’s disdain for social convention, and sacralized childhood in a similar way, rationality is where Bretonian surrealism departs from Rousseau. Breton rejected ‘accepted’ practices of knowing, rooted in science and logic – Enlightenment values – instead attempting to reclaim superstition, fancy and the forbidden.92 As such, he claimed: ‘There are fairy tales to be written for adults, fairy tales still almost blue.’93

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When discussing the illuminated Knightley, participants used words such as ‘magic’ or ‘mystical’ to describe her. In one instance, participants pointed to the childlike elements of the image: Knightley’s slender frame, her bare feet and the way she is standing on the stool, ‘reaching up for the knowledge’ (Smithy). I then asked the group whether the fact Knightley was consulting a book made her look intellectual. Smithy immediately responded: ‘Not in any way, shape, or form!’ – a statement met with laughter from the rest of the group. She went on to justify her position: Excerpt II Smithy: It’s more that she’s looking at something that’s out of reach, almost, based on the dress. Morna:  mmm Jean: So it’s, it’s the contrast in the background makes her look even less intellectual. Smithy: Yes Jean:  mmhmm Morna: Because she’s all frou-frou with her dress? Jean: Yes Smithy: She, she she’s very feminine, in the dress. I, I, if she was dressed in a lawyer’s suit and she was standing there reading a book, with spectacles on, Jean:  mmhmm Smithy:  She would look like she fits Morna: mmhmm Smithy: But she’s almost like, umm, a fairy at the bottom of the garden, that’s just been captured and dropped into a man’s library! [laughter].94

Smithy’s closing statement suggests Knightley is out of place; she represents magic not rationality, a feminine fairy in a man’s world. Magic as ‘feminine’ is pitted against intellect as ‘masculine’, with participants insisting the library belonged to a privileged man. They reached this conclusion on account of the leather-bound books – green, red and brown – which appeared to be ‘first editions’: ‘You’re not looking at romantic fiction there, you’re looking at Encyclopaedia Britannica’ (Smithy). Here the books are posited as ‘highbrow’ rather than the feminized, ‘frivolous’ genre of romantic fiction. The femmeenfant of Surrealism and fashion photography both risk playing into these reductive binaries. Although revering the mythic femme-enfant for her magical, ethereal and inner-directed nature, Breton simultaneously posited

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her as beyond rational comprehension, thus reinforcing the myth of woman as ‘enigmatic’ and mystifying her needs and desires.

Only children, artists and the bourgeoisie may play The pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of reason are of course rooted in education, access to which is often linked to social class and privilege. The idea of social class is toyed with in the image of Keira Knightley. Her ragged dress was placed in opposition to the library as an emblem of privilege: Excerpt III Smithy: She’s smouldering. The, the one on the left is almost umm, a waif and stray type Katherine: Aye Smithy: I, I know that that dress is probably designed to be like that but it’s almost an Orphan Annie type... Jean:  With the kind of uneven hem and... Katherine: mmhmm, yeah. Smithy:  An urchin-type look.

Smithy’s recognition that the dress was ‘designed’ to look shabby implies that Knightley is ‘playing’ at being a poor girl – an idea reinforced by her posturing  at  the piano in the opposing image. This is significant given the surrealist pre-occupation with critiquing bourgeois values, with artists such as Carrington, Ernst and Tanning ‘[using] nostalgia as a deliberately regressive strategy to interrogate their class origins’.95 Furthermore, although the image appeared in Vogue Italia, it was Leith Clark who styled Knightley for the spread: a stylist who has described her own personal style as inspired by ‘Alice in Wonderland’ or ‘Little Orphan Annie’.96 Clark is also personal stylist to Alexa Chung, who appeared in the same pink Chanel dress at the Chanel Resort presentation in 2012. This reminds us of the influence held by key players in the fashion industry when it comes to constructing femininity. That these images appeared around the same time also points to the role played by fashion cycles in crafting feminine ideals. The privileged artist who critiques bourgeois culture, or the idea of playing ‘poor’ through high fashion (the dress is Chanel), recalls Bourdieu’s writing on the aesthetic disposition:

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To be able to play the games of culture with the playful seriousness which Plato demanded, a seriousness without ‘the spirit of seriousness’, one has to belong to the ranks of those who have been able, not necessarily to make their whole existence a sort of children’s game, as artists do, but at least to maintain for a long time, sometimes a whole lifetime, a child’s relation to the world. All children start life as baby bourgeois, in a relation of magical power over others and, through them, over the world, but they grow out of it sooner or later.97

Only those with sufficient means can approximate the aesthetic disposition because it involves ‘the suspension and removal of economic necessity […] distance from practical urgencies’.98 This makes sense given the way discourses on ‘high’ art and discourses on Romantic childhood overlap, with both constructing their objects as ‘pure’ and disinterested.99 This rarefied lifestyle pertains only to the very few, with Amber noting: ‘She looks like she’s, like, in her own little world’; ‘she seems to have all the time in the world’. Again this ties in with the ‘distinctive rarity’ of the bourgeois world, which is made up of ‘countless “disinterested” and “gratuitous” acts’, as well as the ‘squandering of care, time and labour’.100 Amber then relates the image to her own childhood stating ‘it’s quite nice to, kind of, even when you’re an adult, like, to have that dreamlike state of when you were a child and you were lost and you could have the time to read a book or to look at a story […] Aww, I do miss, like, having time to, emm, just to relax and enjoy a book or a story.’ This ties in with something also articulated in relation to the carefree scene in ‘Heavenly Creatures’, with Yvette stating that ‘in fact you don’t work because you don’t need to’. Unless one is very privileged, growing up involves leaving behind the ‘child’s relation to the world’.101 Some children, however, do not enjoy this ‘carefree’ relation to the world in the first place, given Romantic childhood is a Western construct. This ‘leisurely curiosity’, as one participant put it, is not open to all.

Feminist curiosity Returning to Excerpt II, although participants linked curiosity to otherworldliness and irrationality, it might nevertheless hold feminist potential. This is an argument put forward by Mulvey, who theorizes curiosity as a compulsion, ‘experienced almost like a drive with an aim and object to discover something felt so strongly that it overwhelms prohibition or danger’.102 It involves a visceral desire for knowledge, an ‘epistemophilia’,103 which permits the possibility of an

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active, investigative female gaze. As such, Mulvey sees curiosity as offering a way out from the ‘rather too neat binary opposition’ between the male gaze as active and the female gaze as passive, laid down in her earlier work on Hollywood cinema.104 Yet, the concept of curiosity itself is not gender-neutral. In Émile, Rousseau posits curiosity as the guiding principle of the boy-child’s education: ‘Children are first restless, then curious; and this curiosity, rightly directed, is the means of development for the age with which we are dealing.’105 Curiosity in the young Émile is a virtue to be extolled. Female curiosity, however, is quite another matter. We are reminded of this in Rousseau’s counsel that girls be taught ‘above all things self-control. Under our senseless conditions, the life of a good woman is a perpetual struggle against self; it is only fair that woman should bear her share of the ills she has brought upon man.’106 Here girls are encouraged to contain themselves, like Pandora and her fateful box, which should never have been opened. In order to mobilize the concept of curiosity to more feminist ends we need to reinterpret such myths of female curiosity, as Mulvey does in Fetishism and Curiosity. The myth of Pandora dates back to Greek mythology, c. 700 BC. Prometheus had tricked Zeus by stealing fire, which he then passed on to mankind. Zeus was furious about this betrayal and sought his revenge, sending Pandora to Earth as a snare to mankind. Pandora’s beauty was pieced together by several of the Gods: Aphrodite endowed her with great powers of seduction; the divine graces gave her gold necklaces and crowned her with spring flowers; Athena added a veil and a golden crown. Crucially, these accoutrements made Pandora an artefact to be exchanged between men, rather than a woman with agency in her own right. Rather than punishing Prometheus directly, Zeus sent Pandora to his brother, Epimetheus. Upon seeing the beautiful Pandora, Epimetheus forgot the warnings from Prometheus and accepted the gift from Zeus. Later, Pandora removed the lid from the jar107 she carried, unleashing sickness, sorrow and toil, hitherto unknown to humankind. Curiosity was wedded with danger through the figure of Pandora: a highly fashioned femme fatale. And, as is often the case in cinema, fairy tale and myth, woman’s curiosity tends to be punished. Just as Pandora is stuck within her myth, the ‘woman-child’ in fashion photography is stuck within her frame. Yet, Mulvey recognizes a point of transformation in the concept of curiosity: a shift from Pandora’s curiosity, locked within the myth, to a type of feminist curiosity on the part of the reader. This involves moving from ‘the register of the visual into the register of the theoretical’, replacing ‘a literal desire to see with one’s own eyes to the thrill of deciphering an enigma. […] Pandora, caught in her myth, cannot make this step,

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but feminist theorists, seeking to translate the iconographies of the feminine to reveal their origins, can take her curiosity and transform it into a seeing with the mind.’108 This shift from curious looking to curious knowing has some resonance with the role of the imagination in Bretonian surrealism. Through imagination we can imagine other than what there is, tying in with the shift from nostalgic longing to utopian imagining, discussed in the previous chapter. Mulvey’s concept of epistemophilia resonates with the fascination of Amber and Emily in trying to make sense of Knightley’s identity and intentions. Curiosity might here provide a conceptual bridge between the reductive binaries of female/male, reason/superstition, innocence/knowledge, inside/ outside. Curiosity, although associated with Romantic childhood, is something that can be enjoyed in and of itself as well as something that can prompt the pursuit of knowledge: through reason or otherwise. After all, ‘myth is composed of wonders’ as Aristotle observed.109 ‘It is owing to their wonder that men now begin and at first began to philosophize.’ They wondered initially at ‘the obvious difficulties’ before advancing to consider greater matters such as ‘the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe’. Moving forward to the nineteenth century, curiosity is famously central to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as encapsulated in the protagonist’s exclamation ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ McAra describes Alice as a ‘recurrent motif ’ in Surrealism, and suggests ‘it is the narrative drive of Alice’s desire to know that allows us to identify with her’.110 In the opening scene of Carroll’s tale, Alice abandons conventional learning (her book), preferring to indulge her curiosity at the sight of the white rabbit. This pursuit of curiosity meant Alice held great potential as a ‘subversive device’ for Ernst and Tanning; ‘she appears sweet and wholesome but transgresses the confines of her bourgeois nursery, through escape into imaginative, fantastical domains’.111 In the work of female Surrealists, as well as in the tales of Alice, the little girl is not depicted as pure but as ‘ferociously sexualised and fully aware of her actions’:112 Recent readings have not only reclaimed Alice as a desiring body in her own right, but have suggested that she functions as the embodiment of the author or reader. Some of the most interesting interpretations have reread Carroll’s Alice in terms of her ‘dysmorphic’ bodily preoccupations and ‘epistemological crisis’.113

From this perspective, Alice may have been a figure of identification for surrealists, in spite of, or even because of, her age, tying in with the self-feminization that may have been involved in male surrealists’ reverence for the femme-enfant.

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In this respect, the emblem of the little girl is perhaps better suited for revolt if we read her through the lens of ‘imperious’ and independent girlhood: the autonomous female self that must be buried upon entrance to womanhood, succeeded by the more submissive woman as ‘eternal child’.114 This vision of the imperious girl-child is presented as freer from herself, so to speak, and more capable of rebelling against passive femininity, as traditionally defined. The curious and rebellious femme-enfant-fatale is a subject-position carved out in certain fashion images, such as those by Ellen von Unwerth and Juergen Teller, discussed above. Furthermore, this discourse is present in the Lula spread, where Wednesday Addams’ curiosity is linked to her ‘slightly scary willingness to do the wrong thing’ (Figure 28). One memorable example is the uprising Wednesday stages at summer camp, during a wholesome play for American Thanksgiving in Addams Family Values (1993). Wednesday is assigned the role of Pocahontas and, to begin with, says her lines as planned, telling Sarah Miller, the lead white settler: ‘Your hair is the colour of the sun; your skin is like fresh milk.’115 Wednesday then abandons the script and begins to condemn the treatment of Native Americans by pilgrims, before declaring her intention to scalp Sarah Miller and burn her village to the ground. Wednesday and her accomplices tie up Sarah Miller and torch the houses on stage, to the horror of the camp leaders and on-looking parents. Wednesday’s intrepidity ties in with Mulvey’s understanding of curiosity as a drive so strong it ‘overwhelms prohibition or danger’.116 Reverence for Wednesday Addams is more problematic when placed in the context of the Lula spread as a whole. Here we are presented with a string of fictional daughters: Wednesday Addams rather than Morticia, Margot Tenenbaum rather than her mother and Violet Parr rather than Elastigirl (even while her mother retains her status as a ‘girl’). Lula reveres these girls for being different and intellectual, for flouting convention. However, few, if any, of them have actually reached adulthood, when they will hold a greater degree of influence over the world. The images of girlhood curiosity in Lula seem to suggest that it is sanctioned for a limited period of time only. One therefore has to wonder how empowering it is for women to aspire to being six years old again, when adults tend to hold the balance of power in society. Why must readers look backwards to childhood in order to resist social convention? Why not represent Wednesday’s mother Morticia, or Margot’s mother Mrs Tenenbaum: both of whom are played by actor Anjelica Huston? Or would a rebellious, curious woman simply be ‘too much’?

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Punishment for eating: Bigness, smallness and play with proportion Perhaps the opposite of womanly too-much-ness consists in the tiny body of Alexa Chung, who, in her pseudo-memoir It, cites Wednesday Addams as style inspiration – particularly her Peter Pan collar.117 Another of Chung’s style icons is Sue Lyon in Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) – something I return to in the following chapter. In interviews, Chung has mentioned her predilection for wearing children’s clothes, with one example being a navy blue princess coat she bought ‘for a tenner’ on Brick Lane.118 Wearing children’s clothes was something that came up in Helen Malson’s study on thinness. In her interviews with selfidentified anorexics, she found that wearing children’s clothes was a marker of pride for these women, who defined successful femininity ‘by size, by not being “bigger than size eight or ten”’.119 It is fitting that Alice should appear on the pages of fashion magazines, given the industry’s preoccupation with size. The underdeveloped body is positioned as neater and more easily contained than the mature female body. The neatness is evident in colloquial sayings about women’s bodies as ‘tidy’, if considered sexually attractive. Fashion’s idealization of youth as well as its rejection of the overtly womanly body tells us something about the ‘infantalized and infantalizing nature of fashion. Seen in this light fashion is playful, indulgent, amoral and unable to transcend its somatic preoccupations,’ as Evans and Thornton note.120 As for Alice, she is described by Patricia Holland as ‘the girl child of unstable size’,121 whose body shrinks and grows depending on what she consumes. Lois Drawmer notes that ‘drinking here is equated with diminishing size, and eating, especially “forbidden” treats such as cakes, results in rapid growth’.122 A parallel can then be drawn with the discourses which regulate female experience: ‘As with her twenty-first-century counterpart, the emphasis on food and drink for Alice has a direct correlation to her shape and size, and quite literally dictates her entry into social structures, such as the Eden-like garden.’123 The conditions of entry to social worlds are defined by those beyond her: arbitrary rules, seemingly without rhyme or reason. This is not unlike the workings of performativity through which women and men are compelled to inhabit restrictive subjectpositions, defined from one knows not where. The same point might be made about the fashion system, with its arbitrary play of styles. ‘Either way, Alice must suppress or re-order her physical shape and size, or remain marginal, or worse still, excluded from entry into the social order and achieving recognisable status as a “woman”.’124

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Disrupted temporalities and the search for certainty The bigness and smallness of Alice’s body are the repercussions of her curiosity, her drive to know, her willingness to see what happens. Recent scholarship has pointed to the loss of certainty and stability in late modernity, in terms of social roles and ‘appropriate chronological advancement’.125 Feminism and gay liberation have sought to open up the range of possibilities for men and women, unpicking rigidly defined subject-positions such as the gendered public/ private divide in Victorian England. Chris Jenks describes this as a ‘process of de-traditionalization’,126 an unpicking of long-standing hierarchies of power, leading alternative lifestyles to proliferate to the point where one has ‘difficulty in expressing their alternativeness “to”’.127 When it comes to femininity, Catherine Driscoll explains that female subjectivity has traditionally involved transitioning through a set of demarcated roles that include daughter, girlfriend, virgin, wife and mother, with some overlapping between these positions.128 Yet, as McRobbie argues, in lieu of more formal structures, it is now the ‘fashion-beauty’ complex that regulates appropriate chronological advancement, providing a ‘benchmark against which women must endlessly and repeatedly measure themselves, from the earliest years right through to old age’.129 This represents an attempt to ‘re-gain control over disrupted temporalities’ and ‘[impose] new time frames on women’s lives’.130 This resonates with the work of Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen who note that: During their lifetimes many modern Western women experience a variety of body sizes and become accustomed to imagining themselves in the sort of transitions reflected in ‘before’ and ‘after’ diet pictures. This experience relates not only to pregnancy and ageing, but also the long-term effects of dieting. Janine Cataldo has pointed out that such unrealistic female body perceptions result in many women feeling that they never attain their ‘true’ body size, but are always ‘en route’.131

Furthermore, as Coward notes, ‘it seems as though women have to punish themselves for growing up, for becoming adults and flaunting their adulthood visibly about their bodies’.132 Duane Michals captures some of these notions in a photo spread for Vogue Paris from 1998, entitled ‘Dr. Heisenberg’s Magic Mirror of Uncertainty’ (Figures 33–38). In a series of six images, the reader is confronted with the relationship between a woman and her image, reflected back through a looking glass. Each confrontation entails a different distortion of her image, until eventually, in

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the sixth image, her face becomes a blur, as she looks away. The photographs are accompanied with hand-written text, which emphasizes the metaphysical relationship between looking, seeing and becoming, with the third caption noting, ‘Odette can never be sure with any certainty which reflection of herself she will see in the mirror’. This speaks to the centrality of looking to one’s sense of self, as well as the way one’s engagement with visual representations is part and parcel of the ongoing, performative story of the self. Pritsch encapsulates this notion when she describes the self not as ‘based on a strict split between subject and object, inside and outside’ but instead as ‘a permeable form, or to put it differently, as a continuous activity of styling that constitutes new forms by restructuring previous ones’.133 Of particular note for Pritsch is Elspeth Probyn’s citation of Le Doeuff: ‘Images are not, properly speaking, “what I think”, but rather “what I think with”.’134 Commenting on this passage, Pritsch notes the ‘self-reflexive’ quality of images that become ‘points of view’ within the subject’s mind and as such hold potential for re-configuration. Pritsch points to the openness of Le Doeuff ’s concept in that ‘no distinction is made between “concept”, “sign”, or “metaphor”’.135 This openness makes sense, in a way, because images on the page, in the process of being read, become mental images that inform one’s understanding of the world – and one’s place within it – long after the magazine has been put down.

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In the British context, play with proportion appears in the work of Tim Gutt, in a spread shot for British Vogue in May 2011. The spread was commissioned to mark the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and involved a surrealist re-imagining of traditional anniversary gifts. Figure 39 is accompanied by copy that reads, ‘Welcome to the doll’s house:136 the seventeenth anniversary is celebrated with furniture. Lanvin’s exquisite

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Figures 33–38  Duane Michals, Dr. Heisenberg’s Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, 1998. Six gelatin silver photographs with hand-applied text © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

creation keeps everything in perspective – and perfectly proportioned.’ Dressed in white Lanvin (crafted from feathers and silk flowers), Hannah Holman, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, is encased in Romantic innocence.137 Playing with proportion, the image recalls the passage in Alice, when the girl-child’s curiosity leads her to drink from an unmarked bottle, in the knowledge that ‘something interesting is sure to happen’ (Figure 40).138 As a result Alice grows and grows until almost exceeding the bounds of the house. Like Alice, Holman has outgrown her role of ‘Angel in the House’, Romantic and pure; her gaze is now borderline demonic: locked upwards, like the femme-enfant automaton (Figure 25). Feminist curiosity appears to have corrupted her as she pulls back from the viewer, with it unclear whether she does so in shame or whether she is simply preparing to pounce. The image might be read as a parody of conservative discourse that suggests women have burst out from the domestic sphere leaving carnage in their wake: the upturned furniture connoting a sense of ‘this is what you’ll get’ or ‘this is what you asked for’. Bigness therefore takes the guise of exceeding the ideal body, as discursively defined, as well as transcending one’s allotted role in

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Figure 39  ‘Forget Me Not’. British Vogue, May 2011. Photographer: Tim Gutt. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Set Design: Shona Heath. Model: Hannah Holman.

Figure 40  Illustration to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by John Tenniel, 1865.

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Figure 41  ‘Forget Me Not’, British Vogue, May 2011. Photographer: Tim Gutt. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Set Design: Shona Heath. Model: Hannah Holman.

society. Conservative commentators posit women as the ‘keepers’ of childhood innocence, with feminism being held at least partially responsible for its ‘loss’.139 Yet, a second image offers a riposte to this outmoded position (Figure 41). It re-imagines the anniversary gift of china (twenty years), only this time the plates are made from paper and spin precariously on spindly sticks, crashing to the ground in front of a remiss, or preoccupied, mother. Holman has a gloss of the 1950s housewife – retro vacuum cleaner, flared skirt – while her baby crawls amidst the chaos, without a minder. This hints at the idea that neoliberal visions of women ‘having it all’ (read: working full time, being a mother, and taking primary responsibility for house and home) may not be exactly what the women’s movement asked for; instead there has been something of a trade-off, as Fraser and McRobbie suggest.140 Surrealism, as explored earlier sought to question taken-for-granted ideas about the nature of being, including the relationship between childhood and adulthood, girlhood and womanhood. Role reversal was one way of destabilizing these categories, as evidenced in The Spirit of Geometry (1937) by René Magritte. This strategy appeared in a number of fashion editorials in the 2000s, such as ‘Un Dimanche à la campagne’ by Mikael Jansson (Vogue Paris, November 2010). The image inverts the respective sizes of adult and child, with the little girl appearing

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in the foreground (not unlike Alice in Figure 42), veiled in pink with a worldweary expression. The image has been cropped such that the child exceeds the frame, emphasizing her bigness in relation to the adult woman, seated behind her. This was a technique also employed by Lewis Carroll in his photographs of girl-children; his anxieties about Alice growing up were articulated through ‘the girl exceeding the frame of the photographs he [took]’.141 Meanwhile, an adult Sasha Pivovarova sits on the grass behind the child, inviting the viewer to look down on her, like a little girl, offering her the attention she craves. Her

Figure 42  Illustration to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by John Tenniel, 1865.

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arms are straight and stiff, held up high, with her legs akimbo, like a doll placed in pose by a child. This finds earlier precedent in ‘Biba Doll’, photographed by Harri Peccinotti for Nova in 1972. Such role reversals speak to anxieties about appropriate appearance and behaviour of children in the post-war period, with the concept of ‘kidulthood’142 and ‘knowing childhood’143 demonstrating the confluence of analytically distinct categories.

‘You all die at fifteen’ In this chapter, I have explored how certain versions of the ‘woman-child’ in fashion photography speak to Surrealist strategies of subversion, as well as themes associated with the femme-enfant and her prototype, Alice. For the surrealists, the competing discourses that underpin the femme-enfant allowed the Romantic face of childhood to be subverted through curiosity and violence. This resulted in a dark, rebellious subject-position that was capable of critiquing, at least to some extent, Victorian ideals of bourgeois femininity. Certain representations of femininity in fashion photography prove disruptive in a similar way by questioning the dividing line that separates adults from children, as well as the qualities traditionally assigned to women and girls. Yet, in other instances, it seems curious that subversion should be channelled through a girl-child: Wednesday Addams is six years old; Alice is ‘seven and a half exactly’ and these are publications which are, on the whole, aimed at women.144 In order to unpack this, it is worth returning briefly to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and the characteristics excluded from woman’s position as the ‘eternal child’: The richness and strength of their natures, in favourable circumstances, have enabled some women to go on as adults with the passionate designs of adolescence. But these are exceptions. Not without reason did George Eliot and Margaret Kennedy have their heroines, Maggie and Tessa, die young […] The vast majority of young girls see that the struggle is much too unequal, and in the end they yield. ‘You all die at fifteen,’ wrote Diderot to Sophie Volland […] And in fact two years later we find the once queer and rebellious child calmed down and quite prepared to accept the life of a woman […] The crisis of adolescence is a kind of ‘travail’ of mourning. The young girl slowly buries her childhood, puts away the independent and imperious being that was she, and enters submissively upon adult existence.145

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Although they are not adolescents, the figures of Alice and Wednesday seem to approximate the passion and rebellious nature of the adolescent girl, discussed by de Beauvoir. Neiman has noted that ‘life will be neither as wondrous as you thought in your childhood nor as tormented as you thought in your adolescence’.146 Yet, as touched upon in the previous chapter, adulthood consists in neither of these stances towards the world: the wondrous stance is to some extent naïve (and will invariably lead to disappointment) whereas the torment of the adolescent disposition is nihilistic and ultimately self-defeating. Adulthood, Neiman argues, consists in the ability to bridge the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. And, in line with Kant, this gap can only be bridged through reason, imagination and questioning: which is where curiosity comes in. The value of the femme-enfant in fashion photography arguably lies in the hybrid nature of her identity: the fact that she represents an incoherent, contradictory subjectposition and one where the outside does not necessarily match the inside. While such incoherence might lead to ‘an initial loss of epistemological certainty’, as Butler notes, ‘loss of certainty is not the same as political nihilism’ but to the contrary, it might enable new ways of thinking, ‘initiating new possibilities, new ways for bodies to matter’.147 For, as Foucault notes, ‘We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces.’148

7

Rewriting Lolita in Fashion Photography

Figure 43  Promotional image for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, 1962. Photographer: Bert Stern. Actor: Sue Lyon. © Getty Images.

The most iconic image of Lolita, with red lollipop and heart-shaped sunglasses, was taken by a fashion photographer: Bert Stern (Figure 43). The heart-shaped glasses did not appear in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) nor in Stanley Kubrick’s filmic adaptation (1962). Instead, they were chosen by Stern to appear in a publicity image he shot to accompany the release of Kubrick’s film.1 Kubrick and Stern knew one another from their time working as staff at Look magazine.2 That Stern worked in fashion is not insignificant given that Lolita – as both text

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and image – is frequently referenced in the fashion media. More specifically, the heart-shaped sunglasses – bought by Stern from a seaside dime store – have become visual shorthand for ‘a young, sexually available girl’: a meaning that departs significantly from the way Lolita, as a concept, was constructed in Nabokov’s novel.3 Writing about Lolita in fashion photography seems almost trite, given the prevalence of signifiers associated with this aesthetic, and the way they are woven so seamlessly into the discourse of fashion.4 Yet, that is precisely why it is worth exploring, worth denaturalizing. In this chapter I consider why the trope of Lolita is of such import to the fashion media. I trace citations of the word ‘Lolita’ as well as the visual quotation of Lolita signifiers in fashion photography, such as the red heart-shaped sunglasses, lollipop and hula hoop. In so doing, I problematize the myths that inform Lolita in the novel and highlight the role played by fashion and clothing in Humbert’s construction of ‘his Lolita’. Kubrick’s filmic representation of Dolores Haze, as well as the proliferation of visual culture henceforth, often ‘[added] a few years to make Lolita a more palatable age’, as Duncan White has argued.5 This, along with the centrality of clothing in the novel and films, has facilitated her entrance onto the pages of fashion magazines. I would like to emphasize here that the fashion photographs I discuss in this chapter feature adult models (over the age of sixteen) who have been fashioned through the aforementioned visual tropes of Lolita. Thus while the images toy with that visual vocabulary, these connotations are not played out on the bodies of actual children but on young women who have passed the cultural threshold, codified by the age of consent (which is sixteen in the UK).6 The central image analysed here is an advertisement for Marc Jacobs’ fragrance, Oh, Lola! which was shot by Juergen Teller in 2011, featuring a seventeen-year-old Dakota Fanning. Unfortunately, Teller did not grant permission for the image to be reproduced in this book despite having previously granted permission in 2017 for the image to be included in an academic article, the content of which is broadly similar to the present chapter.7 Thus while I was unable to include the photograph here, it is viewable in that earlier article as well as being readily available online.8 Finally, it should be noted that this chapter does not address the subcultural Lolita style that emerged in Japan in the mid- to late 1990s. This style, although taking its name from Nabokov’s novel, is nevertheless ‘distinct from connotations normally associated with the word Lolita’, as Masafumi Monden notes.9

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Nabokov’s Lolita and subsequent misreadings Vladimir Nabokov published his novel Lolita in 1955. The manuscript was refused by four American publishers before finally being accepted for publication by the Olympia Press in Paris.10 Written in English, Lolita tells the story of a middle-aged man, Humbert Humbert, and his paedophilic obsession with girl-child Dolores Haze. Dolores is just twelve when the novel begins, and is daughter to Humbert’s landlady Charlotte Haze. Humbert lodges with the widowed Charlotte Haze and subsequently marries her in order to remain close to Dolores (whom he names ‘his Lolita’). Upon the untimely death of Charlotte (she is hit by a car) Humbert abducts Dolores, neglecting to inform her of her mother’s death. A road trip across North America ensues, with the pair lodging in a number of hotels: during which time Dolores is sexually abused and bribed by Humbert. She soon learns of her mother’s death but is told by Humbert she must stay with him or be taken into foster care, making it near impossible for the child to extricate herself. The novel concludes with Dolores married to a different man and carrying his baby. She later dies in childbirth. Described by Ellen Pifer as ‘a threnody for the destruction of a child’s life’,11 the novel has been twice adapted for cinema: first by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and subsequently by Adrian Lyne in 1997. Transposing Lolita into a visual medium has led to a proliferation of media discourse on the subject meaning ‘Lolita, in her innumerable popcultural refractions […] has come to signify something very different from what Nabokov presumably intended’.12 Nevertheless, misreadings of Lolita were in circulation prior to the cinematic adaptations. Thus, before looking at visual renditions of Lolita, it is important to bear in mind Eric Goldman’s question: ‘through what interpretative or epistemological frame should readers view Lolita’s sexuality?’13 The first thing to note is that Nabokov’s Lolita is narrated entirely by Humbert, meaning his perspective permeates the novel. This has led critics to ‘sometimes [conflate] Humbert’s view of Lolita with Nabokov’s’.14 Some critics have even shared in Humbert’s warped perspective where ‘by arguments similar to those used by convicted rapists in order to view themselves as non-rapists, reviewers depicted Dolores Haze as both morally unworthy and at least partly responsible for her own victimization’.15 One of the ways Humbert justifies his abuse of the girlchild Dolores is by designating her a ‘nymphet’, separating her out from other more ‘wholesome’ children: ‘Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older

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than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets”’.16 (In light of these connotations, it is noteworthy that a MAC lip colour should go by the name Nymphette, with a lighter shade in the same range being labelled Underage.17) For most of the novel, Humbert mythologizes ‘his Lolita’ as deviant temptress, positioning himself as innocent poet, prey to the girl’s seductions. As Brian Walter notes, it is Humbert’s deft use of Romantic prose that serves to ‘exonerate him’ as innocent poet and ‘implicate the nymphet’ as deviant temptress.18 This reversal is curious given the myth of Romantic innocence is more commonly deployed to idealize childhood in the West. This strategy allows Humbert to rationalize his abuse of a child: by ‘restructuring Dolores Haze into the sign Lolita’ he ‘makes her signify his desire’, as Bronfen observes.19 ‘Lolita’ is Humbert’s warped and mythologized version of Dolores Haze, whose thoughts, feelings and point of view are seldom – if ever – presented in the novel.20 So in the context of this chapter, the important point to remember is that ‘Lolita’s fall and perversion begins and ends with Humbert’.21

Visualizing Lolita: From film to fashion photography The first edition of Lolita was published in 1955 with a pale ‘Modernist green’ cover, characteristic of the Olympia Press.22 Three years later, when the book was due to be published in North America, Nabokov expressed his wishes for the cover. In a letter to the publisher he stated: ‘There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl’.23 In another letter Nabokov stated: ‘I want pure colours, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.’24 Nabokov revoked his ‘no girls’ policy only with the release of Kubrick’s film in 1962 when, as Dieter E. Zimmer notes, Lolita had been given ‘concrete form’.25 At this juncture, Stern’s publicity image came to grace the cover of Nabokov’s Lolita in tandem with the marketing of the film. Yet Stern’s interpretation of the character Lolita has been criticized by scholars, with Pifer reading it as ‘lascivious’ and ‘a blatant misrepresentation of Nabokov’s novel, its characters, and its themes’.26 This (mis)reading of Lolita has carried over into media discourse more generally. Rather than being Humbert’s textual invention – the empty sign into which he pours his meanings and desires to justify the abuse of a child27 – the

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word ‘Lolita’ has come to stand for ‘a sexually precocious young girl’, as stated in the 2016 Oxford English Dictionary (OED). This definition was clearly at work in 2006 when Playboy magazine listed Lolita as one of the ‘25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written’. Responding to this, Jessica Valenti writes: ‘I love Nabokov and I thought Lolita was brilliant. But sexy? Seducing a twelve-year-old?’28 Similarly, in Alexa Chung’s pseudo-memoir It, she cites Lolita as her favourite book and her ‘favourite character to reference when getting dressed in summer months’.29 Thus, while Nabokov presents ‘Lolita’ and her clothing as the laborious textual product of a paedophile’s obsessive mind, the paedophile is absent from the media shorthand; we are left with ‘Lolita’ as a signifier for a girl who is ‘sexy’ and ‘precocious’ – the latter suggesting it is she who wishes to engage in sexual behaviour at an earlier stage than is usual. Testament to the complexity of visualizing Lolita, John Bertram and Yuri Leving devoted a book to the vexed question: ‘What should Lolita look like?’30 The authors commissioned eighty graphic designers to create mock covers for Lolita, publishing these alongside essays on the subject in Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl. Fashion plays a key role in many of the covers: from white ankle socks to red lipstick to striped bikinis and patent Mary Janes. It is this visual discourse on Lolita that is of interest here and, in particular, the way Lolita’s wardrobe is imported into fashion photography along with its connotative baggage.

Oh, Lola! She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. H.H.31

An advertising image for Marc Jacobs’ fragrance Oh, Lola! appeared in the fashion media in 2011. Shot by Juergen Teller, the image features Dakota Fanning wearing a pale pink polka dot dress, with scalloped edge and short puffy sleeves. An oversized perfume bottle is positioned between her legs, close to her crotch; her gaze is direct and her blonde hair loosely frames her face. The image was widely circulated – both in magazines and as visual merchandising in department stores. However, the advert proved controversial, with four complaints being lodged with the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in 2011. The complaints came from members of the public who had seen the advert in ES Magazine or the Sunday Times’ Style magazine. Perfume manufacturer

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Coty was invited to respond to the complaints but, in spite of their defence, the complaints were upheld and the image was prohibited from appearing again in its current form.32 The following rationale was offered for the ASA’s prohibition: We noted that the model was wearing a thigh length soft pink, polka dot dress and that part of her right thigh was visible. We noted that the model was holding up the perfume bottle which rested in her lap between her legs and we considered that its position was sexually provocative. We understood the model was 17 years old but we considered she looked under the age of 16. We considered that the length of her dress, her leg and position of the perfume bottle drew attention to her sexuality. Because of that, along with her appearance, we considered the ad could be seen to sexualise a child. We therefore concluded that the ad was irresponsible and was likely to cause serious offence. The ad breached CAP code (Edition 12) rules 1.3 (Social Responsibility) and 4.1 (Harm and offence).33

I would largely agree with the ASA’s visual analysis of the image, but not necessarily the decision to ban it, in line with the anti-censorship rationale offered by Jobling in 1999.34 Furthermore, as earlier mentioned, the advert remains widely available online, its digital afterlife pointing to the ineffectual nature of the ASA’s prohibition. The ruling by the ASA makes no mention of Lolita, perhaps owing to the absence of the actual word as well as some of the more obvious visual signifiers, such as the heart-shaped sunglasses. Nevertheless, when I presented the image to participants in focus groups, the word ‘Lolita’ was mentioned in four out of five groups held: Excerpt I  Amber: I am surprised that was banned. Yeah, Lola’s a bit of a girly name as well though, isn’t it? Like, Lo-la. Emily:  It’s kind of, like, Lolita.35 Excerpt II  Jean: I suppose, too, it’s, it’s ‘Oh, Lola!’, that shade of Lolita, isn’t that the book? Morna:  Yeah Jean: So it’s not Lolita, but that’s what it reminds you of. So the man in that was much older. Smithy:  Yes36

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Jean’s mention of the older man in Lolita (Humbert) followed on from discussion as to whom the advert was aimed at. Jean saw it as ‘a male fantasy’ and Smithy agreed stating, ‘to me, it’s aimed for an older man buying for quite a younger woman’. In both excerpts, the name of the fragrance, ‘Lola’, was sufficiently close to ‘Lolita’ for participants to make, and articulate, the association. This ties in with the opening passage of the novel, quoted above, where ‘Lola’ is listed as one of the many names Humbert gives to ‘his Lolita’.37 Yet, while ‘Lolita’ was mentioned in focus groups, participants did not view the model as a child, in terms of her actual age. Instead, they tended to consider her to have passed the cultural threshold of adulthood, the age of consent, which is sixteen years in the UK.38 The elements of the image that led participants to read her as adult were her shapely upper arm, her developed breasts, her smoky eye make-up, the positioning of the bottle, as well as their knowledge of who Dakota Fanning was in the acting world. Linking Fanning to Lolita, yet positioning her as an adult, might seem contradictory at first sight but this can be explained, in part, by the way Lolita has been visualized from Kubrick’s film onwards. Commenting on the many cover illustrations in circulation, Duncan White writes: Perhaps the illustrators of the more gaudy covers were unaware that they were adding a few years to make Lolita a more palatable age, or that they were dyeing her hair [blonde] to match Hollywood’s tastes, but there is no question that these covers ignore the essentially elegiac quality of the novel.39

The ‘elegiac quality’ to which White refers is the remorse felt by Humbert in the moments when he recognizes his culpability in destroying a child’s life through rape, abuse and manipulation. This elegiac quality is elided in Oh, Lola! through the playfulness of the image: the oversized bottle, the exclamation mark,  the play on words. This playfulness ties in with the rhetoric of ‘postfeminism’, which undermines the gains of feminism through ‘crude or offensive stereotypes … reclaimed as ironic, playful or even subversive comments or sendups’.40 In the case of Oh, Lola!, infantilization is combined with sexualization and commodification, making for a cocktail of post-feminist ‘undoing’: one that seems to sit comfortably with the rhetoric of the fashion media. This was supported by a comment made by Amber, a participant who worked as a Features Editor at a magazine. Upon viewing the image, she stated she was ‘surprised that that was banned’, explaining she considered it one of the more conventional fashion images she had seen as part of the reception study.

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Fashion’s fixation with the cusp of womanhood In Figure 44 Dakota Fanning can be seen posing in front of the image at the Marc Jacobs Spring/Summer 2012 after party. As noted above, Fanning is not a child in the image but rather a girl hovering close to the cusp that separates childhood from adulthood, codified by the age of consent. The meanings and tensions associated with this threshold are not gender-neutral, as Holland observes: As boys reach manhood they tend to be represented in ways which are sometimes comic, and often […] threatening. But the image of the girl child reaching puberty is all about sex. At this transitional point, the image of the young girl becomes a taboo image, surrounded by signals, fears and warnings.41

The gender-specific nature of this taboo explains, in part, why media panics about the sexualization of childhood tend to revolve around girls rather than boys.42 Furthermore, it does seem telling that there exists no male equivalent to Lolita in the cultural mainstream. That the image of the pubescent girl should be one replete with warnings can be understood in terms of the human need to classify. Writing on this point, Mary Douglas famously states: ‘I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience.’43 Yet, as Foucault notes vis-à-vis categories in discourse, in order to draw a dividing line between woman and girl-child, there requires a ‘threshold above which there is a difference and below which there is a similitude’.44 The cusp between girlhood and womanhood is something of a fixation in the fashion industry, more generally: a fixation rendered concrete through Kate Moss as the face of Calvin Klein’s Obsession in the 1990s. An article in i-D makes reference to this advertising campaign, describing Moss as ‘the ultimate Obsession girl’. The opening blurb states: ‘When Calvin Klein wanted a face to sell a fragrance, he chose the unblemished beauty of little Miss Moss. Take a close look at this face and body to learn about the power of beauty – it’s helped to sell between forty and fifty million bottles of scent.’ The notion of obsession is linked to childishness in the accompanying images of Kate Moss, shot by Terry Richardson in i-D magazine (no.167, August 1997). Here Moss is pictured with a child’s hobby horse in one image, and her tongue protruding in another, as she audaciously licks the salt from a glass of Margarita.45 Here Moss plays out what O’Toole calls the ‘uncivilised character of child sexuality, which appears to be without barriers, failing to observe the distinctions

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Figure 44  Dakota Fanning at Marc Jacobs SS2012 After Party, September 2011. Photographer: Dimitrios Kambouris via Getty Images.

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between the masculine and the feminine, the oral and the anal […] Before “normality”, child sexuality is an exercise in bad behaviour, an affront to good taste.’46 The photography of Terry Richardson seems often to involve ironic reference to Freudian discourses, as in his advertising campaign for Sisley in 2010. Here domesticity is rejected quite spectacularly by the model: rather than doing her laundry she comes tumbling out of the washing machine like a toddler. In another shot, the model in the supermarket prefers to writhe on the floor amidst a sea of phallic courgettes in lieu of actually filling her basket with groceries. Both images from the Sisley campaign seem to imply a parental counterpart. The ‘transitional point’ mentioned by Holland also ties in with Dakota Fanning and the way she has passed from child to adult actor in the public eye. Designer Marc Jacobs makes reference to this in an interview with Women’s Wear Daily where he explains the decision to present Fanning as the face of Oh, Lola!: I’ve been a big fan of Dakota since the first time I saw her in a movie, and we made her a wardrobe in her size when she was 12, which was pretty incredible. When we were speaking about who to use in the Oh, Lola fragrance ads – I had recently seen ‘The Runaways’. Dakota was in it, and I knew she could be this contemporary Lolita, seductive yet sweet.47

Here, Jacobs makes reference to a twelve-year-old Fanning, introducing connotations of childhood and the roles she has played as a child actor. He then refers to her role in The Runaways (2010), which might be described as a ‘coming-of-age’ film in which Fanning’s character passes through menarche in the very first scene. Building upon these connotations, Jacobs then hails Fanning ‘a contemporary Lolita, seductive yet sweet’. Jacobs’ positioning of Fanning as a ‘Lolita’ finds precedent in a number of cases in the fashion industry. In the 1980s Brooke Shields was described as ‘the Lolita of her generation’.48 Kate Moss has been similarly positioned, with a key example being ‘Charming Lolita’ – a spread shot by Ellen von Unwerth that appeared in Vogue Italia (April 1992). In this spread Moss embodies Lolita (red sunglasses, lollipop) and other versions of the ‘woman-child’: from Jodi Foster’s role as child prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976)49 to Carroll Baker’s role as a married woman who sleeps in a cot in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956). All of these visual allusions are anchored by the title of the spread, ‘Charming Lolita’. One might theorize these references through notions of irony and playful intertextuality. However, the problem with a wholly ‘postmodern’ interpretation of Lolita is its failure to account for why certain references are chosen over

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others, time and time again.50 Thus, whilst recognizing the playfulness of such representations, they nevertheless remain embedded in Foucauldian relations of power, which shape the possible ways of being female as well as marking out the ‘acceptable’ sexualities from the ‘unacceptable’, and toying with the boundary between the two.51

Tantrums and naughtiness The following excerpt introduces the theme of naughtiness alongside the aforementioned themes of sexual ambiguity and Fanning as child-to-adult actor: Excerpt III SLK: What’s with the ‘Oh, Lola!’? ‘Naughty Lola’ – that’s what it looks like. [laughter] SLK: ‘Stop that, Lola!’ Gill: It’s her dress as well. Morna: What about it? SLK: But Dakota Fanning is a child, is she not? Gill: Oh, is it Dakota Fanning? I’m surprised because I quite like her. SLK: Well she was, em, she is a child actress. Gill: Yeah, she’s not a child anymore, she was. Morna: Well she was 17 in the picture. Penny: mmm, it is like Lolita though. Morna: In what way? Penny: Just the… she’s very young and very sexualised.52

For these participants, ‘Oh, Lola!’ appears to be a plea for good behaviour, an attempt to rein in a naughty little girl – as if Fanning is sulking and an adult is telling her off (‘Stop that, Lola! Naughty Lola!’). While in Excerpt II Jean imagined an implied male counterpart, the discussion in Excerpt III points to an implied parental counterpart. The discussion of naughtiness, sexual ambiguity and Fanning’s transition from child to adult actor leads Penny to collapse all three notions onto the word ‘Lolita’. Penny explains this by stating ‘she’s very young and very sexualised’: a description that corresponds with the OED’s definition of ‘Lolita’ as ‘a sexually precocious young girl’. The sense of Fanning as ‘naughty’ ties in with other representations of childlike femininity in the fashion media. For instance, the video for Prada Candy shot by Jean-Paul Goude in 2011 features actor Léa Seydoux throwing a temper tantrum during a piano lesson.53 Upon completion of a rudimentary

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scale, the music picks up and Candy grabs her unwitting male tutor by the scruff of his neck, singing ‘running wild, lost control, running wild … ’, whilst flashes of her gapped-teeth remind us of her childish persona. Seydoux then dances with the man, in the rough and unbridled manner that typifies Apache street dance. This provides a pretext for her enactment of childlike femininity. Rolling on the floor, she comedically flashes her oversized pink knickers, in the way that very small children do, before taking a running jump, shouting ‘I don’t care’ and leaping onto her piano teacher for a piggyback. The scene closes with her back at the piano, seemingly sated, completing a sophisticated morceau with panache. The clashing colours of the Prada Candy perfume bottle – pink, red and orange – suggest something sickly sweet or simply too much. This resonates with comments made by one of the participants, Zoe (twenty-four), who characterized the actual scent of Oh, Lola! as ‘too much’, ‘too sweet’, to the point where she stated ‘I really hate this perfume, to be honest!’ The sweetness of the scent was then wedded to naughtiness by Zoe: ‘It’s kind of like a bad sweet […] it’s not like a Chanel, where you know, it’s just like really calm and really elegant, this is, like, naughty.’ As if testament to its sickly scent, the behind-thescenes video for Oh, Lola! features the track ‘You Want the Candy’ (2008) by the Raveonettes.54 Linking this back to Lolita, Humbert describes Dolores as having ‘lips as red as licked candy’:55 ‘candy’ being a term more often used in American English (sweets would be the British equivalent), tying in with the post-war consumerism that serves as a backdrop to Nabokov’s novel. Fashion and sweets seem to make an easy pair, with visuals in the fashion media often presented alongside words suggesting impulsive behaviour, such as ‘sugar rush’, ‘dangerously addictive’, ‘craving’ and ‘frenzy’.56 Yet, sweet treats are not the only retreat to childhood; there is also the tantrum thrown by Candy in the video as well as participants’ reading of Fanning as ‘naughty’. Naughtiness and tantrums involve defiance that takes a childlike rather than an adult guise; neither involves constructive confrontation. This ties in with the tendency, observed by Radway, whereby ‘female defiance is finally rendered ineffectual and childlike as well as unnecessary’.57 Or, as de Beauvoir puts it, ‘woman, like a child, indulges in symbolic outbursts: she can throw herself on a man, beating and scratching, but it is only a gesture’.58 Ultimately, Candy’s tantrum and Lola’s naughtiness – not to mention Lolita’s defiance in the novel – are rendered ineffectual because they are positioned as childlike in a culture where adults hold the balance of power. Tantrums marry rather well with fashion in that the latter seeks to bracket off the rational self

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in order to ‘blunt the buyer’s calculating consciousness’.59 This ‘[substitutes] for the slow time of wear a sovereign time free to destroy itself by an act of annual potlatch’.60 The spoilt, impulsive brat is the ideal subject in consumer capitalism.

Petulance and precocity: Cherry Ripe and the bloom of youth I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you’ve done to me. Dolores Haze61

Moving on from candy and consumption, flowers are also key to the representation of sexuality in Oh, Lola! The scalloped edge of Fanning’s dress resembles a bloom, as does the plastic top of her oversized perfume bottle: Excerpt IV Amber: It’s quite seductive, isn’t it? Emily: mmm […] Emily: Sh, she’s holding a flower. Between her legs. Morna: What does that mean? [laughter] Amber: Oh my gosh, yeah! Emily: That’s seductive. Morna: Why? Emily: Because, emm… it’s the whole idea about like… pure, female, innocent, taking female’s flower… [laughter] Morna: Deflowering! Emily: Deflowering!62

What Emily is referring to here is the idea that a girl is innocent until her ‘flower’ is taken (the flower being a symbol of her virginity). This ‘taking’ of virginity can happen at any age but in the context of Nabokov’s novel, Dolores Haze, after being abused by Humbert, states: ‘I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you’ve done to me.’63 This discourse on daisies and freshness was present in the marketing of earlier fragrances in the Marc Jacobs line, entitled Daisy and Daisy Eau so Fresh (Figure 45). Commenting on this scent, Jacobs reportedly stated: ‘The [Daisy] project was fresh, innocent – characteristics that exist in many girls and women. […] Lola was the next girl in line. She is more seductive – softer, sexier, sultrier than Daisy.’64 While Jacobs separates sexiness from innocence, in line with discourses on Romantic childhood, participants tended to see both qualities converging on

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Figure 45  Promotion for Marc Jacobs new perfume Daisy in Copenhagen, Denmark, 2015. Photographer: Francis Dean.

the body of Fanning. This sense is encapsulated in the following comment from Emily: ‘It’s not, like, glaringly kinda sexy. That’s the thing, cause she’s not … Yeah, I think she could get away with it’. Fanning is almost unwittingly sexy and as such ‘less threatening to men’, to use Emily’s words. The ambiguous dividing line between the categories of ‘innocence’ and ‘sexuality’ has been fetishized both in fashion advertising for adults and in that for children, as Annamari Vänskä has observed.65 The idea of flowers in bloom is present in the OED definition of ‘Lolita’ as ‘a sexually precocious young girl’. The first definition of ‘precocious’ relates to a plant that is flowering or fruiting ‘unusually early’. But when the word pertains to a person, especially a child, it means ‘prematurely developed or showing an unusual degree of advancement in some faculty, ability, or proclivity’.66 Both senses of the word apply to Oh, Lola! In the following excerpt, Zoe and Yves make sense of the image through a Chinese proverb about women being ‘ripe’ for a limited time only: Excerpt V Yves: It, it remember me of, uh, funny saying in China, that, uh, a girl says, ‘oh, I’m no longer fruit’. Morna: mmm

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Yves:  It means you are no longer as fresh as something that’s maybe zesty. Morna: mmm Yves: And if you are sweet, but becoming vegetable. You become… vegetable just means that, uh, you are growing old; you are not sophisticated. [inaudible] no longer taste good. Zoe: Fresh. Yves: Getting a bit stale. […] Morna: Ah, that’s interesting. Do you think she’s a fruit, then? Or a vegetable? Yves: Ehhh, fruit of course. She’s holding a flower and it’s like ‘oh, I’m age and blooming and…’67

Here the metaphors of blossoming flowers and zesty fruit suggest Fanning’s  sexuality is burgeoning. In the Chinese proverb, this freshness is pitted against the older woman’s sexuality, described as ‘vegetable’ or as ‘getting a bit stale’. Mention of fruit in the excerpt above brings to mind the slang phrase ‘to pop one’s cherry’: that is, to ‘take’ a girl’s virginity.68 The symbol of a cherry was used to publicize The Runaways, a film in which Fanning starred. The publicity image features a scarlet cherry, glistening with dewdrops and fashioned as an ignited bomb. Accompanying the cherry is the caption ‘It’s 1975 and they’re about to explode’ – a double entendre referring to the rising success of the girl band and the burgeoning sexuality of the teen-girl characters. The connotations here are reminiscent of the scholarly debate surrounding Cherry Ripe (1879): one of John Everett Millais’ more commercial tableaus (Figure 46). Bradley suggests that the image connotes childhood purity and the ‘Edenic England’ of times past.69 Responding to this, Pamela T. Reis suggests the popularity of Cherry Ripe might actually derive from its sexual undertones, such as the darkness of the girl’s mitts, resting on her lap, which ‘form a representation of female genitalia’.70 The painting’s title arguably reinforces the sexual reading, suggesting the young girl is ‘ripe and ready to be plucked’.71 Read this way, the image represents a sexual invitation – whether intended by Millais or not. Williams concludes that paintings such as Cherry Ripe represent ‘a meeting-point for subordinance and control, marketability and pricelessness, eroticism and innocence’.72 This sense of woman being ‘ripe’ or ‘in bloom’ for a limited time only is reminiscent of remarks made by Wollstonecraft. She lamented the centrality of appearance in definitions of ideal femininity, arguing that it made women ‘ridiculous and useless when the short-lived bloom of beauty [was] over’.73 Her remark remains salient vis-à-vis fashionable ideals today. Julia Twigg notes that ‘for magazines

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Figure 46  John Everett Millais, Cherry Ripe, 1879.

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like Vogue […] aging sets in early, starting at the point at which youth begins to fade, often regarded as the late twenties’.74 Models must therefore approximate a very narrow window of perfection or else risk being marked out as ‘Other’. The way fashion models seem never to grow up is reminiscent of Peter Pan by James M. Barrie (1911).75 Peter Pan was mentioned by several of my participants, with one participant, Smithy (forty-one), describing Fanning’s dress as ‘Wendy’: a reference to the girl-child protagonist of the story. Oh, Lola! can therefore be read in tandem with the styling of Wendy Darling in Disney’s 1953 adaption. While Fanning’s dress is pink and Wendy’s dress is blue, both colours can be described using the prefix ‘baby’ (with ‘baby pink’ being a phrase used by one participant, Emily (twenty-seven), to describe the colour of Fanning’s dress). More specifically, a shadow looms behind Fanning in a way similar to Wendy in the scene where she kneels on the floor ‘sewing on’ Peter’s shadow after he failed to re-attach it using soap – ‘How exactly like a boy!’76 The girls’ dresses share a certain silhouette: straight bodice; short, slightly puffed out sleeves; and full skirt, fanning onto the floor. This silhouette has an eerie resonance with Humbert’s predilection for certain kinds of clothing for ‘his Lolita’: Goodness, what crazy purchases were prompted by the poignant predilection Humbert had in those days for check weaves, bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves, soft pleats, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts! Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties? Did I have something special in mind? coaxing voices asked me. Swimming suits? We have them in all shades. Dream pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black.77

Humbert creates Lolita through the clothes he buys for her – not to mention the way he textualizes her through his ‘allegorizing gaze’, to borrow a phrase from Bronfen.78 As for Wendy, she is a girl on the cusp of adolescence: we are told that her father keeps suggesting she have a room of her own, separate from her younger brothers. The opening passage of the book encapsulates Wendy’s awareness that she will eventually have to grow up: One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this forever!’79

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The flower is once more invoked as a symbol of youth, always already inscribed with its demise. The book closes with a grown-up Wendy, married with a daughter of her own. In the final, heart-breaking scene Peter returns to visit Wendy after an absence of many years. He does not notice, at first, that Wendy has grown up. ‘“Hallo, Peter,” [Wendy] replied faintly, squeezing herself as small as possible. Something inside her was crying, “Woman, woman, let go of me”.’80 When confronted with Peter, Wendy is ashamed of her womanly body; she is ‘helpless and guilty, a big woman’.81 Her sense of shame is compounded by a ‘cry of pain’ which comes from Peter when he finally sees her in the light.82 The story ends with Peter taking Wendy’s daughter, Jane to Neverland since Wendy, being big, can no longer fly. She is left behind, no longer ethereal. And when Jane grows up Peter takes her daughter, Margaret. Only girls are permitted; women cannot fly.

Nymphets, daughters and the photographic medium This revolving door of daughters, and the notion that only girls can fly, is reminiscent of both Lolita and the way femininities are represented in the fashion media. In terms of the fashion industry, the imperative to remain young is scarcely masked, with a fast-fashion retail chain going by the name of ‘Forever 21’. Even where models surpass the age of twenty-one, one could be forgiven for thinking they never grow up – never age – thanks to post-production airbrushing. I am thinking here of a 38-year-old Vanessa Paradis being described in British Vogue as ‘the ultimate “femme-enfant”’,83 who ‘belongs to an exotic group of Gauls beloved for their knowing sexuality – a tribe of French Lolitas, if you will’.84 Thus, while Peter Pan’s solution was to take daughters only, the solution in the fashion industry lies in the photographic medium. It was, after all, photography that allowed Lewis Carroll ‘to believe in the myth of everlasting flowers’ and the idea that Alice Liddell would remain ‘forever little’.85 Common misconceptions about photographic ‘truth’ gloss over techniques of digital manipulation that are ‘both ubiquitous and imperceptible’, as Karen de Perthuis puts it.86 Fashion photography ‘catches’ models in their supposed apogee, their window of perfection, whilst also presenting them as ‘beyond human in their flawless beauty. Their hair falls in the carefully sculpted waves of a child’s doll in its plastic packaging’.87 Thus, the mannequin represents ‘an eternally renewable body’,88 which is to say, a ‘no-one’s body’.89

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This desire to never grow up resonates with Humbert’s mythologization of Dolores Haze, whom he renders his ‘eternal Lolita’: the textual product of his imagination.90 Yet, in terms of Dolores Haze, the living, breathing human being, Humbert sees her as ‘hopelessly worn at seventeen’.91 Besides the death of the nymphet at fourteen years, Dolores dies in a second sense: in childbirth, at just seventeen years old. Thus, what further binds Lolita, Peter Pan and the mannequin of fashion, in the period studied for the book, is antipathy towards the maternal body – and the womanly body more generally. Discourse on Romantic childhood posits the adult body as somehow more fleshly than that of the child – the latter being mythologized as asexual, ethereal and transcendental (able to fly). In Lolita, Humbert scorns his wife’s ‘overtly feminine’ body, preferring that of the immature and pubescent Dolores Haze. This is evident in the way Humbert talks about Dolores and her mother. He describes the two as ‘big Haze’ and ‘little Haze’: the former being one pejorative amongst many used by Humbert (such as ‘fat Haze’ and Lolita’s ‘cow-like mother’). Because Dolores dies in childbirth, she never lives to be a mother herself. Thus, the figure of Lolita absolutely and resolutely excludes the maternal: both literally, in terms of the plot, and figuratively, through Humbert’s mythologization of the child as ‘nymphet’ who dies at fourteen.92 In the fashion context, antipathy to the maternal goes beyond mere emphasis on youth, as Evans and Thornton observe: In modern myth and stereotype the maternal body is dissociated from the qualities of glamour and sexiness which fashion endorses. This dissociation goes deeper than fashion’s emphasis on youth or the supposition that fashion signifies a female availability which is abandoned with maternity. In cultural stereotypes maternity and glamour, or the feminine will to power, are incompatible. In so far as fashion does sanction a feminine will to power it excludes the maternal.93

This ‘feminine will to power’ – the maternal power to create life – is replaced in fashion by a rather empty form of power that finds expression in tantrums, squabbles and huffs that lead nowhere (as per Candy, Oh, Lola! and numerous editorial spreads, often photographed by Terry Richardson).94 Fashion and nonreproductive sexuality make an easy pair in that both signify a sort of mythic ‘futility’ or dead end, as Jean Baudrillard has argued.95 There is evidence that this is beginning to shift in media discourse, with the current vogue for glamourized, pregnant celebrity bodies, as explored by Maureen Lehto Brewster. That being said, where the maternal body does appear it is often disciplined, contained and highly normative in appearance.96

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Consumption, petulance and death In Chapter 5 I theorized childlike femininity as involving nostalgia for an idealized window of perfection: a coherent no-place – a liminal utopia – that does not exist outside of representation. Yet, in images such as ‘Sunny and Sexy’, a photo spread published in Vogue Italia,97 the connotations of childhood are not utopian or nostalgic; instead, the freezing of time seems to violently disturb the woman pictured. In the editorial, Ashley Smith wears red sunglasses and a bright pink bikini. Her long blonde hair is coiffed in a way that mimics Sue Lyon’s in Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Lolita. Alongside these sartorial elements is the Diet Coke bottle that Smith holds: homage to American post-war consumer culture that serves as a backdrop to Lolita. Alice Twemlow notes the ubiquity, in the novel, of ‘tawdry accessories, candies, sodas, and comics […] Humbert doles out as rewards and bribes for [Lolita’s] sexual services’.98 Furthermore, a distinction is made between Humbert’s European clothing and the ‘new world’ clothing of Lolita – with the word ‘gaudy’ reminding us of ‘his censure of Lolita’s taste’.99 The brashness of Lolita’s colours lends itself well to fashion photography, which uses brightly coloured props for visual impact. In ‘Sunny and Sexy’ (fashion editor, Cathy Kasterine) Smith’s body language – folded arms and petulant pout – appears against a backdrop of palm trees, brightly coloured inflatables and a bluer than blue make-believe sky. The reference to Lolita is cemented by the accompanying images, which feature a lollipop, hula hoop and cropped top: all of which appear in the book and/or films. While these signifiers work collectively to recall Lolita, they play out in the context of Ashley Smith’s body, which is emphatically womanly, her breasts spilling out over her much-too-small bikini top. Yet these codes are not necessarily contradictory, given the way the concept of Lolita has expanded beyond the confines of Nabokov’s novel, as evidenced in the OED’s definition. Furthermore, as White notes, above, image-makers have sometimes been ‘unaware that they were adding a few years to make Lolita a more palatable age’.100 As such, the original context, including the plot and literary intention of Nabokov’s novel, becomes largely irrelevant; the signifiers float free of their original signifieds. Of course, it is possible to argue that the authors of the imagery did not have Lolita in mind when styling Ashley Smith, but from a Foucauldian perspective, these objects when presented together summon an intertextual recollection of Kubrick’s film and the visual culture that has flowed from it since. Discourse analysis, for Foucault, is thus about tracing ‘relations between statements (even if the author is unaware of them; even if the statements do not have the same

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author; even if the authors were unaware of each other’s existence); relations between groups of statements thus established’.101 Yet, unlike fashion spreads that reference Romantic childhood, there is arguably nothing nostalgic about ‘Sunny and Sexy’. Ashley Smith is not play-acting a child having fun; her expression is petulant, glazed-over or, at worst, disassociated: a mood completely at odds with the title, ‘Sunny and Sexy’. The cracked concrete flagstones, ominous shadows and smoke exhaled from the model’s mouth all point to the tragic destruction that characterizes Nabokov’s Lolita. Unlike Oh, Lola! which playfully elides the ‘elegiac’ tone of Nabokov’s novel, ‘Sunny and Sexy’ succeeds in visually conveying this nuance. Smith is a girl showered with over-the-top consumables – brightly coloured clothing, beach toys, sugary cola, candy – but not a girl who is happy. Like Prada’s Candy, there is a sense of Smith being a ‘spoilt brat’– the clichéd character who has everything but remains petulant and insatiate (not unlike the consumer of fast-fashion). Yet, whilst we know Ashley Smith is play-acting, Nabokov’s Lolita remains powerless, in spite of the consumables lavished upon her. Humbert might mythologize her as femme fatale – and himself as ‘helpless’ poet, rapt in her thralls – but what he chooses to downplay is Lolita’s position in the hierarchy of age. She lacks legal majority and the capacity to forcefully or intellectually resist Humbert’s will. If she leaves Humbert she will end up in a foster home, something Humbert very well knows. Instead Dolores resorts to sulking, strops and bribes. Petulance is one of the few ways she can exercise her limited power in the face of her abuser, as Pifer explains: Increasingly aware of being Humbert’s virtual prisoner, of having never consented to be his sexual partner, let alone his ‘lover’, the teenager grows sullen and defiant. […] Arming herself with the only defense at her disposal, she masks her ‘vulnerability’ as Humbert ultimately admits, ‘in trite brashness and boredom’.102

Her life is irrevocably damaged – not unlike the paving stones in ‘Sunny and Sexy’. Ashley Smith, with her developed breasts, could almost be an adult Dolores in the aftermath of Humbert’s abuse. The smoke exhaled from her mouth is reminiscent of the scene where Humbert returns to find Dolores – now Dolly Schiller – smoking a cigarette, ‘pale, polluted, and big with another’s child’.103 For Humbert, the cigarette raises the spectre of Lolita’s dead mother, ‘big Haze’, as well as being a marker of adulthood and Lolita’s lost ‘nymphage’.104 Having denied Dolores her right to life and liberty, Humbert ultimately admits that ‘“something within her” had been “broken” by him’.105

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Conclusion In this chapter I have traced the citation of ‘Lolita’ as text and image in fashion photography. The prevalence of this figure can be explained, in part, by the visual shorthand that has evolved since the release of Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation – particularly the red lollipop and heart-shaped sunglasses that appeared in Stern’s publicity image. This reductive visual vocabulary ties in with popular usage of the word ‘Lolita’, defined as ‘a sexually precocious young girl’ in the OED. In my reception studies, the word ‘Lolita’ was used in a way that mirrored the dictionary definition, with Fanning being described as ‘young and sexualised’, ‘in bloom’ and ‘naughty’. Such readings of Fanning as ‘Lolita’ tie in with practices of naming adult women ‘Lolitas’ in the fashion media. This chapter also considered why the figure of ‘Lolita’ fits so seamlessly into the discourse of fashion. This can be explained, in part, by the industry’s fixation with the cusp separating girl-childhood from adult womanhood. Lolita’s mythic body lends itself well to fashion’s feminine ideal in that it resolutely excludes the womanly body. But unlike Lolita, techniques of digital manipulation allow the fashion model to transcend her predicament of being ‘hopelessly worn at seventeen’.106 Repetitive references to Lolita in the fashion media therefore involve a suppression of the fully developed, womanly body – in all its lifegiving power – in favour of a revolving door of daughters, à la Wendy, Jane and Margaret in Peter Pan. Alongside sexuality, Nabokov’s novel explores themes of post-war American consumerism, excess and saturated colours: all of which lend themselves well to the fashion media and its penchant for visual impact. Clothing plays a key role in Humbert’s construction of the sign ‘Lolita’, as visualized so memorably by Bert Stern. Fashion images such as Jurgen Teller’s Oh, Lola! (2011) and Ellen von Unwerth’s ‘Charming Lolita’ (1992) draw upon this visual shorthand in a playful, ironic, irreverent manner, eliding the tragic tone of Nabokov’s novel. Instead, the childlike defiance and consumables wedded to the trope of Lolita serve the irrational logic of the fashion system and its dream of a never-satiated consumer.

8

Kinderwhore: From Catwalk to Slutwalk

In this final chapter I consider Kinderwhore, a parodic version of childlike femininity that appeared in the 1990s. It was a practice of dressing that fused signifiers of childhood – dolls, dummies and gingham – with signifiers of overt female sexuality  – such as tight-fitting clothing and red lipstick.1 This aesthetic was later re-signified, and rendered hyper-girly, by design duo Meadham Kirchhoff in 2012. Of particular interest is the extent to which these instantiations of childlike femininity succeed in subverting gender norms, given Butler’s suggestion that ‘parody by itself is not subversive’.2 Although some parodic repetitions will succeed in being ‘effectively disruptive’, others ‘become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony’.3 In order to address this question I draw on findings from reception studies of ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’, a feature that appeared in i-D in August 1995. Participants tended to read the women depicted through the categories of ‘deviance’ such as drug addiction, prostitution, aggression and homicide. Such readings, I suggest, arguably undermine the subversive potential of the parody as they pathologize ‘strong’ or active sexuality in women, rendering the women depicted as deviant Other to ‘healthy’ or ‘ideal’ femininities: not unlike the virgin/whore dichotomy which has underpinned discourses on women for centuries. The second part of the chapter examines the way Kinderwhore was later mobilized by Meadham Kirchhoff in their collection A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing (Spring/Summer 2012). This is a version of Kinderwhore which arguably sheds  the ‘dark’ undercurrent of the aesthetic as it appeared in the 1990s. To explore this further I turn to a feature in British Vogue, which reported on a Slutwalk the designers enacted on the streets of Dalston in East London. Drawing again from reception studies, as well as Angela McRobbie’s notion of the postfeminist masquerade,4 I question the extent to which the appearance of A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing on the pages of Vogue succeeds in being a subversive enactment

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in the struggle to repeat, but repeat differently, restrictive ideals of femininity under the heterosexual matrix. As will become clear, the re-contextualization of Meadham Kirchhoff ’s collection on the pages of the magazine raised a different set of questions, in terms of the politics of race and the exclusionary practices of representation in the fashion media.

Kinderwhore and troubling the virgin/whore dichotomy The Kinderwhore aesthetic can be located in the context of 1990s grunge, which spoke to a sense of despair during the economic downturn of that period.5 Kinderwhore was most famously embodied by Courtney Love, whose vestimentary style has been described as a ‘hybrid between a toddler and a vampire’ (Figure 47).6 Kinderwhore and grunge can also be read alongside the emergence of the Riot Grrrls in the early 1990s, who sought to reclaim the word ‘girl’, which they used ‘strategically to distance themselves from the adult patriarchal worlds of status, hierarchies and standards. Its usage also marks a celebration of both the fierce and aggressive potential of girls (the “grrr” stood for growling) as well as reconstitution of girl culture as a positive force embracing self-expression through fashion, attitude and a Do It Yourself approach to cultural production’, as Aapola et al. note.7

Figure 47  Eric Erlandson, Courtney Love and Melissa Auf Der Maur, 1995. The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

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When I typed ‘Kinderwhore’ into the search field of Google Image, a photograph from Interview magazine was the first result to appear.8 The image, shot by Ellen von Unwerth, appeared as part of a six-page spread in the March 1994 edition of the magazine, entitled ‘Courtney Love: The Hole Truth’.9 The wordplay here refers to Love’s role as vocalist of alternative rock band, Hole. It was her membership of Hole – as well as her relationship with, and subsequent marriage to, Kurt Cobain – that cemented Love’s association with grunge in the early 1990s.10 In Figure 48, Love appears in a long-sleeved tea-dress with white Peter Pan collar: a garment suggesting dainty, delicate femininity. Yet, the contrasting black waistband strikes a note of dissonance as does her dark make-up and footwear. She wears black buckled Mary Jane shoes over kneehigh socks, not unlike the patent shoes and pelerine socks of a schoolgirl, or the surrealist automaton in Chapter 6. She playfully negotiates a large shellon-a-string in one hand and a witch’s broom in the other, while her pose and downcast gaze suggest a little girl absorbed in her own world – aided by the grainy finish. The dolphin mural behind her recalls a child’s play area, while someone watches from the sidelines, their footwear only just visible, while they supervise Love from a point of authority (the implied parental counterpart). Yet, undermining her childlike nature are Love’s womanly body, the cigarette drooping from her lips and the dark roots, creeping out from under her too obviously bleached blonde hair. On the opposite page (Figure 49), Love wears a slip dress – that 1990s staple – its gingham print recalling schoolgirl pinafores and Judy Garland’s all-American femininity in The Wizard of Oz. This ‘wholesome’ femininity is then melded with Love’s ‘knowing’ sexuality: signalled by her close-fitting dress, which emphasizes her breasts, her slightly parted lips, her intense gaze, her open legs. This medley of contradictory signifiers can be read through punk strategies of re-contextualization, which allow well-worn connotations – such as gingham and wholesomeness – to be re-signified in the context of Kinderwhore as a whole. Rebecca Arnold writes: The [Kinderwhore] look was influential, but confusing: the coy little girl is undercut by the unnerving, aggressive quality of her make-up; the deliberate fracturing of the expected neatness of femininity hints at madness, loss of control, raising fears of women as dangerous and sexual, publicly flaunting her flaws instead of presenting a contained and acceptable face of prettiness and seduction. The references to the punk ideology of confronting moral hypocrisy, exposing fears and desires, are once again used as a tactic to shock and unbalance the viewer.11

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Figure 48  ‘Courtney Love: The Hole Truth’. Interview magazine, March 1994. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Model: Courtney Love.

The fears and expectations to which Arnold refers are tied up in longstanding  discourses that draw upon the virgin/whore dichotomy which has underpinned discourses on acceptable and unacceptable femininities in the West.

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Figure 49  ‘Courtney Love: The Hole Truth’. Interview magazine, March 1994. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Model: Courtney Love.

Lucy Bland writes that prior to the nineteenth century, the virgin/whore polarity was seen as existing within women whereas in the nineteenth century there was a discursive shift whereby the polarity came to be articulated as existing between women. This discourse on sexuality was bound up with distinctions of social class, with model bourgeois femininity being posited as

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‘asexual’ or passive, in opposition to the prostitute, or ‘unrespectable’ women of the lower classes more generally, who were considered a public health risk in terms of their capacity to transmit disease, such as cholera, typhoid and venereal disease, as well as their practices of apparently ‘reckless breeding’.12 Or, as Williams puts it, ‘adult males of the comfortable classes imposed/permitted sexuality for those beneath them but not for their class equals’.13 In turn, this divided middle-class men from middle-class women: the ‘(a)sexuality of the Victorian lady signified virtue and morality as against the vice and immorality of male sexual lust’.14 When it comes to Love, her enactment of exaggerated incoherence betrays the impossibility of ever fully inhabiting the gendered subject-positions that are offered up in discourse. She toys with analytically discrete categories, such as virgin/whore and good girl/slut. This conscious refusal of categories is made visible in Love’s appearance in Elle magazine in 1993, where she is photographed with ‘witch’ scrawled on one arm and ‘sugar’ on the other.15 Of course, the myth of the Victorian lady as asexual entails a logical contradiction, for ‘how […] could it be reconciled with the active sexuality that would inevitably be included in the duties of wife and mother?’16 This paradox might be resolved in two ways. The first way involves making a distinction between sex in the service of reproduction, and sexual pleasure for its own sake. The second way of resolving the paradox is through the ‘phantasy solution’ of the virgin mother,17 the Madonna,18 who in biblical discourse offered salvation for women following Eve’s fall from grace.19 As Efrat Tseëlon writes: ‘Virginity is an angelic state that has existed in paradise before the Fall. It is a mediator between the human and the divine’;20 and the Victorian lady reached spiritual heights, not least by virtue of her position as ‘Angel in the House’.21 This idea of the respectable woman as ‘divine’ finds expression in Rousseau’s Emile, where he suggests the ‘virtuous woman is little lower than the angels […] Sophy [the ideal woman] will be chaste and good until her dying day’.22 This has clear relevance to articulations of the Romantic woman-child in Chapter 5, with images such as ‘Heavenly Creatures’ (Figure 9) going with the grain of this discourse on feminine divinity, purity and ethereality. As such, the imagery in that chapter presented a disinterested female body, elevated from the ‘dirt’ of sexuality. This distancing from sexual lust is supported by Leith Clark’s comment about wanting the imagery in Lula to sidestep the sexualization which she associated with the ‘imaginary man in the room’. 23 The binaries between woman and child, virgin and whore, were not the only binaries parodied by Love; upon becoming a mother she refused to

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align herself with normative discourses positing sexuality and motherhood as mutually exclusive categories.24 As Higonnet explains, Love ‘refused to ratchet down her sexuality, her violence, her publicity, or her maternity’.25 This provoked public unease, for ‘a woman who unleashes an artistic impulse on the subject of maternity, who lets it go beyond the narrow limits of ideal Romantic innocence, is bound to offend’.26 Love flouted the boundaries of innocence by combining motherhood – culturally intelligible as asexual and paradoxically virginal – with assertive sexuality. After all, it is women (and mothers in particular) who are designated ‘keepers’ of childhood innocence in conservative rhetoric, and as such aligned with children in the domestic sphere.27 This conflation of categories might explain some of the hostile reactions to Love, given Butler’s suggestion that ‘coherence is desired, wished for, idealized’ by the subject.28 Fashion can be used to bolster that fantasy of coherence, realizing it ‘on the surface of the body’, as per images of the Romantic womanchild.29 This superficial coherence reinforces the belief that gender difference derives from some ‘interior essence’: an essence held responsible for producing the signifiers and behaviours that mark out ‘woman’ from ‘man’. Yet Butler’s point is quite the contrary; the idea of an ‘interior essence’ is actually the ‘effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse’ rather than the cause of gendered significations on the surface of the body. From this, disruptive performances are arguably those that ‘reveal this ostensible “cause” [the imagined interior essence] to be an “effect”’.30 Thus while the Romantic woman-child of ‘Heavenly Creatures’ (Figure 9) might bolster the fantasy of coherence – reassuring in its lack of conflict, contradiction and discomfort – Kinderwhore, as performed by Love, disrupts that regulatory fiction. It might, therefore, be an instance where the bodily surface ‘enacted as the natural […] can become the site of a dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveals the performative status of the natural itself ’.31 If we accept the Foucauldian premise that power cannot be overthrown, only redeployed, then re-signification becomes an important strategy for subverting and re-orienting long-standing myths of femininity. This brings us back to Butler’s claim that ‘parody by itself is not subversive’;32 instead she stresses context and reception as two important factors in determining the disruptive potential of gender parodies: There must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become

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domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony. A typology of actions would clearly not suffice, for parodic displacement, indeed, parodic laughter, depends on a context and reception in which subversive confusions can be fostered.33

Drawing on my findings from reception studies, I argue that the subversive potential of Kinderwhore is partially undermined by the way participants read this version of femininity through the lens of ‘deviance’, such as drug abuse, prostitution and murder.

Pretty on the inside/outside The theme of discordance recurs in another spread by Ellen von Unwerth entitled ‘Pretty on the Inside’ (Figure 50). The editorial features American actor Drew Barrymore and appeared in i-D in March 1995.34 The link between this editorial and Courtney Love is rendered explicit by the spread’s title, ‘Pretty on the Inside’: the title of Hole’s debut album from 1991.35 This ironized title, in hot pink letters, pokes fun at the idea of a feminine essence or ‘organizing gender core’36 – mirrored by Barrymore’s refusal to construct herself (or be constructed) in an outwardly submissive way. Like Love, Barrymore’s ‘outside’ is contradictory. The spread sees her playfully taking up the position of 1950s pin-up – there for the taking – reinforced by ‘sweet’ elements such as daisies and a gingham bikini in baby pink. These references to 1950s femininity are counterpoised with femme fatale signifiers such as dark make-up, a cigarette and a strong, knowing regard. As with Love, Barrymore’s dark roots are starting to show through, reminding the viewer of her ‘artifice’: her bleached blonde hair, her femininity. Her expressions are knowingly nonchalant; she does not cower from her desirability. This visual reading of Barrymore fits with the introductory text in hot pink, which states: Drew Barrymore has done it all. From child starlet to teenage alcoholic and drug addict, the drama in her life has never been confined to the big screen. Now all grown-up, she’s modelling nude for Playboy, starring in the new Batman movie, and proving that her talent for self-destruction has been left a long way behind.37

Like Courtney Love, who talked openly about her heroin use, Barrymore’s knowingness and strength are couched in the vocabulary of debauched teenage years, drug abuse, ‘drama’ and a penchant for ‘self-destruction’. Barrymore’s

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Figure 50  ‘Pretty on the Inside’. i-D no.138, March 1995. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Stylist: Joe McKenna. Model: Drew Barrymore.

image is steeped in irony, evidenced by the caption ‘I can never understand when people refer to me as a sex symbol’, superimposed on another image of Barrymore, this time with a finger in her mouth, looking out provocatively at the viewer. The phrase ‘all grown up’ is tongue-in-cheek, being a term often applied to children who are only just approaching adulthood. The same phrase was applied to Kate Moss a few years later – a model who passed from adolescent to adult in the public eye – in a spread for i-D photographed by Juergen Teller.38 In one sense, the parodic redeployment and refusal of constructed coherence can be read as subversive when it comes to Drew Barrymore, Courtney Love and their renditions of femininity. Yet, others have read this differently, foregrounding the way Kinderwhore championed a sort of penchant for self-destruction, vulnerability and ‘faux innocence’ (presumably as opposed to ‘real’ Romantic innocence). Commenting on Love’s sartorial style, Joan Smith wrote in The Guardian: Her clothes are not merely a fashion statement but a reflection of emotional disorder, a painful exposure of vulnerability, self-hatred and confusion. She is at once a little girl, a baby doll without responsibility for the paedophiliac response courted by her appearance and – in a curious piece of self-objectification – the site on which the sexual disgust accompanying that response can be inscribed. Rarely has the sinister nexus between sex, faux-innocence and death which motivates the recurring craze for dressing adult women as schoolgirls or baby dolls been so frankly exposed.39

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These comments are reminiscent of the press reaction to Kate Moss as photographed by Corinne Day in ‘Under Exposure’ (British Vogue, June 1993).40 As was the case then, Smith’s suggestion that Love’s style courted ‘a paedophiliac response’ is not entirely convincing: Love’s aesthetic might combine signifiers of innocence with signifiers of sexuality but she nevertheless appears unambiguously womanly. According to Smith, the salient issue lies in the response of men: Kinderwhore, she suggests, ‘defuses male fears, pretending that adult women are little girls at heart’.41 Male superiority and control are thus retained through the ideology of childlike femininity, much like the masquerade as discussed by Riviere.42 If one accepts this reading of Kinderwhore, then Smith’s comments might square with de Beauvoir’s suggestion that ‘the adult woman now inhabits the same world as the man, but the child-woman moves in a universe which he cannot enter. The age difference re-establishes between them the distance that seems necessary to desire’.43 Yet, I would question Smith’s assertion that this particular stylization of gender difference serves to defuse (male) fears about ‘active’ female sexuality. Instead, I would argue that Kinderwhore is a subjectposition that provokes rather than defuses male anxiety – precisely because it melds categories that are habitually kept analytically discrete (virgin/whore, mother/child, innocence/sexuality). This is supported by Emily’s reading of ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’, particularly her comment, ‘I think this would scare guys off ’, as further discussed below. Whilst I do not agree with Smith’s suggestion that Love courts a ‘paedophiliac response’, or defuses male anxieties about female sexuality, Smith might have a point when it comes to depictions of Love’s vulnerability. In 1993, journalist Liz Evans stated that ‘where Madonna is acceptably (and commercially) subversive, Courtney Love deals in the ugliest of taboos’.44 One of those ugly taboos might be the heroin use for which Love and Cobain were renowned. The 1990s saw the emergence of a certain ‘fascination with darkness’45 in fashion, the most notable of which was a genre of realist photography that came to be labelled ‘heroin chic’. Although drug use had previously appeared in fashion photography – such as Bob Richardson’s work in the late 1960s46 – so-called heroin chic provoked moral unrest when it appeared in the mainstream media.47 Whilst at times, Love appeared in control of her body, her sexuality and her life, there were other times where her sexuality was cast as the transgressive ‘other’ to ‘healthy’ female sexuality. Or as Love, herself, put it, there were times when she came across ‘as a fourteen-year-old battered rape victim’.48 This speaks to Caroline Evans’ observation that ‘in many fashion images of the 1990s women appeared either

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mad or dysfunctional: their sexuality could not be frank and straightforward but was always configured as complex, deviant, deranged or troubled’.49 It is to this discourse of female sexuality as mad, dysfunctional or even pathological that I now turn, explored through the words of participants in reception studies.

Sugar ‘n’ Spite: Kinderwhore in reception studies In order to explore different readings of Kinderwhore, I showed focus group participants a double-page feature from i-D, entitled ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’ (Figure  51). Photographed by Davies and Davies, the image appeared in i-D in August 1995:50 five months after Barrymore in ‘Pretty on the Inside’ and the year after the death of Kurt Cobain and the release of Hole’s second album, Live through This. The editorial presents four members of the girl band Fluffy, whose name is an ironic take on the word’s association with delicate femininity.51 The following excerpt is from reception studies held with a group of four women between the ages of forty-one and fifty-eight, resident in a rural part of the UK. The women I spoke to in this particular group were not the target audience for i-D, which may explain, in part, the dialogue which ensued upon presentation of ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’: Excerpt I Smithy: Drugs abuse. Sex abuse. Morna: It’s from the nineties; I think it’s ‘94… It appeared in i-D magazine, which is, like, a style magazine. Smithy:  Too many girls on [inaudible]. The hollow eyes. Jean:  mmhmm Smithy:  There’s something haunted about those. Jean: Emm… what’s her name… the mass mur, moors murderer? Katherine:  Oh yes! Smithy: Myra Hindley. Jean:  Myra Hindley. [laughter] Katherine: Oh yeah! Jean: Her eyes. […] Smithy: And Rosemary West is another one that… Jean:  Mmmhmm Morna:  Mmm Jean: There’s something slightly unhinged.52

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Figure 51  ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’. i-D no.143, August 1995. Photographers: Davies and Davies. Models: members of girl band Fluffy.

So, within a couple of minutes, the participants had already situated the image in the context of drug abuse, sex abuse, mental instability – as indicated by the word ‘unhinged’ – and the mass murder of children, as signalled by mention of Myra Hindley and Rosemary West. According to Helen Birch, the photograph of Myra Hindley taken at the time of her arrest in 1965 has become ‘synonymous with the idea of feminine evil’ (Figure 52).53 Hindley was convicted for her role in the murder of five children, along with her lover Ian Brady. The Moors Murders were widely reported in the British press, leading the photograph of Hindley to take on a mythic quality, inciting ‘terror, mingled with fascination’.54 The picture symbolized ‘the threat of femininity unleashed from its traditional bonds of goodness, tenderness, nurturance. It strikes at the heart of our fears about unruly women, about criminality, and about the way gender is constructed’.55 Given the abhorrence of Hindley’s crime, it is worth questioning why girl band Fluffy would come to be read through the lens of one of the most vilified female figures in twentiethcentury Britain. As the discussion progressed, the participants drew upon additional discursive resources, locating members of Fluffy somewhere between mass murderers and

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Figure 52  Portrait of Myra Hindley (1942–2002). Photo by Keystone via Getty Images.

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creepy dolls. Smithy sensed something Victorian about the image: pointing to the models’ likeness to ‘those old china dolls that used to get their heads broken’ as well as suggesting their clothing looked like ‘old-fashioned nightdresses’. The idea of the broken doll was further elaborated with regards the fourth figure in the image: Excerpt II Jean: That looks as if her neck, her neck’s broken. [laughter] Morna:  Yeah Katherine: Toy story! You know… Jean:  Yes Katherine:  You know, with the doll… Smithy: Yes. That’s exactly what that looks like [inaudible] That’s the head that belongs on that dress [pointing] Jean: Yes that’s… and it’s a bit nightmarish.

Here Katherine is perhaps referring to either ‘Babyface’, one of the mutant toys from Toy Story or the equally frightening ‘Big Baby’. Babyface has a doll’s head, with one eye intact and one hollow eye socket, attached to a body made of spidery metal legs. Woody and Buzz, the ‘goodies’ from Toy Story, stumble across Babyface, amongst a group of other mismatched toys, and ‘react in fear, thinking that the mismatched toys are cannibals’.56 Big Baby, on the other hand, is a babyturned-bad whose white fabric body is grubby (Romantic innocence lost) and whose plastic limbs are covered with purple pen marks resembling tattoos. Big baby has one eye stuck half-open as if recovering from a brawl. Smithy and Jean then elaborated further, mentioning the Bride of Chucky, whose black make-up, dark roots and leather jacket tie in with the grunge aesthetic of Courtney Love and Drew Barrymore discussed earlier. Collectively, these intertextual references served to position the members of Fluffy as callous, depraved, terror-inducing and quite literally broken. Fluffy’s flirtation with grunge, read in this light, is reminiscent of de Beauvoir’s observation that ‘if … woman evades the rules of society, she returns to nature and to the demon’.57 Thus, the members of Fluffy, through a very slight shift in the visual language of femininity – the direct gaze, the tilted head, the dark make-up – provoke a response that returns them to the land of the devil, child murder and grotesque babies-turned-bad. Yet, it might be that these particular participants were unfamiliar with the visual codes of i-D and grunge: or, to put it differently, did not have the ‘subcultural competences’58 or ‘fashion competences’ that regular readers of the magazine might have. This reinforces the way in which

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the female gaze is multifarious, influenced not only by one’s cultural capital and (sub-)cultural competences but also by one’s social positionings, such as age, region and profession. The image takes on a lighter tone when read in tandem with the accompanying text. The caption reads ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’: a tongue-in-cheek reference to an English nursery rhyme, as remarked upon by one participant, Penny (fifty-six). The rhyme proclaims little boys to be made of ‘snips and snails, and puppy dogs’ tails’ whereas little girls are made of ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’. Whilst it is unclear what ‘snips’ refers to, the overarching message is clear: boys are made of slimy snails and boisterous puppy tails – meaning unruly or ‘bad’ behaviour is to be expected – whereas girls are made of sweetness and loveliness: classic ‘good girl’ behaviour. This is a phrase that recurs across media discourse,59 with one controversial example consisting in the photographs of a ten-year-old Brooke Shields, in Sugar and Spice, published by Playboy Press in 1975. More recently, the phrase appeared in a DazedDigital interview with Leith Clark, with introductory text that read: ‘Sugar and spice and everything nice: that’s what Lula girls are made of. The sugariest and spiciest of all is Leith Clark, editor-in-chief and stylist on the side.’60 Once more, Lula girls are here seen to go with the grain of normative femininity, whereas the wordplay in ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’ suggests Fluffy are women who eschew traditional gender roles: ‘These four young women may call their band “Fluffy”, but don’t let that fool you.’ Mention of ‘candyfloss veneer’ and ‘smokescreen’ continues this sense of the exterior surface belying the interior. When I asked participants to imagine men presented in the same manner, the readings were quite different.61 Poppy responded to this question by stating ‘you expect it from men’, while other responses included: ‘men would get away with it’; ‘it wouldn’t be so sinister’; they would look ‘smouldering rather than abused’. Participants offered numerous examples of men who might present themselves in this way, without appearing sinister, such as: Ozzy Osbourne, James Dean, the Pet Shop Boys, Robert Palmer, Mick Jagger and members of Queen. From this, the sinister or ‘deviant’ readings of this image seemed to derive from the fact that these behaviours, gestures and poses found expression on female-gendered bodies. The phrase ‘you expect it from men’ was also used by participants in another group, when reflecting on what they saw as the ‘confrontational’ nature of the women depicted: Excerpt III Amber: I think if it was a guy it would make me feel less uncomfortable… these poses. Morna: How come? Do you think it would be attractive?

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Amber: Emm … I think it would be if it was men. Emm, cause I think that they’re… the way that they are, I’m not used to seeing women, like, stood like that and being so, emm, direct, so kind of confrontational. Whereas, men … are more macho. Emily: You expect it with men. Amber: Yeah. Emily: … the confrontation. Amber: Yeah. And you expect, kind of, the, um, the eyes to be… cause, the, the the way it, just the way they look, like … I think it would almost be quite sexy for a man but for a woman it … kind of that directness, looks like…62

Here, Amber trails off, but their exchange demonstrates how they understand the direct and confrontational poses to be more typical of men because it fits with their expectations of normative masculinity. Amber states that the direct gaze of a man might actually be sexy whereas coming from a woman it made her feel uncomfortable. This also recalls the Lady of Shalott in Chapter 5 and the punishment she receives for looking directly at Lancelot through the window, rather than seeing the world and its inhabitants indirectly, through her mirror and the tapestry she weaves. Some participants read this image in opposition to the Romantic womanchild of ‘Heavenly Creatures’ (Figure 9). Drawing on what might be described as an internalized male gaze, Emily and Amber suggest the femininities in ‘Heavenly Creatures’ would be more appealing to men than those in ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’: Excerpt IV Emily: I think guys prefer pictures of girls that are, emm, you know, they look more, like… naturally nice rather than like bedraggled. Amber: Yeah. And I think also it’s, like, here cause they look up, they look so intense, they’re not smiling or anything they look like they, they could be psychos whereas in the other ones, they, they look, this is horrible, I’m not sure if this is a valid point… Morna: No, it’s great; it’s all valid. Amber: [laughs] But like the, emm, other images, they look so carefree and innocent, they wouldn’t harm anything whereas here they look like ‘I will steal your money’. And… [laughter] Emily: They look like they’d be a force to be reckoned with, like… I think they’d be less cooperative than the other ones, I think; they’d maybe make, like, the rules. And a lot of guys find that difficult, I think. […]

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Emily: Like Amber said earlier, I think this would scare off a lot of guys. Morna: Yeah? Emily: Cause I think guys just, I dunno, they like to feel that they’re… almost, not in control, necessarily, but… Morna: No, I know, I know what you mean… Emily: Do you know what I mean? I think, I think sometimes guys can be put off by women who are too kind of like direct and forceful and I think this is very much in your face, they’re not going to be told what to do, like, or… Morna: So it’s threatening, almost? Emily: Yeah, I think so.63

Several points can be drawn from this excerpt. Firstly, the participants evaluate ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’ in relation to other images introduced during the session, reading them through what they perceive to be the preferences of men. This speaks to the ‘visual pedagogy’ girls go through when evaluating the desirability of female bodies.64 As part of the conversation they separate out those femininities that would appeal to men (the Romantic woman-child) from those which would not appeal (Kinderwhore). The former are described as: naturally nice, smiling, carefree and innocent, ‘wouldn’t harm anything’, cooperative, not controlling, not direct, and not forceful. By contrast, the kind of femininities that would repel men are those represented in ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’, described by participants as: bedraggled, psychotic, criminally deviant (they will ‘steal your money’), forceful, in control (they make the rules), direct and ‘in your face’. This ties in with Evans’ discussion of the work of Alexander McQueen in the late twentieth century. The deathly imagery associated with the designer evoked ‘a decadent and self-fulfilling female desire that no longer depended on male approbation or disapprobation’.65 And this seems also to apply to the women in ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’. It may be that the negative readings of the image derive not so much from the depiction of women in control of their bodies and sexualities, but are linked more to the way that control is put into discourse. The women’s control and knowledge are expressed through the visual language of Kinderwhore and its associations with ‘heroin chic’. Or, as Penny put it in relation to ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’: ‘They just look totally decadent and unhealthy.’ Amber and Emily contrast ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’ with more ‘innocent’ representations of femininity: Excerpt V Amber: Emm… I think yeah, like, these images… umm, are more… I dunno, they’re just more kind of, like… they seem like they’ve kind of, like, got around a little bit, do you know what I mean? Like, they seem like… they know exactly what they’re doing… Whereas in the other images… it seems…

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Emily: It seems that’s the norm in the other images, like more the norm. Amber: Yeah Emily: Whereas these are either, because they’re so confrontational, they’re either, they either come across like they’re prostitutes, or they’re druggies, or they’re crazy, like… Amber: Yeah

It takes Amber a while to find a way to articulate the sexualities presented in these images, but the point she makes is particularly salient: ‘they know exactly what they’re doing’, a statement which was then immediately contrasted with the earlier images constructed through the tropes of Romantic innocence. ‘Knowing what they’re doing’ is then linked to promiscuity through the phrase ‘got around a bit’, which refers to women who have more sexual partners than is perceived to be socially acceptable. One can deduce from this that the band members of Fluffy are not only sexually desirable, but they also know what they’re doing: they’re in control of their sexuality. By contrast the girls in ‘Heavenly Creatures’ and Oh, Lola! were perhaps desirable without fully intending to be. This recalls Rosalind Coward’s discussion of the ‘sexually immature’ feminine ideal of the 1980s. This subject-position presents a body which is sexual – it ‘exudes’ sexuality in its vigorous and vibrant and firm good health – but it is not the body of a woman who has an adult and powerful control over that sexuality. The image is of a highly sexualized female whose sexuality is still one of response to the active sexuality of a man. The ideology about adolescent sexuality is exactly the same; young girls are often seen as expressing a sexual need even if the girl herself does not know it.66

The idea of being unwittingly sexy was something articulated by Amber and Emily in relation to Oh, Lola! Participants discussed how the combination of innocence and sexiness seemed to work well, concluding that ‘she gets away with it’. As such, Fanning is sexy almost in spite of herself. This ties in with what Arnold characterizes as the ‘eternal conflict between the need to appear sexually attractive and being condemned for adopting too obvious an approach to achieve this goal’.67 However, there was one exception to the way knowingness was read in ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’. In a reception study held with two Chinese MA students from Central Saint Martins, the participants mentioned the idea of knowingness, but read it in a more positive light: Excerpt VI [In discussion of the third woman in ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’] Morna:  What kind of style is that, do you think?

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Zoe:  Like, ‘don’t really care’, in a way. Morna: Yeah. Like she’s just dressing to please herself, kind of thing, or…? Zoe: Or, no, just like, mmm… I still really wanna be like that. Just, like, you feel like she has something cored there. Morna: Cored? Zoe: I mean, like… Yves:  She can identify herself. She’s like ‘I’m this.’ What else. She knows everything. That kind of feeling. Like… Morna: So she knows who she is? Yves: Yeah, yeah and she knows what she’s doing and she’s quite cool about it. Morna: mmmhmm Zoe: And she’s cool about anything else. And this one, too, I think they’re really confident, in a way, like, yeah.68

Whilst earlier in the discussion Yves and Zoe had articulated similar sentiments about ‘deviance’ – with Yves stating that ‘in reality, usually we’d think that they were problematic girls’ – these participants nevertheless found something appealing in the way the women were represented. Zoe, in particular, expressed a desire to be like the third woman stating, ‘I still really wanna be like that’, seemingly on account of her ‘confidence’ – a word with more positive connotations than the word confrontational. Zoe’s admiration recalls Jackie Stacey’s discussion of women looking at women in the cinematic encounter.69 Such spectatorship might involve a sort of fascination, ‘[tempting] the woman spectator with the fictional fulfilment of becoming an ideal feminine other’.70 The positive reading of ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’ by these participants might be explained in terms of their familiarity with the codes of fashion or style magazines – ‘fashion capital’71 or ‘subcultural capital’74 – particularly given their age (the women were in their twenties) and their position as arts students in London. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Butler argues that reception is key to determining the subversive potential of gender parodies. If we accept this point, then it seems that the subversive potential of ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’ is at least partially undermined by the way the women represented are read – rightly or wrongly – through the categories of drug addiction, prostitution and homicide. Thus, while the members of Fluffy might have intended to parody the contradictory demands of normative femininity, this was not, for the most part, picked up on at the point of reception. In fact, the potential for disparity between intention and reception was actually pre-empted by Amanda, one member of Fluffy: ‘What we want, though, is to display a hard edge without being the kind of girls who look like they’re trying to be boys.’ English-rosy Amanda laughs and continues: ‘We’ll soon see whether people are tuned into our sense of humour:

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whether they understand the contradiction of playing really hard, direct music and being four girls who’ve called themselves “Fluffy” rather than going for a serious band name. I’d like to think it showed we were up for a laugh.’

Amanda’s comment about not wanting to ‘[try] to be boys’ chimes with a comment made by Courtney Love in Interview magazine (March 1994, Figures 48 and 49). There, Love expressed a desire not to be androgynous like PJ Harvey, instead wanting to be different from men in her appearance. Continuing along a similar vein, the next section turns to the hyper-girly aesthetic of Meadham Kirchhoff. The designers’ SS 2012 collection elaborated on Kinderwhore, repeating it but repeating it differently in some important respects, most notably without the ‘dark’ undercurrent.

Meadham Kirchhoff and hyper-girliness In 2014, SHOWstudio launched ‘Project Girly’, a series of essays, films and interviews on the subject of ‘fashion’s relationship with overt, cartoon femininity’.73 Led by Lou Stoppard and Nick Knight, the project was prompted by ‘the fluffy, sparkly bastions of girlishness on the runways recently – from Ryan Lo’s tutus to Meadham Kirchhoff ’s minis’. I contributed an essay to the project, focusing on Meadham Kirchhoff ’s SS 2012 collection, A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing.74 There, I was optimistic about the subversive potential of the show and suggested it might represent one way in which politics and visual pleasure could co-exist, allowing childlike femininity to be re-signified to a more critical and empowering end. Returning to Butler’s discussion of parody and subversion, I felt the collection might be a welcome instance of ‘parodic laughter’. I revisit this notion here, reaching a slightly different conclusion about the meaning and subversive potential of the femininities, based on reception studies of an article published in British Vogue in 2012. The label Meadham Kirchhoff was founded in 2006 by Edward Meadham and Benjamin Kirchhoff. The designers cite Courtney Love as an important influence on their work and their collection A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing paid homage to the musician on a number of levels. The show opened with a sample from Hole’s Miss World (released in 1994), referencing the music video through a group of models dressed in satin baby doll dresses, wielding powder puffs (Figure 53). The group of faux Courtneys took centre stage, dancing raucously beneath balloon-covered arches, whilst the défilé took place around them. These

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Figure 53  Meadham Kirchhoff, A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, SS2012. Photographer: Stuart C. Wilson via Getty Images.

adult Kinderwhores were later replaced with girl-child ballerinas. The collection celebrated fluffy femininity through pom-poms, tutus and pastel colours but what stood out amidst the general frou-frou were the exaggeratedly childlike motifs: chequered bears, rainbow sweaters and pinafores with smiling hearts (Figure 54). These motifs were excessively and exaggeratedly childish to the extent that it was hard, at times, to imagine even very young children wearing them. The models sported blonde fluffy hair with pastel-coloured streaks: hair that looked deliberately artificial, akin to a Barbie doll whose tuggy hair had been coloured in by a child. Taken as a whole, it conveyed a sense of hyperfemininity or perhaps, more accurately, hyper-girliness. Although A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing referenced Courtney Love, it was more than a mere pastiche of Kinderwhore. Commenting on the collection in an interview for Dazed & Confused, Edward Meadham explained that they ‘wanted to feel like nothing bad was going to happen, in terms of the moods and the colours’.75 This came across visually, in that the dark eye make-up of Kinderwhore was replaced with an almost clown-like palette of turquoise, fuchsia and yellow. While Love wore black patent Mary Janes over white pelerine socks, Meadham Kirchhoff girls wore frilly platforms over red and green tube socks. The models’ fluffy cloud-like hair, graced with pastel-coloured streaks, replaced the peroxide hair and dark roots associated with Love. In the same interview, Benjamin Kirchhoff explained that they ‘tried to really not have a dark side. We didn’t

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Figure 54  Meadham Kirchhoff, A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, SS2012. Photographer Victor Virgile/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

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want to have an undercurrent of anything. The whole idea was more celebratory than confrontational.’ This allowed childlike femininity to be parodied, without rendering it ‘deviant’, ‘unhealthy’, ‘self-destructive’ or ‘Other’. The designers might have avoided ‘a dark side’ or ‘undercurrent’, but they nevertheless succeeded in conveying a marked disjuncture between the idea of strong internal subjectivities, on the one hand, and sickly sweet external wrappings, on the other. The exaggerated girliness of the garments was sharply offset by the models’ strident steps and unabashed stares. They looked strong, determined and forthright; they were in control and knew what they were doing. The childlike signifiers did not seem to infantilize the models, who instead appeared strong and in control of their own self-image; they ‘owned’ this look in all its childishness. Masculinity was introduced as a counterpoint in that the childish, cheerful pinafores were worn by models over a shirt and tie, the masculine foil to girly frou-frou. It would seem, therefore, that A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing holds disruptive potential in that it takes a critical distance from femininity without rendering it ‘deviant’. It repeats the misogynist norm of childlike femininity but it does so differently, in a way that self-consciously defies the idea of the ‘male gaze’ and does so with a dose of ‘parodic laughter’.76

Grrrls in drag: From catwalk to Slutwalk The subversive reach of A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing extended beyond the catwalk through the designers’ re-enactment of a Slutwalk on the streets of Dalston in East London. The event was reported in an article entitled, ‘Power of TWO’ in British Vogue: ‘It’s a protest against the way everyone perceives pretty,’ says Ed, dressed in red stockings, culottes and a duffel coat from their own collection. The original slut walks, staged in Toronto, were in reaction to a statement that a Canadian policeman gave following a rape case, claiming women should ‘avoid dressing like sluts’ in order not to be victimised. ‘There is always a thread of protest running through our collections and what we are saying here is connected,’ says Ben. ‘The clothes might appear sweet, playful, naive – but it does not mean the wearers are. It’s essentially a celebration of girlishness,’ clarifies Ed.77

Both the idea of reclaiming the word ‘slut’ and the idea of celebrating and resignifying the notion of ‘girly’ are reminiscent of attempts to reclaim the word ‘girl’ as part of the Riot Grrrl movement in North America in the early 1990s.

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Meadham Kirchhoff ’s Slutwalk resonates with the fierceness of the Riot Grrrls (the models appear to be growling) as well as their desire to re-signify girliness as a ‘positive force embracing self-expression through fashion, attitude and a Do It Yourself approach to cultural production’, as Aapola et al. put it.78 However, when I presented Figure 55 to women in reception studies, they did not read the fierceness in a positive light. After explaining that the image was a re-enactment of a Slutwalk, the following exchange ensued: Excerpt VII Sayda: I don’t know, like, if the message is coming across with them like being dressed like that, though. Shanaz:  And holding up pictures of vaginas, I mean… Morna:  What do you think it is that stops the message coming across? Yvette: Well, why are they dressed like children in the first instance? What’s that got to do with ‘slut’ or the word or what it’s associated with? Sayda: And they look quite aggressive as well. Morna: mmm Emma: They are dressed like children, aren’t they? Yvette: It’s sexualizing children really, isn’t it? Associating the word ‘slut’ with kids: I don’t understand why you would do that. Hmm, why not, like prostitutes or something? That might work a bit better, at least you know… I’m not saying they should but at least you know… Shanaz:  Why dress like this at all? Why not just… Yvette: Normally [laughs] Emma: Normally79

In their reading of the image, participants seem confused by the message, with Sayda being particularly critical of the ‘aggressiveness’ of the women, at various points in the discussion. This might be because it is a trait sanctioned for men but not for women (not unlike the direct, confrontational poses in ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’, which certain participants found problematic). Furthermore, Yvette was unclear why the models were dressed childlike when they were participating in a Slutwalk. Finally, Shanaz was critical of the placards featuring a childlike drawing of a vagina. I would read the placards of vaginas more positively, however, since the vagina is depicted with pubic hair: a significant inclusion given that pubic hair on women – and body hair more generally – has been termed ‘feminism’s lost battle’.80 In light of this, representing female genitals complete with pubic hair, alongside the word ‘love’, might be read as a statement about self-acceptance of mature female sexuality and one’s bodily self, as opposed to the ‘immature’, hairless ideal discussed by Coward.81 After all, women’s body

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Figure 55  ‘Power of TWO’, British Vogue, January 2012. Photographer: Philip Sinden.

hair connotes a sexuality which is markedly adult, as Berger has argued.82 On the other hand, by presenting that body hair in a childish manner, the designers have arguably sanitized it, making it more palatable in a culture that calls for doll-like hairlessness. Another reason why participants found the clothing in ‘Power of TWO’ problematic was because they saw it as a throwback to the baby-doll dresses, nighties and fluffy kitten heels of the 1950s and 1960s. This led Sayda to comment: ‘It’s like we’re trying to move away from this image of woman being just … Like … towards them being stronger. It just takes it back to how people used to view them.’ This comment ties in with the idea of childlike femininity as a backlash against the gains of feminism (as discussed by Faludi).83 Sayda’s comment also resonates with Goffman’s comment on gender advertisements, where he wonders whether ‘to present oneself in puckish styling is to encourage the corresponding treatment’.84 The baby-doll dress, embodied first by Courtney Love and later by these models, seemed to detract from the politics of protest, for these particular women. This rehearses a long-standing assumption that the outside should represent the inside, and vice versa. The editorial’s title ‘Power of TWO’ was a further point of contention for this group. They argued that it located power in the hands of the two male designers,

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who appeared in the foreground of the image, thus detracting from the idea of empowerment for the women surrounding them (for whom the politics underpinning the Slutwalk movement might have held personal significance). Participants noted the division between men and women in one of the placards, which featured a woman holding a gun to a man’s head. This was characterized as ‘unhelpful’ and as something that undermined feminism as a movement that has the potential to empower both men and women. Following this logic, the participants suggested that a mixed gender group in drag might have been more effective: Excerpt VIII Emma:  Yeah. Like if it was a mixture of men and women, I think that would be brilliant. Yvette:   That would be better. Sayda:    Yeah Emma:   I would be totally, like, cheering them on and be like… Yvette:      mmm Emma:   I’m still not sure if I’d want them to be… I dunno. Emma:   But they just don’t seem part of it, it’s like… [the two designers] Yvette:   He really hasn’t made the effort [designer in black]. At least this one’s got like, yeah, as you said. Emma:    And he looks like, he’s wearing kind of very, he looks very masculine, I think like with the facial hair and the kind of, like, outfit, like there’s nothing feminine… Sayda:    It’s like they’re body guards or… Emma:   Or the boss, kind of thing. Or the pimp! He looks like a pimp! [laughter]

Emma later described the scene as being ‘like two guys with their harem of … their harem of dressed-up ladies, kind of thing’. Thus, the way British Vogue has presented the Slutwalk was seen as problematic both in terms of the title, which locates power in the hands of the designers, and in terms of the visuals, with Yvette suggesting that because one of the men is dressed in black it ‘[makes] him the dominant person because your eye will be drawn to him’. However, the image was more successful in terms of fostering ‘subversive confusions’85 and what Butler terms ‘gender trouble’: Excerpt IX Shanaz:  And are these all women? Or men dressed as women? Some of them look like men. I don’t know…

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Morna:  Okay, so it’s not clear? Emma:  She, well, she or he could be… [pointing] Yvette: [laughter] Shanaz:  When I first saw the image I thought it was a group of men dressed like women, like… Emma:  In drag? Shanaz:  In drag, yeah. Sayda:  I think just in terms of how aggressive they look, cause that one just looks really aggressive.

This passage points to the need for subjects to be identified as sexed in order for them to be intelligible within language (‘She, well, she or he could be … ’). It also highlights how the character trait of aggression is seen by Sayda as incompatible with femaleness and femininity. Supposing the group all identified as women, they might still be understood as presenting a form of same-sex drag. This is a notion discussed by Caroline Evans in relation to the work of Canadian psychoanalyst George Zavataros, who ‘described the parodying of one’s own sex as “homeovestism” (the opposite of transvestism)’.86 Homeovestism is not uncommon on the catwalk, with Arnold tracing this back to the 1980s and gay culture, which allowed for a more playful, camp approach to fashion.87 This shift in mood meant ‘it was no longer necessary to pretend that fashion, or for that matter femininity, was natural’.88 Such playfulness and exaggerated expressions of femininity are clearly at work in the designs of Meadham Kirchhoff. Men who parody femininity tend to be read differently from women parodying femininity, with Grayson Perry’s alter-ego Claire being one example of a man who parodies childlike femininity through drag (Figure 56).89 Whilst men dragging up as women is commonly read as fabulous (per Ru Paul’s drag race)90 or comedic (per pantomime),91 ‘women dragging up as women’ tends to be read as ‘threat, rather than allure’, as Evans notes.92 This was evidenced in Sayda’s critical comments about how aggressive the women appeared in Figure 55 as well as the earlier discussion of ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’ where Emily stated ‘I think guys prefer pictures of girls that are, emm, you know, more, like … naturally nice, even, like, rather than like bedraggled’. In their refusal to at least attempt to approximate the fantasy of feminine ‘naturalness’ and coherence, the women in ‘Power of TWO’ transcend the bounds of acceptable femininity. Their look exaggerates, underscores and mocks the childlike (virginal/sweet/unthreatening) facet of ideal femininity, and in so doing allows the female subject to own that transgression and confront the ‘male gaze’: something intended by Meadham

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Figure 56  Grayson Perry dressed as his alter-ego, Claire, 2004. Photographer: Dave M. Benett. © Getty Images.

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Kirchhoff, as discussed below. Indeed, displays of hyper-femininity in fashion arguably confront what Arnold terms the ‘fear of exaggeration, of drawing too much attention to oneself that is so important a part of respectable bourgeois culture’.93 In this way, fashion can be understood as ‘self-reflexive in its parodies of its own past and the feminine images it has created’.94

Man Repeller and Barbie on crack Distance from male approval is made explicit in the title of Leandra Medine’s blog Man Repeller, which has enjoyed considerable success since being launched in 2010. It humorously describes Man Repeller (noun) as ‘she who outfits herself in a sartorially offensive mode that may result in repelling members of the opposite sex’ and (verb) ‘to commit the act of repelling men’ (Figure 57). This ironic approach might be contrasted with the nostalgic approach of Leith Clark who founded ‘a magazine of women looking at women’.95 Meadham Kirchhoff later referenced Clark’s comments in a interview about the ideas behind A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing: Edward Meadham: Well, it being so light is sort of confrontational. I wanted it to be about girls being happy about being girls, without there being the threat of a male gaze. Benjamin Kirchhoff:  We’ve been quite obsessed lately with something that Leith Clark said to coincide with the launch of her magazine [Lula], that she was terrified that every shoot and every representation of women in fashion always had this invisible male presence.96

The designers thus explicitly distance themselves from the idea of seeking approval from a male gaze; yet, that does not necessarily leave them free from the regulatory control of the fashion system. Angela McRobbie explores this idea, arguing that the power once located in the  hands of the patriarchy has been delegated and displaced onto the commercial sphere and the fashion and beauty industries in particular. As a consequence, ‘beauty, fashion, magazines, body culture, etc. […] [become] the source of authority and judgement for young women’.97 Western women are now seen to have choices, in a way hitherto unknown, and as such the ‘the fearful terrain of male approval fades away, and is replaced instead with a new horizon of self-imposed feminine cultural norms’,98 in line with the conceptualization of power by Foucault and Butler. McRobbie terms this the ‘post-feminist

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Figure 57  Screen grab from Man Repeller, 2010.

masquerade’: a concept that reworks Riviere’s earlier concept of masquerade99 to make sense of femininity in the twenty-first century. Normative femininity, under the post-feminist masquerade, has been re-instated into the repertoire of femininity ironically (as the wearing of clothes in inverted commas). This signals that the hyper-femininity of the masquerade which would seemingly re-locate women back inside the terms of traditional gender hierarchies, by having them wear spindly stilettos and ‘pencil’ skirts, for example, does not in fact mean entrapment (as feminists would once have seen it) since it is now a matter of choice rather than obligation.100

This ‘knowing’ strategy means the post-feminist masquerade ‘constantly refers to its own artifice’.101 This ironic disposition is evident in ‘Beat on the Street’: a feature in British Vogue in April 2012, which documents the style of ‘fashion’s new taste-makers […] at the centre of the digital revolution’. One such ‘taste-maker’ is Hannah

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Lambert, a student at Central Saint Martins: ‘“My friends say I look like Barbie on crack,” shrugs Lambert comically, popping her pink bubble gum, miraculously not getting it caught up in her double train-track braces’. We are told that Lambert ‘is her passion for clothes’ (emphasis added) and has a wardrobe stacked with designer items, despite her being a student. The main image features Lambert in a Meadham Kirchhoff cardigan (with baby blue smiling heart), walking her dog ‘Teddy’ in a pair of green Prada stilettos. Rather than being necessarily for the benefit of men, the post-feminist masquerade is adopted by women and overseen by the ‘reprimanding structure of the fashion and beauty system’.102 This explains the ‘seeming disregard for male approval, especially if the outfit and look is widely admired by those within the fashion milieu’103 – hence the logic of Man Repeller. This might apply to the style of Hannah Lambert, which is lauded by Vogue and the fashion blogosphere: ‘Once bought, it is how she throws the outfits together that is so enchanting: in such mad, magical, ingenious, offbeat combinations that one is enthralled – as are the fashion bloggers.’104

Whiteness, Slutwalk and the politics of exclusion The post-feminist masquerade is underpinned by the politics of race as well as the politics of gender. This was evidenced in Chapter 5, where I discussed the ‘nostalgia for whiteness’ which McRobbie observed in fashion magazines in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as well as the ‘disarticulation’ of the politics of multiculturalism that this entailed.105 This emerged, once more, in British Vogue’s editorial choices in ‘Power of TWO’. The following exchange ensued when I first presented ‘Power of TWO’ to participants: Excerpt X Emma:  They look… a bit ridiculous [laughs] Morna:  Which part’s ridiculous? Emma: Kind of, like, it’s like clown make-up, kind of, well, not all of them but on some of them. Shanaz:  Yeah. Emma:  And clown hair. Yvette: See, I hate that, then, they’ve got this, like, person of colour, like in the back as well, wearing the same stupid wig. Shanaz:  Just to balance it out, like ‘oh, I’ve ticked that box’. Yvette:  I hate seeing that. [laughs quietly]

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Shanaz:  Yeah Emma: Oh, look, Yvette… [points to the model, barely in the frame, on the far left] Morna:  Oh my god. All: [laughter] Yvette: Doesn’t quite make the part. [quiet laughter] Morna:  I didn’t even notice that. That’s terrible. Yvette: Exactly. So they can tick the box that yes they had their 20–80 per cent ratio, or something. Emma: Yeah [laughter] Emma:  But they’ve cut them both out of the shot.   […] Emma: That is such a… one on each edge. Yvette: [laughter] Emma: Just make sure they’re kind of… in there.

The magazine, in adding its own ‘gloss’106 to the designers’ Slutwalk, has quite literally side-lined the women of colour, with the left-hand model being cropped to the point of virtual disappearance. This editing is actually at odds with the designers’ catwalk show, which featured several Black models, one of whom  eventually took centre stage in bridal wear, atop a giant wedding cake (Figure 58).

Figure 58  Meadham Kirchhoff, A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, SS2012. Photographer: Stuart C. Wilson via Getty Images.

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The editing in British Vogue supports McRobbie’s contention that in the first decade of the 2000s (and in this case, slightly beyond) there existed a process of undoing in the fashion media that dispensed with the politics of multiculturalism and political correctness in favour of a rhetoric that implied racism to no longer be an issue. She noted ‘a kind of racial violence within the celebratory white visual economies of the fashion-beauty complex which goes almost unnoticed’.107 For, as participant, Yvette pointed out, the Black models were wearing the same blonde wigs as the white models. This resonates with McRobbie’s observation that ‘the retro, nostalgia for this kind of whiteness ensure that the new masquerade, if not unavailable to black or Asian women, is then only available at the cost of negating modes of style and beauty associated with blackness, with cultural diversity and ethnic difference’.108 Thus by wearing the same blonde wigs as the white women, the Black models are made to approximate the white ideal. This undermines the connotations of natural Afro hair, which Carol Tulloch has described as ‘an aesthetic marker of self-redefinition and commitment to the Black nationalist cause of Black Power – and aesthetic counter-narrative to “White Power” and white beauty standards’.109 The editing in British Vogue unwittingly bolsters criticism of the Slutwalk movement more generally. While the movement was lauded for exposing the misogyny built into words like ‘slut’ as well as challenging the view that victims of rape were somehow partially responsible for their sexual assault if dressed in a manner deemed provocative, that same movement has been indicted for its privileging of normative bodies, as Hester Baer recounts: Objections to SlutWalk in Germany and elsewhere have focused on the movement’s failure to acknowledge the key role of white privilege in the ability to reclaim the term ‘slut’; SlutWalk’s problematic normalization of dehumanizing language and symbols; and its exclusivity as a movement that appears to foreground the bodies of cis-gendered, middle-class white women, offering little space within its corporeal politics or its performative aesthetics for people of color, LGBT people, economically disadvantaged groups, or sex workers.110

By partially cropping the only two models of colour out of the frame, British Vogue underlines Slutwalk as a predominantly white movement that fails to adequately address the politics of intersectional feminism.

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Conclusion In this chapter I have discussed Kinderwhore as an aesthetic that parodies and recontextualizes elements of normative femininity by betraying the fiction of ‘coherent’ womanhood. However, as my findings from reception studies show, Kinderwhore risks being read as a pathologized version of female sexuality. This potentially nullifies the parody, rendering it a ‘domesticated critique’ that is ‘recirculated as [an instrument] of cultural hegemony’.111 By contrast, Meadham Kirchhoff ’s collection A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing holds more potential for ‘parodic laughter’ and gender trouble. Part of Meadham Kirchhoff ’s subversive potential derives from the way indulgence in childlike hyper-femininity is combined with a political message about female empowerment. The collection’s combination of pleasure with politics is no mean feat, particularly in light of my earlier discussion of the Romantic woman-child, who offers nostalgic pleasure through a version of femininity that goes with the grain of language. Thus, Meadham Kirchhoff ’s hyper-girly aesthetic might be one way in which pleasure and politics can co-exist, allowing for indulgence in childlike hyper-femininity whilst simultaneously mobilizing it to a political and empowering end. Yet, while the intention behind Meadham Kirchhoff ’s Slutwalk was to challenge gender norms, the way in which the event was represented on the pages of British Vogue worked to undermine this. It seems the meaning of Meadham Kirchhoff ’s designs was shifted through the addition of the caption ‘Power of TWO’ as well as the framing and editing in post-production that literally side-lined the Black women participating in the Slutwalk. This weakens the subversive potential of the image in that the aesthetic falls in line with the politics of the ‘post-feminist masquerade’: a look available to white women only or to Black and Asian women ‘at the cost of negating modes of style and beauty associated with Blackness, with cultural diversity and ethnic difference’.112 This bolsters the legitimacy of the call for an intersectional politics of gender, both in the fashion media and in feminist activism more generally.

Conclusion

This book has established the figure of the ‘woman-child’ as a central trope in British fashion magazines from 1990 to 2015. This is an ideal that cuts across different genres of magazine: from mainstream ‘high’ fashion magazines like Vogue to niche publications like Lula, and style magazines such as i-D. In order to better understand the prevalence of childlike femininities against the backdrop of the gains of feminism, the book had three overarching aims: to establish the meaning of childlike femininities in the contemporary context, their possible appeal to contemporary women and the extent to which childlike femininities could be re-signified to a more empowering end. This last point was particularly pertinent given that constructing women as childlike has historically aligned women with children, securing their inferior status to men. In the early stages of this research, I interpreted childlike femininities as a straightforward backlash against the gains of feminism (in line with Faludi, Backlash). However, as the research progressed, it became clear, from a Foucauldian point of view, that the cultural landscape of childlike femininities was more complex than the backlash thesis allowed. The figure of the ‘womanchild’ is not singular but instead appears in various guises, as indicated by the headings of my empirical chapters: the Romantic woman-child, the femmeenfant-fatale, Lolita style and the Parodic woman-child. Thus, rather than labelling women as ‘childlike’ in a general sense, in this book I sought to focus the debate by unpicking more precisely the plurality of discourses on childhood, girlhood and womanhood which overlap and intersect in different formations to allow different versions of the ‘woman-child’ to emerge. Part of this involved putting earlier first- and second-wave feminist critiques of childlike femininity in dialogue with more contemporary scholarship, such as that on performativity and ‘post-feminist’ discourse. In so doing I was able to address the extent to which different versions of the woman-child were capable of shedding the dehumanizing, ‘second sex’ connotations of childlike

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Figures 59 and 60  Molly Goddard, AW 2017. Photographers: Tim P. Whitby and Niklas Halle’n via Getty Images.

femininity and the extent to which they held potential for subversive resignification in the present. My reception studies suggest that contemporary women might hold a number of different investments in childlike femininities, some of which are empowering and some of which are disempowering. While the Romantic woman-child

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(Chapter 5) appeared politically problematic in terms of her naturalization of ‘constructed coherence’, this figure nevertheless offered pleasures in terms of nostalgic retreat to the home of Romantic childhood. Even the fractured beauty of the melancholic woman-child, lost from home, seemed to provide intrigue for some participants whilst simultaneously signalling the extent to which even idealized versions of femininity and adulthood were inhospitable and uninhabitable for contemporary women. In de Beauvoir’s writing, she discusses childlike femininity by invoking different discourses on childhood.1 Alongside, the ‘eternal child’ who signals womanly submission, she also discusses the imperious adolescent who is freer and more ‘human’ than the adult woman. This second version of childlike femininity is present in the figure of the femme-enfant-fatale in fashion photography. This figure emerges from discourses on the hybrid femme-enfant of Surrealism and finds concrete expression in figures such as six-year-old Wednesday Addams on the pages of Lula magazine. The rebellious, curious aspects of this figure move away from the idea of childlike femininity as dehumanizing, instead marking it out as a subject-position with subversive potential for re-configuration. The question remains, however, as to why curiosity, intellect and politics must find expression on the body of a six- or seven-year-old girl (Wednesday and Alice, respectively). It might be, as McAra suggests, that the ‘sweetness’ of girlchildhood provides the necessary conditions for subversion.2 On the other hand, it might suggest that writing these qualities on the body of an adult woman would simply be ‘too much’. Rebellion and parody are key features of both Kinderwhore and Meadham Kirchhoff, both of which are represented on bodies that are unambiguously womanly. These figures are subversive in their ‘parodic redeployment’ of the contradictory nature of discourses on womanhood. Particularly interesting is the way Meadham Kirchhoff achieve such parody without the ‘deviant’ or ‘pathologized’ undercurrent of Kinderwhore. However, the politics of representation were brought uncomfortably to the fore when the designers’ ‘Slutwalk’ was reported on the pages of British Vogue. The ‘gloss’3 added by the magazine made painfully visible the ways in which non-white femininities are excluded from the norm of childlike femininity in the fashion media. This, paradoxically, suggests that a woman positioned as childlike in the context of the fashion media signals a certain level of privilege – whether relating to race, income, age or body size. Indeed, what united the images was a tendency for the childlike aspect to be realized on bodies that were slender and predominantly white. There are exceptions to this, with more diversity in

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skin colour becoming evident in recent years, as per the casting of models at Meadham Kirchhoff ’s runway show. Yet, as the subsequent depiction of this collection in British Vogue attests (Figure 55), there remained in 2012 a lack of sensitivity about the politics of representing women of colour on the pages of the magazine. By contrast, images of women and men in i-D magazine were, taken collectively, more diverse than those in Lula and Vogue. This meant that although the images of childlike femininity tended to be white, they sat alongside other more diverse subject-positions, in terms of race, social class and sexuality.

Producing the woman-child Certain cultural intermediaries and institutions play a key role in perpetuating discourses on childlike femininity. These include photographers such as Juergen Teller, Ellen von Unwerth and Tim Walker, and stylists, such as Kate Phelan and Leith Clark. Clark proved central to the production of discourses on the Romantic woman-child, in particular, in her role as founder and former editorin-chief of Lula magazine. Clark’s role in creating images of childlike femininity extends beyond Lula to include her work as stylist on spreads such as ‘Keira Knightley’ in Vogue Italia (Figure 24) as well as her role as stylist to celebrities who espouse a childlike personal style, such as Alexa Chung. The woman-child found embodiment in a number of models who were repeatedly positioned as childlike, such as Sasha Pivovarova and Kate Moss. This was underlined by fashion writing which served to anchor models in the realm of childhood by labelling them ‘Lolitas’, such as Kate Moss, Vanessa Paradis, Dakota Fanning and Brooke Shields. Finally, childlike femininity seemed linked to brand identity in some instances, with Marc Jacobs fragrances (Figures 44 and 45) and Orla Kiely (Figure 30) being two such examples. The cut-off for this study was 2015 but that is not to say that childlike femininities have fallen out of vogue since then. For example, Molly Goddard’s label was founded in 2015 and has enjoyed considerable success in the intervening years: her dresses being worn by celebrities such as Rihanna, and her bubblegum pink creation being worn so memorably by Jodie Comer as Villanelle in the BBC drama Killing Eve in 2018. Goddard’s dresses reference girlhood partywear through yards of tulle, smocking and gingham prints yet these codes are held at a distance through the sculptural rendition of the garments, as well as their oversized proportions and their pairing with T-shirts and grungy accessories

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(Figures 59 and 60). The label’s success post-dates this study, but it is testament to the enduring appeal of girliness in the visual vocabulary of British fashion albeit with more diversity in model casting.4 As noted in the introduction, British Vogue was the magazine I surveyed most comprehensively when collecting images for this book. Alexandra Shulman had been editor-in-chief of British Vogue since 1992, but in 2017 she stepped down with Ghanaian-born Edward Enninful named her successor. Enninful had previously worked as fashion director at i-D, with a career that also included styling and modelling for various publications. The December 2017 issue of Vogue was the first under his stewardship, and featured British model, Adwoa Aboah on the cover, alongside a list of contributors, many of whom were people of colour. This vision of #NewVogue had an emphasis on diversity5 and sits alongside calls to ‘decolonize fashion’ in British art and design schools,6 and beyond, with an expanding discourse on feminism, inclusion and identity politics becoming more pronounced in both fashion studies and certain segments of the fashion media.7 Yet, it might be argued that progress hinges on the extent to which more critical and inclusive discourse enters the industry in the long-term. I make this comment in light of McRobbie’s reflections in 2009, when she looked back on her writing about magazines in the 1990s: I attributed too much hope in the capacity of the world of women’s magazines, to take up and maintain a commitment to feminist issues, encapsulating a kind of popular feminism. I was over-enthusiastic about the impact the recruitment of feminist-influenced graduates might have on the editorial policies of young women’s magazines, and I did not fully engage with the way in which the battle for circulation figures could see an editor sacked for displeasing a company with a lucrative advertising contract. Nor did I take into account the need for magazines to be constantly re-inventing themselves, which of course means that a strong feminist voice might well only last for as long as a couple of fashion seasons and then be discarded in favour of a new counter-trend.8

McRobbie wrote this in light of what she described as a nostalgic return to whiteness as ‘the norm’ in women’s magazines in the first decade of the twentyfirst century: a move which seemed to dismiss ‘multi-culturalist demands or anti-discriminatory requirements for equal representation’ or ‘indeed for simple visibility’.9 Thus, whilst the editorial shift is encouraging, we should nevertheless remain mindful of the logic of the fashion system, with its commercial imperatives and the tendency, in some quarters, to absorb, neutralize and ultimately commodify political discourse in pursuit of new fashionable forms.

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A second noteworthy shift came in 2013, when Leith Clark stood down as editor-in-chief of Lula magazine. In 2014 she went on to launch a new magazine called Violet Book. In an interview for It’s Nice That, she stated that: ‘I think it’s important to say that I think as I’ve gotten a bit older I have started to feel frustrated and confused at the way youth is over-celebrated. It all keeps getting better so why look backwards?’10 This marks a departure from her editorial direction in Lula, where nostalgia seemed to suffuse much of the writing and photography as well as the way femininities were articulated through a childlike lens. Looking backwards, as earlier discussed, risks being regressive or even stultifying, for it locates pleasure in a long-lost vision of childhood, potentially eclipsing the possibility of self-realization and political action that adulthood might hold in the present. While nostalgic renditions of childhood in both Lula and British Vogue are problematic in the way they align women with children, they nevertheless provide an opportunity for reflection: both for myself in the course of this research and for my participants in reception studies. Here we return to the bridge between nostalgia and utopia as a dialectical way of moving between the past and present, which Baccolini has described as ‘a critical, progressive nostalgia’.11 The nostalgic longing such imagery incites tells us something about the difficulties of inhabiting adult subject-positions for women – and perhaps men – in the present. As Elizabeth Wilson has observed, certain feelings or modes of experience tend to be excluded from contemporary definitions of ‘successful’ adulthood.12 These include feelings of curiosity, wonder and play: too ‘woolly’ in nature, too unbecoming for the neoliberal subject, who must show herself to be endlessly productive and always en route to being the best version of herself. Whilst on the one hand, childlike aesthetics can be linked to individual magazines and producers, the pervasiveness of the ‘woman-child’ says something about fashion at a more structural level. Bourdieu wrote that to be able to ‘play the games of culture’ one must have the means ‘to maintain for a long time, sometimes a whole lifetime, a child’s relation to the world’.13 Only distance from economic necessity can furnish one with freedom from more humdrum, practical concerns. Yet, the childhood referenced here is tantamount to the ‘long childhood’ discussed in Chapter 3. This experience of childhood is open only to those with privilege, thus excluding labouring children or poor children from its ambit.14 The experiential gap between children of different backgrounds has not yet been ameliorated but that has not stopped the category of ‘long’ childhood being extended through the discursive

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category of ‘kidulthood’15 in recent Anglo-Saxon media discourse, linked to one’s ability to participate fully in consumer culture. And when it comes to stimulating consumption, fashion features and advertisements draw on the language of childishness, characterized by tantrums, sugar highs and petulance, which are collapsed magnificently onto the signifier ‘Lolita’, which serves to ‘blunt the buyer’s calculating consciousness’.16 Such imagery seems to sanction an impulsive approach to consumption, a sort of parental approval to splurge, in lieu of fostering slower, more considered practices of consumption. In this regard, ‘investments’ in childlike femininities go beyond the individual feelings and desires of readers, alone, instead extending to certain players in the fashion machine at large, such as big brands and fashion houses, as well as the wider economic model of neoliberalism. So it is here that my project dovetails with that of Susan Neiman, who poses the question, ‘why grow up?’17 Here, she comments on the difficulties of inhabiting – or even imagining – adulthood outside of the prevailing economic conditions. When it comes to critiquing capitalism, she notes, ‘ideas of a more just and humane world are portrayed as childish dreams to be discarded in favour of the real business of acquiring toys’ – however paradoxical that might sound.18 Fashion provides a visual vocabulary for Neiman’s sentiment, in the way that perfume and accessories are effortlessly aligned with toys or sweets in editorial features.19 And this plays out on a macro level through the refrain, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’.20 For as Nancy Fraser argues, from the perspective of the present we can observe that ‘second-wave feminism coincided with a historical shift in the character of capitalism, from the state-organized variant […] to neoliberalism’.21 As a consequence, there might be more women in work, with potentially more spending power, but that does not necessarily equate to freedom for women in a more radical sense, particularly when we extend our thinking to the working conditions of women and girls globally, party to transnational supply chains, which implicate both producers and consumers in the West.22 Given that the ‘palatable’ aspects of feminism in the West have been absorbed by capitalism23 – it might be said that the resulting state of affairs, for both women and men, is not exactly what we asked for. Here Donna Haraway’s comments on ‘staying with the trouble’ feel particularly pertinent. When it comes to critiquing capitalism, she notes that ‘denunciation has been singularly ineffective, or capitalism would have long ago vanished from the earth’.24 It might be easy to despair or ‘excuse [ourselves] from doing many important things better’ but Haraway suggests we ought to ‘affirm on-the-ground collectives

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capable of inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning, and of living and dying as well’.25 Since we cannot overthrow discourse in any wholesale way, media imagery will undeniably have a role to play when it comes to framing our future relationship with clothes, (gender) identities, and questions of production and consumption, particularly with the increasing urgency of the environmental crisis. It might also have a role to play in rethinking or re-imagining the way we structure our lives, our politics and our sense of purpose. The longer version of Jameson’s quote here becomes pertinent: ‘Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.’26 For after all, the logic of capitalism, exploitation and the environmental crisis are inextricably linked.27 Yet, it is unclear whether fashion images, particularly those residing in more mainstream magazines or those existing in the service of fast fashion cycles, will have the capacity to rethink our relationship to fashion and beauty ideals in a more radically empowering way that goes beyond individual acts of consumption for privileged subjects, instead reorienting the relationship between bodies, garments and the environment in which we live. It thus remains to be seen whether, and in what form, childlike femininities might figure in this future landscape, with all the uncertainty it engenders.

Notes

Preface 1

For discussion of the ‘ambivalent’ relationship between fashion and politics, see Djurdja Bartlett ed. Fashion and Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019).

2

Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Appearance Unbound: Articulations of Co-Presence in #BlackLivesMatter’ in The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self, ed. Marco Bohr and Basia Sliwinska (New York and London: Routledge, 2018).

Chapter 1 1

Susie Mesure, ‘Rise and Rise of the Woman-child’, The Independent, 23 September 2012. Available online: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/riseand-rise-of-the-womanchild-8165992.html (accessed 6 September 2015). This was followed by the similarly titled ‘Rise of the Woman-child’ in The Huffington Post, 12 May 2015. Available online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/12/ woman-child_n_7191258.html (accessed 6 September 2015).

2

For discussion of Girls, see for instance: Betty Kaklamanidou and Margaret Tally, eds., HBO’s Girls: Questions of Gender, Politics and Millennial Angst (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014).

3

The text posits the ‘woman-child’ as the counterpart to the ‘man-child’, although I would argue that they share a different place in historical discourses, as discussed below vis-à-vis the writings of Michael Kimmel and Stuart Hall.

4

Deborah Schoeneman, Woman-child (Kindle Single: Amazon Digital Services, 2012).

5

The use of shorthand terms like ‘the West’ and ‘western’ are contentious, as scholars such as Stuart Hall have explained. I take a cue from those authors in recognizing the concept of ‘the West’ as a historical construction, which cannot be understood only in geographical terms. The authors state: ‘By “western” we mean

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the type of society […] that is developed, industrialized, urbanized, capitalist, secular, and modern’ (277). The images presented in this book are largely drawn from British fashion magazines, although I sometimes also include images from North American and European publications, as further discussed below. See Stuart Hall, ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’ in The Formations of Modernity. Understanding Modern Societies: An Introduction, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (Oxford: The Open University, 1992).   6 SHOWstudio, ‘Project Girly’, SHOWstudio, 2014. Available online: http:// showstudio.com/project/girly (accessed 4 September 2015).   7 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; London: Penguin, 2004), 13.   8 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (1949; London: New English Library, 1970).   9 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; London: Penguin, 2010), 246. 10 See Ann Oakley, ‘Women and Children First and Last: Parallels and Differences between Children’s and Women’s Studies’ in Children’s Childhoods: Observed and Experienced, ed. Berry Mayall (London: Falmer, 1994). 11 Oakley, ‘Women and Children First and Last’. 12 Jens Qvortrup, ‘Childhood Matters: An Introduction’ in Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics, ed. Jens Qvortrup, Marjatta Bardy, Giovanni Sgritta and Helmut Wintersberger (Hants: Avebury, 1994), 4. 13 See for instance: Ealasaid Munro, ‘Feminism: A Fourth Wave?’, Political Insight 4, no.2 (2013): 22–5; Kira Cochrane, ‘The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Meet the Rebel Women’, The Guardian, 10 December 2013. Available online: http://www. theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wave-feminism-rebel-women (accessed 21 September 2015). A conference was also held on the subject at Queen Mary, University of London, entitled Feminist Futures: Critical Engagements with the Fourth Wave, 27 June 2015. 14 Hester Baer, ‘Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism’, Feminist Media Studies 16, no.1 (2016): 17–34. 15 Ibid., 18. 16 Movements such as Slutwalk have however been critiqued for foregrounding normative versions of femininity, and digital media has played an important role in holding such movements to account, through hashtags such as #YesAllWomen. This hashtag was authored by an anonymous Muslim woman of colour following the Isla Vista shootings in May 2014. According to Michelle Rodino-Colocino, this hashtag ‘inspired self-reflexivity among feminists regarding intersectional inclusivity, and in so doing, spawns further hashtagged discourse’. See: Michelle Rodino-Colocino, ‘#YesAllWomen: Intersectional Mobilization against Sexual Assault Is Radical (Again)’, Feminist Media Studies 14, no.6 (2014): 1114.

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17 Another important example is the Me Too movement that emerged in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in 2017. This moment falls outside the timeframe for this book, which focuses on the period of 1990–2015. 18 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000). 19 Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 26. 20 Jennifer C. Nash, ‘Re-thinking Intersectionality’, Feminist Review 89 (2008): 2. 21 hooks, Feminist Theory, 5. 22 David Morley uses this term to describe how he gives ‘analytical priority’ to social class in his study of television. See: David Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 12. 23 For discussion of femininities in the plural, see for instance: Samantha Holland, Alternative Femininities: Body, Age and Identity (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004); Raewyn W. Connell, Gender and Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1987); David Glover and Cora Kaplan, Genders (London: Routledge, 2000). 24 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (1993; London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 78; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990; New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2006). 25 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley (1976; London: Penguin, 1998). 26 Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009). 27 Ros Coward as cited in Paul Jobling, Fashion Spreads: Word and Image in Fashion Photography since 1980 (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 123. 28 On the other hand, for a discussion of female beauty from an evolutionary point of view, see: Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (New York: Doubleday, 1999). 29 Even as I write this I am mindful of Butler’s critique of listing aspects of identity ‘as if they were fully separable axes of power’ (Butler, Bodies That Matter, 78). Such lists are often closed with what Butler terms the ‘embarrassed “etc.”’; they ‘strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete’ (Gender Trouble, 196). The embarrassed ‘etc.’ is testament to the ‘illimitable process of signification itself ’ as well as the impossible task of ‘[positing] identity once and for all’ (Ibid., 196). That is not to say that these categories do not hold weight in the social world; in fact, consolidating these categories has been a political imperative, as evidenced by the Civil Rights movement and the more recent Black Lives Matter movement, the fight for equal rights for LGBTQ people and the project of feminism itself. However, at the level of the individual, these different facets of identity are not necessarily experienced discretely, despite their analytical separation in such lists. These lists of predicates can thus never fully contain a person’s identity and fail to recognize intersectional axes of oppression that might render the experience of a

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Black transgender woman different from the experience of a white cis-gendered woman’s, for instance. 30 For discussion of discourses on the femme fatale, see for instance: Andrea Rummel, ‘Delusive Beauty’: Femmes Fatales in English Romanticism (Göttingen: V&R University Press, 2008). For discussion of the virgin/whore dichotomy, see: Lucy Bland, ‘The Domain of the Sexual: A Response’, Screen Education 39 (1981): 56–67. 31 Henry A. Giroux, Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture’s War on Children (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 32 Jobling, Fashion Spreads, 126–7. 33 For discussion of fashion photography featuring children, see Annamari Vänskä, Fashionable Childhood: Children in Advertising, trans. E. Malkki (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 34 This phrase is borrowed from Efrat Tseëlon, The Masque of Femininity (London: Sage, 1995), 114. 35 For studies that focus on these issues, see for instance: Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (London: University of California Press, 2003); Helen Malson, The Thin Woman: Feminism, Poststructuralism and the Social Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa (London: Routledge, 1998); Katharine Wallerstein, ‘Thinness and Other Refusals in Contemporary Fashion Advertisements’, Fashion Theory 2, no.2 (1998): 129–50; Susie Orbach, Bodies (London: Profile, 2009). For an account of the persistence of thinness in the modelling industry, see: Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger, eds., Fashioning Models: Image, Text and Industry (London and New York: Berg, 2012). 36 McRobbie, Aftermath. 37 Hilary Radner, ‘On the Move: Fashion Photography and the Single Girl in the 1960s’ in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London: Routledge, 2000), 128. 38 See, for instance: Rebecca Arnold, ‘Heroin Chic’, Fashion Theory 3, no.3 (1999): 179–296; Rosalind Coward, Female Desire (London: Paladin Books, 1984); Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 210, 211, 231; Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton, Women and Fashion: A New Look (London: Quartet, 1989); Jobling, Fashion Spreads; Wallerstein, ‘Thinness and Other Refusals’. 39 Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (London: Macmillan, 1979). 40 Jobling, Fashion Spreads. 41 Prior to 2010 the average number of images of childlike femininities I collected in British Vogue was 51.4 per year (in the period 1990–2009). By contrast, in 2010 I collected 130 images: far more than I had collected in any year prior to this.

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42 McRobbie, Aftermath, building on the work of Judith Butler. 43 Catriona McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity: Lewis Carroll and the Femme-Enfant’, Papers of Surrealism 9 (2011): 3. 44 Arnold, ‘Heroin Chic’, 179–296. 45 Butler, Gender Trouble, 189. 46 Angela McRobbie, British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (London: Routledge, 1998). 47 Bethan Benwell, ‘New Sexism? Readers’ Responses to the Use of Irony in Men’s Magazines’ in Mapping the Magazine: Comparative Studies in Magazine Journalism, ed. Tim Holmes (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2008). 48 Harriet Quick, ‘Fame Academy’, British Vogue, July 2003. 49 Stephen Fry was pictured on a fairground horse in ‘It’s Showtime’ (British Vogue, May 2004, 212) and Keith Haring was labelled a ‘boy-man’ in James Servin, ‘Notices’ (British Vogue, October 1991, 44–5). 50 ‘MANCHILD. Drugs, drink and lots of tears: Robbie Williams does them all, but still comes out on top and smiling, most of the time. That’s why his new adult audience loves this former teenage star – the boy who proves you can get away with everything, even at the age of 26’, British Vogue, October 2000, 314–19 (Photographer: Mario Testino, with text by Justine Picardie). 51 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 32. 52 Michael S. Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 4. 53 Ibid. 54 Stuart Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the “Other”’ in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 262. See also Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952; New York: Grove Press 2008). 55 Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up? (London: Penguin, 2014). Neiman’s book builds upon the earlier text by Paul Goodman, entitled Growing Up Absurd, published in 1960. 56 For instance, an article in British Vogue reads: ‘More than ever before, a love of nostalgia and all things childlike has begun to dominate our culture. Now there’s a name for its devotees: Kidults’ (British Vogue, December 2003, 94). The notion of kidulthood is also discussed in Robin Marantz Henig, ‘What Is It about 20-somethings?’, The New York Times, 18 August 2010. Available online: http:// www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=all&_ r=1 (accessed 21 September 2015). 57 Wallerstein, ‘Thinness and Other Refusals’; Arnold, ‘Heroin Chic’.

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58 This involved looking at every copy of every magazine, published in the period spanning 1990–2015. Lula is a more recent title, being founded in 2005, so my primary research on the publication started from there. Furthermore, it should be noted that the archive of Lula magazine held at University of the Arts London was incomplete (several issues were missing) and so my survey of this magazine was necessarily less comprehensive than that of Vogue and i-D. 59 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1969; London: Routledge, 2002), 32. 60 David Silverman, Doing Qualitative Research,3rd ed. (London: Sage, 2010). 61 Conde Nast, ‘Vogue Media Kit 2012’, Conde Nast, n.d. Available online: http://www. condenast.com/brands/vogue/media-kit/web (accessed 15 September 2013). 62 Conde Nast, ‘Vogue Media Kit 2015’, Conde Nast. n.d. Available online: http:// digitalassets.condenast.co.uk.s3.amazonaws.com/static/condenast/VOGUE%20 Media%20Pack%2003072015.pdf (accessed 24 July 2015). 63 Conde Nast, ‘Vogue Media Kit 2012’. This information was not detailed in the 2015 Media Kit. 64 The 2012 Media Kit states that 67 per cent of readers are ABC1 and 32 per cent AB. 65 The website states that ‘i-D has come a long way since its pre-digital, cut-andpaste days and has developed into a glossy magazine that documents fashion and contemporary culture, and has broken ground defining it too’. See: i-D, ‘About Us’, iD, 2013. Available online: http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/about (accessed 30 November 2013). 66 ‘Polymorphous’ here refers to what Laurence O’Toole calls the ‘uncivilised character of child sexuality, which appears to be without barriers, failing to observe the distinctions between the masculine and the feminine, the oral and the anal […] Before ‘normality’, child sexuality is an exercise in bad behaviour, an affront to good taste.’ Laurence O’Toole, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire. (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998), 234–5. 67 Lula can be categorized as a niche fashion magazine, owing to its content and highquality finish. Niche fashion magazines, as defined by Ane Lynge-Jorlén, emerged in the 1990s and are ‘small-scale independent fashion magazines that merge high fashion with art and style cultures, often targeting both men and women’. See: Ane Lynge-Jorlén, ‘Between Frivolity and Art: Contemporary Niche Fashion Magazines’, Fashion Theory 16, no.1 (2012): 8–9. 68 It should be noted that the editorship of Lula changed in 2013, with issue no.17 being Leith Clark’s last in her role as editor-in-chief. Sheila Single was appointed her successor, leading to a subsequent shift in the magazine’s aesthetic. 69 White and Richardson, ‘Lula’, White and Richardson, n.d. Available online: http:// www.whiteandrichardson.com/print/ (accessed 13 August 2013). It is worth

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bearing in mind that these figures are unlikely to take ‘secondary readership’ into account, which might include a higher proportion of men. For discussion of secondary readership, see Marjorie Ferguson, Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity (Exeter: Heinemann, 1983). 70 Morna Laing, ‘The Lula girl as “Sublime and Childlike”: Nostalgic Investments in Contemporary Fashion Magazines’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 5, no.2 (2014): 271–93. 71 Lula, no.7 (2008), 23. For discussion, see Laing, ‘Lula girl’. 72 Sarah Nicole Prickett, ‘Leith Clark’s Lula: A Big Happy Birthday to Leith Clark’s Girl-loving Magazine Hitting Its Fifth Year’, Dazed Digital, 25 October 2010. Available online: http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/8809/1/leith-clarkslula (accessed 26 August 2015). 73 The concept of the ‘male gaze’ is explored in depth in Chapter 4. 74 i-D, ‘About Us’. 75 Val Williams, ‘Fashion Was the Least Important Thing’ in Look at Me: Fashion and Photography in Britain: 1960 to the Present, ed. Val Williams (London: The British Council, 1998), 9. 76 Ibid., 111–12. 77 Rachel Lifter, Contemporary Indie and the Construction of Identity: Discursive Representations of Indie, Gendered Subjectivities and the Interconnections between Indie Music and Popular Fashion in the UK (PhD thesis, University of the Arts London, 2012), 123. 78 Agnès Rocamora and Alistair O’Neill, ‘Fashioning the Street: Images of the Street in the Fashion Media’ in Fashion as Photograph, ed. Eugénie Shinkle (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008). 79 Williams, ‘Fashion Was the Least Important Thing’, 111–12. 80 i-D, ‘About Us’. 81 See Juergen Teller, Marc Jacobs Advertising 1998–2009 (v.1). (Göttingen: Steidl Photography International, 2009). In terms of childlike femininities in editorials by Juergen Teller, see for instance: ‘So she sat, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland’, i-D, ‘The Serious Fashion Issue’, no.185, April 1999, 228–35, (model, Jen Dawson; stylist, Venetia Scott); ‘All Grown Up’, i-D ‘The Adult Issue’, no.179, September 1998, 140–5 (model, Kate Moss). ‘Start Me Up’, British Vogue, May 2003, 204 (model, Kate Moss; stylists, Bay Garnett and Anita Pallenberg). 82 Williams, ‘Fashion Was the Least Important Thing’, 111. 83 Penny Martin, ‘English-style Photography?’ in The Englishness of English Dress, ed. Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin and Caroline Cox (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002).

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84 Laurence O’Toole, Pornocopia, 234–5. 85 McRobbie, British Fashion Design, 153–4. 86 Foucault, Archaeology, 32. 87 For discussion, see for instance: Masafumi Monden, ‘The “Nationality” of Lolita Fashion’ in Asia through Art and Anthropology, ed. Fuyubi Nakamura, Morgan Perkins and Olivier Krischer (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Manami Okazaki and Geoff Johnson, Kawaii!: Japan’s Culture of Cute (London: Prestel, 2013). 88 I borrow this term from Helen Malson, Emma Halliwell, Irmgard Tischner and Annadis Rúdólfsdóttir, ‘Post-feminist Advertising Laid Bare: Young Women’s Talk about the Sexually Agentic Woman of “Midriff ” Advertising’, Feminism and Psychology 21, no.1 (2011): 74–99. 89 Other existing studies include: Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas; and Malson et al., ‘Post-feminist Advertising Laid Bare’. 90 For studies of magazine-reading rituals, see for instance: Rosalind Ballaster, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer and Sandra Hebron, Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine (London: Macmillan, 1991); David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxon: Routledge, 2008); Joke Hermes, Reading Women’s Magazines: An Analysis of Everyday Media Use (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell, 1995); Peter Jackson, Nick Stevenson and Kate Brooks, Making Sense of Men’s Magazines (Cambridge: Polity, 2001); Janice Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London: Pandora, 1987). 91 The work of Ane Lynge-Jorlén is a good example of an ethnographic approach to the production side of niche fashion media. See Ane Lynge-Jorlén, Niche Fashion Magazines: Changing the Shape of Fashion (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017). 92 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 78. 93 Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 8. 94 Bordo, Unbearable Weight. 95 Reina Lewis and Katrina Rolley, ‘Ad(dressing) the Dyke: Lesbian Looks and Lesbian Looking’ in Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, ed. Peter Horne and Reina Lewis (London and New York: Routledge), 179. 96 Richard Hoggart was Professor of English Literature. The CCCS was founded on the premise that everyday culture was just as worthy of academic study as so-called high culture such as classics, English literature and art history. As such, it paved the way for the emergence of fashion studies in the 1980s and 1990s, marked in particular by the founding of the scholarly journal Fashion Theory

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in 1997. For a recent review of the field of fashion studies, see special issue ‘The State of Fashion Studies’, International Journal of Fashion Studies 5, no.1 (2018). For further discussion of the CCCS, see Andrew Milner and Jeff Browitt, Contemporary Cultural Theory: An Introduction, 3rd edn (1991; London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 97 Ibid. See also Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 98 Hall as cited in Milner and Browitt, Contemporary Cultural Theory, 7. Hall was immediate successor to Hoggart as director of the CCCS. 99 Rosetta Brookes, ‘Fashion Photography. The Double-Page Spread: Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Deborah Turbeville’ in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, ed. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (London: Pandora, 1992), 19.

Chapter 2   1 Brookes, ‘Fashion Photography’, 19.   2 Agnès Rocamora, Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009).   3 Werner Sombart as cited in Adam Briggs, ‘Capitalism’s Favourite Child: The Production of Fashion’ in Fashion Cultures Revisited, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2013), 106.   4 Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London: Routledge, 1993), 6.  5 Barthes, The Fashion System, 300.   6 Ibid.   7 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams (London: Virago, 2003), 3.   8 For discussion of symbolic and material production, see: Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, with an Editor’s Introduction by Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 37.  9 Rocamora, Fashioning the City. 10 Foucault, Will to Knowledge, 100. 11 Foucault, Archaeology. 12 Rocamora, Fashioning the City, 58. 13 Neil Kirkham, ‘2012: Notes on Fashion and Pornography’ in Working Papers in Fashion Studies 2, ed. Rachel Lifter (London: London College of Fashion, 2012).

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14 Celia Lury, Consumer Culture, 2nd edn (1996; Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2011). 15 McRobbie, British Fashion Design, 151. 16 Martin Harrison, Appearances: Fashion Photography since 1945 (London: Cape, 1991). 17 Craik, The Face of Fashion, 97. 18 Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 21. The Ladies’ Mercury appeared prior to this – in 1693 – published by John Dunton, a London Bookseller. As White notes, it ‘may fairly be called the very first periodical for women’. See: Cynthia L. White, Women’s Magazines, 1693–1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), 23. 19 Harrison, Appearances, 10. 20 Ibid. 21 Carmel Snow was editor of Harper’s Bazaar between 1934 and 1958. 22 Ibid., 84. 23 Alison Bancroft, Fashion and Psychoanalysis (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 23. 24 Susan Kismaric and Eva Respini, ‘Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990’ in Fashion as Photograph, ed. Eugénie Shinkle (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008). 25 Margaret Maynard, ‘The Fashion Photograph: An “Ecology”’ in Fashion as Photograph, ed. Eugénie Shinkle (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 55. 26 Barthes, The Fashion System, 4. 27 Eugénie Shinkle, ‘Introduction’ in Fashion as Photograph, ed. Eugénie Shinkle (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 4. 28 Foucault, Archaeology, 25. 29 Maynard, ‘The Fashion Photograph’, 55. Maynard develops this point using the work of Anne Freadman on taxonomies, but her argument can be similarly supported with reference to Foucault, whose work underpins this book. 30 Christopher Breward, ‘Intoxicated on Images: The Visual Culture of Couture’ in The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947–57, ed. Claire Wilcox (London: V&A, 2007), 176. 31 Shinkle, ‘Introduction’, 2. 32 Williams, ‘Fashion Was the Least Important Thing’, 9. 33 For discussion of auteur theory and visual culture see: Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies, 2nd edn (London: Sage, 2007).

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34 Morna Laing. ‘The Lula Girl as “Sublime and Childlike”: Nostalgic Investments in Contemporary Fashion Magazines’. Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 5, no.2 (2014): 271–93. 35 See for instance: Figures 24 and 30 in this book. For an overview of brands, publication and celebrities with whom Leith Clark has collaborated, see: The Wall Group, ‘Leith Clark’, The Wall Group. Available online: https://www.thewallgroup. com/artist/leith-clark (accessed 24 April 2020). 36 Harrison, Appearances, 14. That said, recognizing the many agents involved in the production of any given photograph does pose a problem, however, in terms of Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model, as discussed in Chapter 4. To consult Hall’s essay, see: Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’ in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (London: Routledge, 1992), 128–38. 37 The term ‘preferred reading’ is a reference to Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model, which I discuss in Chapter 4. 38 Shinkle, ‘Introduction’, 2. 39 Ulrich Lehmann, ‘Fashion Photography’ in Chic Clicks: Creativity and Commerce in Contemporary Fashion Photography, ed. Ulrich Lehmann and Jessica Morgan (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2002), 5. 40 Pierre Bourdieu as cited in Agnès Rocamora, ‘High Fashion and Pop Fashion: The Symbolic Production of Fashion in Le Monde and The Guardian’, Fashion Theory 5, no.2 (2001): 123. 41 This expansive definition can be contrasted with more tightly defined definitions, such as that employed by Bancroft, whose work focuses on those ‘instances when fashion can be talked about in the same terms as art’. See: Bancroft, Fashion and Psychoanalysis, 5. 42 See for instance: Rosie Findlay, Personal Style Blogs: Appearances That Fascinate (Bristol: Intellect, 2017); Derek Conrad Murray, ‘Notes to Self: The Visual Culture of Selfies in the Age of Social Media’, Consumption, Markets and Culture 18, no.6 (2015): 490–516. Agnès Rocamora, ‘Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital Self-portraits’, Fashion Theory 15, no.4 (2011): 407–24; Monica Titton, ‘Fashionable Personae: Self-identity and Enactments of Fashion Narratives in Fashion Blogs’, Fashion Theory 19, no.2 (2015): 201–20. 43 For discussion of fashion film, see for instance: Nathalie Khan, ‘Cutting the Fashion Body: Why the Fashion Image Is No Longer Still’, Fashion Theory 16, no.2 (2012): 235–50; Marketa Uhlirova, ‘100 Years of the Fashion Film: Frameworks and Histories’, Fashion Theory 17, no.2 (2013): 137–58. 44 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 2nd edn (New York and London: New York University Press, 2008).

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45 Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 104. 46 Evans and Thornton, Women and Fashion, 82. 47 For discussion of the way scholarship in the academy has been slow to theorize fashion media, see: Brookes, ‘Fashion Photography’; McRobbie, British Fashion Design; Rocamora, Fashioning the City; Shinkle, Fashion as Photograph. 48 Harrison, Appearances, 124. 49 This is something recognized by Barthes vis-à-vis fashion writing. When justifying his decision to focus on fashion magazines rather than fashion in its materiality, he wrote: ‘It […] seemed unreasonable to place the reality of clothing before the discourse of Fashion: true reason would in fact have us proceed from the instituting discourse to the reality which it constitutes.’ See: Barthes, The Fashion System, xi, emphasis in original. 50 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 6. 51 Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 52 Stuart Hall, ‘The Work of Representation’ in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 25. 53 Hall, ‘The Work of Representation’, 25. 54 For discussion of the idea of text as ‘anchor’, see Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’ in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, ed. Roland Barthes, trans. S. Heath (1961; London: Fontana Press, 1977), 15–31. 55 Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 109. 56 Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; London: Penguin, 2008), 153. 57 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard (1980; London: Vintage, 2000). 58 Ibid., 115. 59 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 60 Ibid., 3. 61 Ibid., 3. 62 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5. 63 Craik, The Face of Fashion, 93. 64 Ibid., 97, building upon Seebohm. 65 Harrison, Appearances, 10. 66 Kismaric and Respini, ‘Fashioning Fiction’, 31. 67 Dyer, White, 110.

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68 Ibid., 97. 69 Tagg, Burden of Representation, 63. 70 Paul Jobling ‘On the Turn – Millennial Bodies and the Meaning of Time in Andrea Giacobbe’s Fashion Photography’, Fashion Theory 6, no.1 (2002): 10. 71 Spencer Stokes, ‘Next Stop, Fairyland!’, BBC, Spring 2004. Available online: http:// www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/sense_of_place/unexplained/cottingley_fairies.shtml (accessed 2 December 2018). 72 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3rd edn (1972; London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 73 For discussion see Arnold, ‘Heroin Chic’; Jobling, Fashion Spreads; Wallerstein, ‘Thinness and Other Refusals’. 74 Jobling, Fashion Spreads, 114–15. 75 See Wallerstein, ‘Thinness and Other Refusals’. 76 ASA, ‘ASA Adjudication on Prada SpA t/a Miu Miu’. 77 ASA, ‘ASA Ruling on Coty UK Ltd’, Advertising Standards Authority, 9 November 2011. Available online: https://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2011/11/ Coty-UK-Ltd/SHP_ADJ_168079.aspx#.VgGJTp3BzGc (accessed 14 December 2011). 78 ASA, ‘ASA Adjudication on Prada SpA t/a Miu Miu’. 79 For discussion of niche fashion publications, see Ane Lynge-Jorlén, Niche Fashion Magazines: Changing the Shape of Fashion (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017). 80 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge (London: Yale University Press, 2003), 12. 81 For instance, Ien Ang and Joke Hermes note how ‘different discourses produce different definitions within specific contexts. For instance, Catholic religious discourse defines woman as virgin, mother or whore. It is contradicted by radical feminist discourse that defines women as oppressed human beings, victims of male exploitation’. See Ien Ang and Joke Hermes, ‘Gender and/in Media Consumption’ in Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, ed. Ien Ang (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1996), 119. 82 Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines, 8. 83 Ballaster et al., Women’s Worlds, 7, 176. On this point, see also Leslie Rabine, ‘A Woman’s Two Bodies: Fashion Magazines, Consumerism, and Feminism’ in On Fashion, ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 84 Foucault, Will to Knowledge, 100. 85 See: Foucault, Will to Knowledge; Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. R. Hurley (1984; London: Penguin, 1990).

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  86 For discussion, see: Sandra Lee Bartky, ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’ in The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behaviour, 3rd edn, ed. Rose Weitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Sylvia Pritsch, ‘Inventing Images, Constructing Standpoints: Feminist Strategies of the Technology of the Self ’ in Feminism and the Final Foucault, ed. Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Jana Sawicki, ‘Feminism, Foucault and “Subjects” of Power and Freedom’ in The Later Foucault, ed. Jeremy Moss (London: Sage, 1998).   87 Judith Lorber and Susan A. Farrell, ‘Preface’ in The Social Construction of Gender, ed. Judith Lorber and Susan A. Farrell (London: Sage, 1991), 1–2, emphasis in original.   88 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (1975; London: Penguin, 1991), 198.   89 Butler, Gender Trouble, 34.   90 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex 9.   91 Genesis, 1.3, Good News Bible.   92 Butler, Bodies That Matter, building on Austin, emphasis in original.   93 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 70.   94 Ibid., xii.   95 Ibid., xvii.   96 Ibid., xvii.   97 A gender-neutral pronoun exists, in the form of ‘they’, which is used to refer to groups of people as well as a single individual of unspecified sex. There is increasing awareness about the politics of gendered pronouns, with some activists and institutions suggesting that the gender-neutral pronoun ‘they’ be extended to apply to individuals in the singular. See for instance: Shige Sakurai, MyProunons.Org. Available online: https://www.mypronouns.org/ (accessed 26 November 2018). For media commentary, see for instance: Gary Nunn, ‘Is It Time We Agreed on a Gender-Neutral Singular Pronoun?’, The Guardian, 30 January 2015.   98 Butler, Gender Trouble, 23.   99 For further discussion of binaries as a way of marking cultural difference, see Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the “Other”’. 100 Butler, Gender Trouble, 24. 101 Cameron Russell, ‘Looks Aren’t Everything: Believe Me, I’m a Model’, TEDxMidAtlantic, October 2012. Available online: https://www.ted.com/ talks/cameron_russell_looks_aren_t_everything_believe_me_i_m_a_ model?language=en (accessed 5 November 2018).

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102 For discussion see Chapter Five. 103 Pritsch, ‘Inventing Images’, 136. 104 Butler, Gender Trouble, 198. 105 Ibid., 169. 106 Ibid., 169. 107 Ibid., 201. 108 Ibid., 191. 109 Pritsch, ‘Inventing Images’, 128.

Chapter 3    1 Hall, ‘The Work of Representation’, 33.   2 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. unknown (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), 346.   3 Foucault, Will to Knowledge, 95.   4 Ibid., 101.   5 Holland, Picturing Childhood, 181.   6 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. R. Baldick (1960; London: Pimlico, 1996).   7 Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996), 62.   8 Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Methodologically, their approaches differ in that Ariès looked to changes in iconography in order to chart changing social attitudes to children whereas Pollock based her thesis on an extensive survey of documentary evidence such as manuscripts and diaries. While Ariès argued that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represented a period of transition in attitudes to children, Pollock departs from this view, suggesting that there existed historical continuity in societal attitudes to children, with affection towards children extending back as far as the medieval period. For critique of both positions and suggestions for reconciling the two, see: James C. Steward, The New Child: British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730–1830 (Berkeley: University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, 1995).   9 Chris Jenks, Childhood, 2nd edn (Oxon: Routledge, 2005), 59. 10 Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 316. See also 31 and 125. 11 Ibid., 125. 12 Ibid.

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13 Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 147–8; Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 316. 14 Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 323. 15 Neiman, Why Grow Up? 163, citing Mead. For discussion of child labour and fair trade fashion, see for instance: Jennifer Farley Gordon and Colleen Hill, Sustainable Fashion: Past, Present and Future (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 16 As is often the case with schools of thought, the ‘new sociology of childhood’ is something of an umbrella term within which there exist a number of different, sometimes competing, perspectives. For instance, some scholars emphasize the plurality of childhoods rather than conceiving of the child as uniform across cultures and societies (Jenks, Childhood, 1st edn, 6). Other scholars problematize this position (as in Qvortrup, ‘Childhood Matters’, 5–6). 17 Allison James and Alan Prout, ‘A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems’ in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, 2nd edn, ed. Allison James and Alan Prout (London: Falmer, 1997), 7. 18 Daniel T. Cook, The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (United States of America: Duke University Press, 2004), 3. 19 Holland, Picturing Childhood, xi. 20 Jenks, Childhood, 1st edn. 21 Ibid., 32. 22 Ibid., 10. 23 Ibid., 4–5. 24 See for instance: James and Prout, ‘A New Paradigm’; Jenks, Childhood, 1st edn; Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe, eds., Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood. 2nd edn (Colorado: Westview Press, 2004). 25 Jenks, Childhood, 1st edn, 26. 26 Qvortrup, ‘Childhood Matters’, 4. 27 Oakley, ‘Women and Children First and Last’, 14, emphasis in original, building on Hacker. It should be noted that while women’s studies grew out of a political movement for women’s rights, driven by women themselves, childhood studies involve adults ‘making representations on behalf of children – “in their best interests”’, as Oakley notes in ibid., 20. This difficulty has been widely acknowledged (see for instance: Cook, Commodification of Childhood; James and Prout ‘A New Paradigm?’; Qvortrup, ‘Childhood Matters’; Steward, The New Child). 28 Ariès, Centuries of Childhood; Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998).

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29 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. B. Foxley (1762; London and Vermont: Everyman, 1993). 30 Ibid., 64. 31 Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 125–6. 32 Ibid., 126. 33 Ibid., 126. 34 Ibid., 129. 35 Steward, The New Child, 81. 36 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 23. 37 Rousseau, Émile, 181. 38 Neiman, Why Grow Up? 64. 39 Ibid., 64. 40 Ibid., 126. 41 Rousseau, Émile, 218. 42 Ibid., 336. 43 Ibid., 147–8. 44 Ibid., 156. 45 Ibid., 63. 46 Ibid., 84. When it comes to adults, however, the epithet becomes ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’: the title of an etching (1799) by Spanish artist Goya. It is Plate 43 in a satirical series where the artist explores ‘what happens when reason is absent’. The etching was intended as a satire on Spanish society, ‘which he portrayed as demented, corrupt and ripe for ridicule’. For discussion see: Met Museum, ‘Plate 43 from “Los Caprichos”’, Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d. Available online: http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/ search/338473 (accessed 5 September 2015). 47 Neiman, Why Grow Up?, 22. 48 Cook, Commodification of Childhood. 49 Paula S. Fass, ‘Childhood and Memory’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3, no.2 (2010): 155–64. 50 Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on Sexual Theory’ in Sigmund Freud, The Psychology of Love, trans. S. Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2006). 51 Carol Mavor, ‘Dream-Rushes: Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of the Little Girl’ in The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915, ed. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1994), 159.

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52 O’Toole, Pornocopia, 234–5; Henry Jenkins, ‘The Sensuous Child: Benjamin Spock and the Sexual Revolution’ in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (London and New York: New York University Press, 1998), 209–30. Valerie Walkerdine, ‘Popular Culture and the Eroticization of Little Girls’ in Cultural Studies and Communications, ed. James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine (London and New York: Arnold, 1996), 325. 53 James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 219. 54 Rousseau, Émile, 230. 55 Ibid., 180. 56 Ibid., 158. 57 Neiman, Why Grow Up? 58 Steward, The New Child, 17. 59 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 23. 60 Ibid., 14. 61 Ibid., 24. 62 This is reminiscent of the child as tabula rasa, a term associated with Rousseau’s contemporary John Locke, who saw the child’s mind as ‘blank’ until experience was etched upon it (as discussed in Neiman, Why Grow Up?, 8). Yet in spite of their mutual belief in the formative role of early education, there were important differences between Locke and Rousseau. In his treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693, Locke depicted the child as a work in progress, a being whose ‘native stock’ can be improved through education that placed an emphasis on ‘restraint and discipline’ rather than ‘liberty and indulgence’ (265). According to Ariès (Centuries of Childhood, 129), this moment marked the beginning of the child as ‘imperfect’ person. This can be contrasted with Rousseau’s ‘coddling’ attitude towards education in childhood. 63 Dyer, White, 3. 64 Ibid., 1. 65 Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985), 5–6. 66 Steward, The New Child, 174–5. Specific examples include William Blake’s ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ from Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789) – a comment on social injustice – as well as the novels of Charles Dickens. 67 Ibid., 177. 68 Mavor, ‘Dream-Rushes’; Leslie Williams, ‘The Look of Little Girls: John Everett Millais and the Victorian Art Market’ in The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915, ed. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1994).

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69 Williams, ‘The Look of Little Girls’, 128. See also de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 114, 345. 70 Williams, ‘The Look of Little Girls’, 128. 71 Giroux, Stealing Innocence, 8. On this point, see also Sinikka Aapola, Marnina Gonick and Anita Harris, Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 72 Rousseau, Émile, 206. 73 Furstenberg cited in An-Magritt Jensen, ‘The Feminization of Childhood’ in Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics, ed. Jens Qvortrup, Marjatta Bardy, Giovanni Sgritta and Helmut Winters (Hants: Avebury, 1994), 61–2. 74 Jensen, ‘The Feminization of Childhood’, 59. 75 Ibid., 60. 76 Ibid., 59. 77 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 82. 78 Ibid., 24. 79 Ibid., 27. 80 Rousseau, Émile, 206. 81 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 39. 82 Ibid., 39. See also 60–4. 83 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 16 and 42. Wollstonecraft does, at one point, refer to man as an ‘overgrown child’, ‘thanks to early debauchery’ (Ibid., 32). This is interesting from the perspective of the present as it might tie in with recent scholarly literature on the laddish ‘man-child’ as discussed in Benwell, ‘New Sexism?’ and Kimmel, Guyland. 84 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 44. 85 Ibid., 45. 86 Ibid., 52, emphasis in original. 87 Ibid., 29. 88 Ibid., 28 and 29. 89 Ibid., 16. 90 Ibid., 45. 91 Ibid., 145–6. For discussion of this quotation see: Corinne Field, ‘“Made Women of when They Are Still Mere Children”: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Eighteenthcentury Girlhood’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 4, no.2 (2011): 199–222. 92 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 13–14.

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  93 Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (London: Profile, 2003), 45–6.    94 As described on the back cover of Wollstonecraft, Vindication.   95 Field, ‘Made Women of when They Are Still Mere Children’, 213.   96 McRobbie, Aftermath, 72–83.   97 Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013), 214–15.   98 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 9, 329.   99 Ibid., 329. For further references to woman as childlike see also 92, 329, 337, 347, 353. 100 Ibid., 105. 101 Ibid., 76. 102 Ibid., 76. 103 Ibid., 77. 104 Ibid., 63. 105 Ibid., 63. 106 Ibid., 63. 107 Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, trans. B. Fretchman (England: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1960). 108 See for instance cover art for ‘Best of BB’, released in 1996. 109 De Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, 26, 58. 110 Ibid., 28–30. 111 Ibid., 28 and 14–18. 112 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 104. 113 O’Toole, Pornocopia, 234–5. 114 De Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, 14. 115 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 27. 116 Wollstonecraft, Vindication. 117 Ibid., 89. 118 Ibid., 15. 119 Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 18. 120 Ibid., 28–9. 121 Ibid., 105–6. 122 Gill, Gender and the Media, 26. 123 hooks, Feminist Theory, 2.

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124 Ibid., 38. 125 Gill, Gender and the Media, 27. 126 Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 23. 127 Holland, Alternative Femininities, 37. 128 Tseëlon, The Masque of Femininity, 49. 129 Holland, Alternative Femininities, 37; see also 146. 130 Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 190–2. For discussion of 1950s glamour, see also Carol Dyhouse, Glamour: Women, History and Feminism (London and New York: Zed Books, 2010). 131 Breward, Culture of Fashion, 191, my emphasis. 132 Radner, ‘On the Move’. 133 hooks, Feminist Theory, 1–2. 134 Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 246. 135 See also Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 52; De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 76; Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women (London: Vintage, 1992), 74. 136 For discussion of post-feminist discourse, see: Gill, Gender and the Media; McRobbie, Aftermath; Angela McRobbie, ‘Post-feminism and Popular Culture’, Feminist Media Studies 4, no.3 (2004): 255–64. 137 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 29. 138 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault posits the subjected body as one that is invested with ‘power and knowledge relations’ (28). This is further unpacked in the now famous passage where Foucault introduces the metaphor of the panopticon: Jeremy Bentham’s design for the model prison. The prison consists of a central control tower veiled in darkness and encircled by cells, each of which is illuminated. The prisoners do not know if they are being watched but they do know that they might be. As such, ‘the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary’ (Foucault 1991a: 200). Physical force is no longer needed; one is never sure whether one is being watched meaning one must always conform to discursive standards and behave appropriately: ‘Visibility is a trap’ (200). Ultimately, the prison involves ‘power of mind over mind’ (206). 139 Prickett, ‘Leith Clark’s Lula’. 140 McRobbie, Aftermath, 61. 141 Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 130.

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142 Gayle Greene, ‘Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory’, Signs 16, no.2 (1991), 290–321. Interestingly, Greene notes that although the word tends to be associated with the 1980s, it actually appeared far earlier, in 1919 when ‘(as Nancy Cott tells us) “a group of female literary radicals in Greenwich Village” founded a new journal declaring an interest “in people… not in men and women”; they called their stance “post-feminist”’ (299). 143 Faludi, Backlash, 14. 144 Ibid., 101. 145 See also Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (London: Vintage, 1991). 146 Faludi, Backlash, 77–8. Faludi’s comment chimes with de Beauvoir’s discussion of woman as eternal child in The Second Sex: ‘Her wings are clipped and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly’ (336). 147 Faludi, Backlash, 93. 148 For discussion of ‘divine’ femininity in the Victorian period, see Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (1982; Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2013). 149 Faludi, Backlash, 93. 150 Ibid., 92. 151 McRobbie ‘Post-feminism’, 255–64. 152 McRobbie, Aftermath, 12. 153 Goldman, Readings Ads Socially, 130. 154 Gill, Gender and the Media; McRobbie, Aftermath. 155 Imelda Whelehan, Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism (London: The Women’s Press, 2000), 4. 156 Gill, Gender and the Media; McRobbie, ‘Post-feminism’. 157 Baer, ‘Redoing Feminism’. 158 Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 1. In this text, Banet-Weiser identifies two further ways in which feminist discourse in the 2010s is ‘popular’: the second being the fact it is ‘liked and admired by like-minded people and groups’ and the third being some versions of feminism are more visible, and therefore popular, than others (1). 159 Rosalind Gill, ‘Sexism Reloaded, or, It’s Time to Get Angry Again!’, Feminist Media Studies 11, no.1 (2011): 61–71. 160 Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 20. 161 Ibid., 4. 162 Ibid., 13.

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163 Jess Cartner-Morley, ‘Karl Lagerfeld’s New Look for Chanel: Feminist Protest and Slogans’, The Guardian, 30 September 2014. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/fashion/2014/sep/30/karl-lagerfeld-chanel-show-paris-fashionweek (accessed 4 November 2018). 164 @ethicalbrandz as cited in a Fashion Revolution tweet on 1 May 2018. 165 Banet-Weiser, Empowered. 166 See Anne Burns ‘Creepshots and Power: Covert Sexualised Photography, Online Communities and the Maintenance of Gender Inequality’ in The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self, ed. Marco Bohr and Basia Sliwinska (New York and London: Routledge, 2018).

Chapter 4   1 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image Music Text, trans. S. Heath (1968; London: Fontana Press, 1977).   2 Ibid., 148.   3 Barthes, The Fashion System, 233.   4 The work of Diana Crane in Fashion and Its Social Agendas is a notable exception. There also exist studies from an advertising perspective, such as Ben Barry and Barbara J. Phillips, ‘The Fashion Engagement Grid: Understanding Men’s Responses to Fashion Advertising’, International Journal of Advertising 35, no.3 (2016): 438–64; and Malson et al., ‘Post-Feminist Advertising’.   5 For a recent review, see the special issue on methodologies in International Journal of Fashion Studies (vol. 5, no.1), guest edited by Alessandro Bucci, Chiara Faggella, Marco Pecorari and Lauren Downing Peters.   6 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 131.   7 Myra MacDonald, Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), 5.   8 This term derives from Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no.3 (1975): 6–18. For discussion of how this term has been mobilized in the field of fashion studies, see Morna Laing and Jacki Willson, eds., Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020).   9  Rose, Visual Methodologies. 10 Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’ in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. S. Heath (1961; London: Fontana Press, 1977), 15.

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11 James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein, ‘Introduction’ in Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), xiii and xii. 12 Ibid., xiii. 13 Liesbet van Zoonen, Feminist Media Studies (London, California and New Delhi: Sage, 1994), 106. 14 Machor and Goldstein, Reception Study, 203–9. 15 See for instance: Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (Oxon: Routledge, 1985); David Morley, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: BFI, 1980). 16 Gogglebox was first aired in 2013 and there have been twelve series on Channel 4 to date. See: Channel Four, ‘Google Box’, Channel4, November 2018. Available online: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/gogglebox (accessed 6 November 2018). 17 See for instance: Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); John A. Walker, ‘Pop Art: Differential Responses and Changing Perceptions’, AND: Journal of Art and Art Education 26 (1991): 9–16. 18 See for instance: Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women (New York and London: Methuen, 1984); Radway, Reading the Romance. 19 For a historical overview of the development of reception studies in Cultural Studies, see Machor and Goldstein, Reception Study, 203–12. 20 In Fashion and Its Social Agendas, Crane showed fashion photographs and clothing advertisements to participants in focus groups in order to explore the extent to which women identified with conflicting fashionable ideals. 21 Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas, 212. 22 Barry and Phillips, ‘The Fashion Engagement Grid’, 439. See also Malson et al., ‘Post-feminist Advertising’. 23 In terms of magazines, see: Hermes, Reading Women’s Magazines and Benwell’s study of reader responses to irony in men’s magazines in ‘New Sexism?’. The work of Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks in Men’s Magazines is noteworthy in that it explores all three modalities of the image, through interviews with editors (production) alongside audience studies (reception). 24 Gill, Gender and the Media, 17. 25 At this point in his argument Morley is referring to John Fiske, ‘British Cultural Studies and Television’ in Channels of Discourse, ed. Robert C. Allen (London: Methuen, 1987). 26 Morley, Television, Audiences, 24, in dialogue with the work of James Curran.

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27 Ibid., 21. Morley makes this point with reference to the work of Stuart Hall. 28 Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, 134. 29 See for instance: James Curran, ‘Media Dialogue: A Reply’ in Cultural Studies and Communication, ed. James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine (London and New York: Arnold, 1996), 294; Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’; Morley, Nationwide; Morley, Television, Audiences; John A. Walker, ‘Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning’ in The Camerawork Essays: Context and Meaning in Photography, ed. Jessica Evans (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1997). 30 Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’. 31 Ibid., 137. 32 Jackson et al., Men’s Magazines, 19. 33 Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman, ‘The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer Viewing’ in A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, ed. Paul Burston and Colin Richardson, 13–56 (London: Routledge, 1995), 45. 34 Harrison, Appearances, 14. 35 Ibid., 68. Harrison makes this point in relation to Richard Avedon, whom he saw as interested in exploring human psychology through fashion photography. 36 Hall’s model was taken up by David Morley in his Nationwide audience studies, under the heading ‘structured polysemy’ (10). In his later work, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, Morley maintained that the Encoding-Decoding model, ‘while needing development and amendment in various respects, still offers the best alternative to a conception of media texts as equally “open” to any and all interpretations […] which readers wish to make of them’ (21). 37 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ in Image Music Text, trans. S. Heath (1964; London: Fontana Press, 1977). 38 Rose, Visual Methodologies, 24. 39 Machor and Goldstein, Reception Study, 321. 40 Ellen McCracken, Decoding Women’s Magazines (London: Macmillan, 1993), 27. 41 Radway, Reading the Romance, 8. 42 Barthes, ‘Photographic Message’, 19. 43 Ibid. 44 Alan Bryman, Social Research Methods, 3rd edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 475; Jenny Kitzinger, ‘The Methodology of Focus Groups: The Importance of Interaction between Research Participants’, Sociology of Health and Illness 16 (1994): 104. 45 Herbert J. Rubin and Irene S. Rubin. Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data. 2nd edn. (Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage, 2005), 24–5.

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46 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice. 2nd edn. (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 3. 47 Ibid. 48 Marjorie L. Devault, ‘Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis’. Social Problems 37, no.1 (1990): 96–116. 49 Ang and Hermes, ‘Gender and/in Media Consumption’, 110. 50 I borrow this term from Morley, Television, Audiences, 12. 51 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 5. 52 Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment, eds., The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), 7. 53 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’. 54 Ibid., 11. 55 For an overview of changes to practices of looking since the publication of Mulvey’s essay, see: Morna Laing and Jacki Willson, ‘Introduction’ in Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking, ed. M. Laing and J. Willson (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). 56 Laura Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” inspired by “Duel in the Sun” (King Vidor, 1946)’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 15, no.17 (1981): 15. 57 Ibid., 15. 58 Ibid., 13. 59 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972; London: Penguin, 2008), 41. 60 Jacki Willson, Being Gorgeous: Feminism, Sexuality and the Pleasures of the Visual (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 13. 61 Ibid., 14. 62 Sean Nixon, ‘Exhibiting Masculinity’ in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 321. 63 Rosemary Betterton, ‘Introduction: Feminism, Femininity and Representation’ in Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, ed. Rosemary Betterton (London: Pandora, 1987), 12. 64 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 60–1. 65 Ibid., 60–1. 66 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, 6. 67 Ibid., 8. 68 I borrow this phrase from Angela McRobbie: see McRobbie, Aftermath, 108. 69 Harrison as cited in Radner, ‘On the Move’, 130.

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70 Diana Fuss, ‘Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look’ in On Fashion, ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick and New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 228. For discussion of the pre-oedipal in relation to romance reading, see: Radway, Reading the Romance, 140. 71 For discussion of fashion photography and the lesbian gaze, see also Lewis and Rolley, ‘Ad(dressing) the Dyke’, 181; Catherine Baker, ‘Re-reading the Queer Female Gaze in the 1990s: Spectatorship, Fashion and the Duality of Identification and Desire’ in Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking, ed. Morna Laing and Jacki Willson (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 199–226. 72 Bordo, Unbearable Weight. 73 Jacqui Roach and Petal Felix, ‘Black Looks’ in The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, ed. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), 130, emphasis in original. 74 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 3. 75 Ibid., 122–3. 76 Ibid., 126. 77 She was editor-in-chief of British Vogue from 1992 to 2017. 78 Yasmin Jones-Henry, ‘Alexandra Shulman’s Cheap Shot at Her Successor Is a Sad Fall from Grace’, The Guardian, 6 October 2017. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/06/alexandra-shulman-vogue-editoredward-enninful-attack-legacy (accessed 26 November 2018). 79 Holland. Picturing Childhood, 4. 80 Walker, ‘Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning’, 57 and 54. See also Evans and Thornton, Women and Fashion, 82; Harrison, Appearances, 14–15. 81 For discussion of meaning-making as collaborative see: Kitzinger, ‘Methodology of Focus Groups’, 104; Sue Wilkinson, ‘Focus Groups: A Feminist Method’, Psychology of Women Quarterly 23, (1999): 236. 82 Rubin and Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing, 78. 83 Hermes, Reading Women’s Magazines, 6. 84 Marjorie L. Devault, ‘Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis’, Social Problems 37, no.1 (1990): 109. 85 Ibid., 107. 86 Butler, Gender Trouble. 87 The image appeared as part of ‘Heavenly Creatures’, a photo spread by Benjamin Alexander Huseby in British Vogue (March 2006), which is discussed in Chapter 5.

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  88 Foucault, Archaeology.   89 Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 12.   90 Bal, Travelling Concepts, 10.   91 Malson et al., ‘Post-feminist Advertising’.   92 Curran, ‘Media Dialogue: A Reply’, 294.   93 Rubin and Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing, 24–5.   94 Fran Tonkiss, ‘Analysing Discourse’ in Researching Society and Culture, ed. Clive Seale (London: Sage, 1998), 259.   95 Ibid.   96 Ibid.   97 Ibid.   98 Ang and Hermes, ‘Gender and/in Media Consumption’, 120, building on Hollway and Henriques et al..   99 Ibid., 120–1. 100 Henriques et al. as cited in Ang and Hermes, ‘Gender and/in Media Consumption’, 120. 101 Grimshaw as cited in Gill, Gender and the Media, 14. This speaks to Winship’s discussion of the ‘double edge’ of magazine-reading (see Inside Women’s Magazines, xiii) and Rabine’s discussion in ‘A Woman’s Two Bodies’. 102 Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (1929; London and New York: Routledge, 1989). 103 Ibid., 35. 104 Ibid., 36. 105 Ang and Hermes, ‘Gender and/in Media Consumption’. 106 Fuss, ‘Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look’; McRobbie, Aftermath; Radway, Reading the Romance. 107 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 51. 108 This point is also acknowledged in Malson et al., ‘Post-feminist Advertising’. 109 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 183. 110 Sylvia Pritsch, ‘Inventing Images, Constructing Standpoints: Feminist Strategies of the Technology of the Self ’ in Feminism and the Final Foucault, ed. Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 131.

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Chapter 5   1 Barthes, The Fashion System, 302.   2 Dyer, White.   3 Laing, ‘Lula Girl’.   4 Barthes, The Fashion System, 242.   5 Lula, no.10, 2010.   6 Will Hodkinson, ‘Joanna Newsom, Royal Festival Hall, London’, The Guardian, 12 May 2010. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/may/12/ joannanewsom-review. (accessed 3 October 2014).   7 Rocamora, ‘High Fashion and Pop Fashion’, 134, quoting from Le Monde.   8 Vanessa Thorpe, ‘How Joanna Newsom Made the Harp Hip’, The Observer, 20 June 2010. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jun/20/joannanewsom-made-harp-hip (accessed 3 October 2014).   9 For further examples of the way the ‘Lula Girl’ is discursively elaborated, see Laing, ‘Lula Girl’. 10 Tseëlon, The Masque of Femininity, 13 citing Brown 1986. 11 Newsom quoted in Jody Rosen, ‘Joanna Newsom, the Changeling’, New York Times Magazine, 3 March 2010. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/ magazine/07Newsom-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed 26 August 2013). 12 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence. 13 Barthes, The Fashion System, 242. 14 Ibid., 240. 15 For a more detailed discussion of the long-standing nature of these discourses, see Chapter 3. 16 Laing, ‘Lula Girl’, 289. 17 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 23. 18 Butler, Gender Trouble, 185. 19 Susan Neiman explores the gap between the is and the ought in the context of life and experience more generally, as discussed below. 20 Barthes, Mythologies, 143. 21 For discussion of the construction of the Romantic child in eighteenth-century visual culture, see Chapter 3. 22 I was unable to identify to whom this voice belonged, in the recording, but the group was carried out with young women aged between sixteen and eighteen, all of whom identified as white British.

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23 See also the similarly titled ‘Heavenly Creature’ (British Vogue, May 2002: 182–3), where Sophie Dahl is guest fashion editor in collaboration with photographer Bert Stern. Dahl herself is photographed for the feature: her blonde hair is crowned with a sparkly tiara, she wears baby pink stilettos and her doe-eyed gaze is directed upwards while she sips, provocatively, from a can of Coca-Cola. See also ‘Fallen Angels’, photographed by Nathaniel Goldberg (British Vogue, March 2002: 368–9); ‘4: Heavenly Dresses – A Team of New Models Plays Ball in Angelic Creations’, photographed by Juergen Teller (British Vogue, September 2003: 296–7); and ‘All This and Heaven Too’, photographed by Alasdair McLellan (British Vogue, January 2011: 104–19). 24 Barthes, ‘Photographic Message’, 23. 25 Warner as cited in Dyer, White, 124. For alternative connotations of blonde hair, see Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984). 26 Dyer, White, 3. 27 Hall, Representation. 28 Dyer refers to this as ‘the glow of white woman’. See Dyer, White, 122–42. 29 hooks, Black Looks, 3. 30 Bland, ‘The Domain of the Sexual’, 59 31 Masafumi Monden, ‘Contemplating in a Dream-like Room: The Virgin Suicides and the Aesthetic Imagination of Girlhood’, Film, Fashion and Consumption 2, no.2 (2013): 139–58. 32 Foucault, Will to Knowledge, 139. 33 Ibid., 138. 34 The clip is viewable here: Marc Jacobs, ‘Daisy Trio by Marc Jacobs’, YouTube, 25 November 2014. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaesB-labIA (accessed 23 April 2020). 35 Derek Blasberg, ‘Marc and Sofia: The Dreamy Team’, Harper’s Bazaar, 13 August 2014. Available online: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/designers/a3169/ marc-jacobs-sofia-coppola-0914/ (accessed 23 April 2020). 36 Clark as quoted in Prickett, ‘Leith Clark’s Lula’. 37 I was unable to include this page of the magazine because the image rights proved prohibitively expensive. 38 Raffaella Baccolini, ‘Finding Utopia in Dystopia: Feminism, Memory, Nostalgia, and Hope’ in Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007). 39 Ibid., 172–3. 40 Prete as cited in Ibid., 172.

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41 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 71. 42 Emily is a 27-year-old actor who identifies as white British. Amber is a 26-year-old features editor who identifies as white British. 43 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 23. 44 Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines, 52. 45 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 23. 46 Ibid. 47 Fass, ‘Childhood and Memory’, 157–8. 48 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 28. 49 Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, ‘Introduction: Utopia as Method’ in Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 13. 50 Breward, for instance, notes the tendency for publications that celebrate photographers and fashion magazines to gloss over the industry’s ‘dirty debt’. See: Breward, ‘Intoxicated on Images’, 176. 51 Karl Marx, Capital: A New Abridgement (1867; Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008). 52 Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 4–5, building on Marx. 53 Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 316. 54 For discussion of child labour in fashion production, see Tim Edwards, Fashion in Focus: Concepts, Practices and Politics (London: Routledge, 2011). 55 For discussion of nostalgia and consumerism more generally, see: Giroux, Stealing Innocence; and Neiman, Why Grow Up?. 56 Barthes, The Fashion System, 244. 57 Ibid. 58 Penny is a 56-year-old teacher who identifies as white British. Gill is a 28-year-old administrator who identifies as white British. SLK is a 30-year-old doctor who identifies as white Scottish. 59 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 81. 60 See Neiman, Why Grow Up? for further discussion of childhood, adulthood and ‘magical thinking’. 61 Janice Doane and Devon L. Hodges, Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (London: Methuen, 1987), 3, emphasis in original. 62 Giroux, Stealing Innocence.

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63 McRobbie, Aftermath, 41. 64 Ibid., 42. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 43. 67 Models.com, ‘Natalia Vodianova’, Models.com. Available online: http://models.com/ models/Natalia-Vodianova/8/year/advertising (accessed 15 September 2015). 68 ‘Star Girls’, British Vogue, December 2010, 206–7. 69 Dyer, White, 21, citing Martin Bernal. 70 Bernal as cited in Dyer, White, 21. 71 Dyer, White, 21. 72 Ibid. 73 See also ‘White Mischief ’ (British Vogue, May 2011) for another example of whiteness being linked not to a homewards voyage but to a journey to a remote, forgotten land. There, English model, Agyness Dean is photographed by Tim Walker (working alongside Kate Phelan once more) in a spectrum of frozen poses, dressed always in white. The accompanying copy reads: ‘White Mischief: With a trunk packed with cool, romantic looks, adventuress Agyness Deyn wanders the sun-baked land of Kolmanskop, a forgotten town buried under the Namib Desert. Vogue documents her incredible journey.’ See also ‘The Dreamer’, photographed by Laura Sciacovelli (British Vogue, October 2010) for another white woman, Polish model Anna Jagodzińska, lost en route (fashion editor: Charlotte Stockdale), and ‘The Girl from Oz’, photographed by Corinne Day (British Vogue, July 2006), featuring Australian model Gemma Ward who takes a trip to her homeland (fashion editor Kate Phelan). 74 That Kate Phelan edited this photo spread is significant in that Leith Clark, former editor-in-chief of Lula, began her career assisting Phelan who was fashion director at British Vogue. She spent three years at the magazine before going on to launch her own freelance career. See: D+V, ‘Leith Clark Bio’, D+V Management. Available online: http://www.dandvmanagement.com/London/stylists/leith-clark/bio (accessed 30 September 2015). 75 Dyer, White. 76 Barbara Burman Baines, Fashion Revivals: From the Elizabethan Age to the Present Day (London: B. T. Batsford, 1981), 18. 77 British Vogue, January 2007, 12–3. 78 See Chapter 6 for images of women who have literally outgrown the boundaries of the home. 79 Yvette is a 41-year-old supporter care advisor who identifies as Black British/ Caribbean. Sayda is a 27-year-old financial administrator who identifies as Asian

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British (Bangladeshi). Shanaz is a 36-year-old charity worker who identifies as Asian British (Bangladeshi). Emma is a 29-year-old community fundraiser who identifies as white British. 80 Faludi, Backlash. This sentiment is echoed in a spread entitled ‘Forget Me Not’ which appeared in British Vogue in 2011. Picturing a woman vacuuming while her baby roams around unminded (Figure 41), the image is captioned as follows: ‘Juggling Childcare, Housework and a Host of Other Projects, All the while Keeping Up Appearances, Can Feel a Lot Like Spinning Plates’. 81 Monden, ‘Contemplating in a Dream-like Room’, 146. 82 Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (London: Secker and Warburg, 1970), 270. 83 Ibid., 269. 84 Lorna Bradbury, ‘Miss Havisham: My Favourite Dickens Character’, The Telegraph, 20 February 2012. Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/charlesdickens/9084922/Miss-Havisham-My-favourite-Charles-Dickens-character.html (accessed 30 August 2015). 85 See for instance: ‘Sasha’ by Mario Testino (British Vogue, December 2007, 272–85) and ‘Un Dimanche à la Campagne’ by Mikael Jansson (Vogue Paris, November 2010, 158–77). 86 ‘White Nights’, British Vogue, January 2007, 93. 87 Brothers Grimm, Rapunzel. 1812, trans. D. L. Ashliman. Available online: http:// www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm012a.html (accessed 25 September 2015). 88 Brownmiller, Femininity, 51. For further discussion of female vulnerability as ‘unthreatening’ to men, see also de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, 98; and Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, 38. 89 Coward, Female Desire, 57. 90 Malson, The Thin Woman. 91 Ibid., 135. 92 Ibid., 136. 93 Dyer, White. 94 Brennan as cited in Jayne Lutwyche, ‘Ancient Rome’s Maidens– Who Were the Vestal Virgins?’, BBC Religion and Ethics, 7 September 2012. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/0/18490233 (accessed 25 September 2014). 95 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 217. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 218. 98 Ibid.

252

Notes

  99 Ibid. 100 Gill, Gender and the Media, 40. 101 Caroline Evans, ‘Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject’, Fashion Theory 3, no.1 (1999): 9. 102 Ibid., 18. 103 McRobbie, Aftermath. See also Faludi for discussion of ‘The Age of Melancholy’ in the mid-1980s, attributed to the women’s movement by therapists and journalists: Backlash, 55. 104 For discussion of this point, see also Fuss, ‘Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look’. 105 McRobbie, Aftermath, 96. 106 Ibid., 97. 107 Monden, ‘Contemplating in a Dream-like Room’, 142. 108 McRobbie, Aftermath, 96. 109 Ibid., 98. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 105. 113 Ibid., 100. 114 Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’. 1832. The Poetry Foundation. Available online: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174626 (accessed 16 September 2015). 115 Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (London: Tate, 2012), 233. 116 Ibid., 233. 117 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 166–7, n.16. 118 Ibid., 166–7. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 121 Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts’, 32. 122 Barringer et al., Pre-Raphaelites, 233. 123 Barthes, The Fashion System, 302. 124 For other examples of adult and child ‘twinning’, see ‘Un Dimanche à la Campagne’ (Vogue Paris, November 2010) and ‘A Family Portrait’ (Vogue Italia, August 2011).

Notes

253

125 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 4. 126 ‘A Long, Long Way from Home’, Lula, no.7, 2008. 127 Neiman, Why Grow Up?, 147. 128 ASA, ‘ASA Ruling on Prada Retail UK Ltd’, Advertising Standards Authority, 23 November 2011. Available online: https://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/ Adjudications/2011/11/Prada-Retail-UK-Ltd/SHP_ADJ_167410.aspx#. VX6vMIdRn0c (accessed 18 June 2015). 129 Berlin as discussed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Positive and Negative Liberty’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012. Available online: http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/ (accessed 7 October 2015). 130 McRobbie, Aftermath, 109. 131 Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Match Girl, trans. J. Hersholt. 1845. Available online: http://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheLittleMatchGirl_e.html (accessed 25 September 2015). 132 McRobbie, Aftermath, 111. 133 Neiman, Why Grow Up?, 16. 134 Ibid., 167, building on Goodman. 135 Neiman, Why Grow Up?, 172. 136 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 210. 137 Ibid., 220. 138 Ibid., 217. 139 Ibid., 224. 140 V&A, ‘Arts & Crafts: Britain 1880–1914’, V&A, 2005. Available online: http://www. vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/arts-and-crafts-britain-1880-1914/ (accessed 25 September 2015). 141 Lula, no.3, 2006. 142 Neiman, Why Grow Up?, 173. 143 ‘Flowers in December’, Lula, no.9 2009, 123, emphasis added. 144 Neiman, Why Grow Up?, 3. 145 Ibid., 32–3. 146 See for instance: ‘Play Time: Fun-loving Grown-ups Choose Watches in Paintbox Colours and Precious Leathers’ in British Vogue, June 2006, 88–9; ‘Foot Prints’ in British Vogue, November 2005, 268–9; ‘Toy Story: Chunky Jewellery in Candy Colours and Fun Feminine Motifs Signals Playtime for Adults’ in British Vogue, July 2001; ‘Candy Floss: Lip-smacking Ice-cream Shades in Sheer and Floaty Fabrics Give This Season’s Girlish Looks a Sugar-coated Glamour’ in Vogue Runway Report, supplement to British Vogue, February 2010; ‘Candy Girls: Sweet-

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toothed Fashion Fans Rejoice: Bubble-hum Chic Is Here. It’s Irreverent, Fun and Dangerously Addictive’ in British Vogue, March 2001; ‘Life Is Sweet: Indulge in a Sugar Rush’ in British Vogue, May 2011, 57; ‘Life Is Sweet: Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice, That’s What Girlish Faces Are Made Of ’ in British Vogue, April 2005, 293; ‘The Sweetest Thing: Prepare to Crave the Most Delectable Watches of the Season’ in British Vogue, January 2002, 128–9; ‘Techno: Have Cartoon Fun with Robot Charms, Geometric Wedges and Dazzling Hologram Shine’ in British Vogue, August 2004. 147 ‘Ladybird’, Lula, no.14, 2012. 148 Laing, ‘Lula Girl’. 149 Apfel as quoted in ‘Ladybird’, Lula, no.14, 2012: 92. 150 Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Magic Fashion’, Fashion Theory 8, no.4 (2004): 383. 151 Aristotle, ‘Metaphysics’, 350 BC, trans. W. D. Ross, The Internet Classics Archive. Available online: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.1.i.html (accessed 17 September 2015). 152 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism; McRobbie, Aftermath. 153 Neiman, Why Grow Up?, 157. 154 Baccolini ‘Finding Utopia’, 159. 155 Ibid., 156 Ibid., 174. 157 Lichtenstein as cited in Baccolini, ‘Finding Utopia’, 174–5. 158 Jacobus as cited in Baccolini, ‘Finding Utopia’, 174. 159 I am aware that I am here making fashion the subject of the sentence. I do this consciously to refer to the fashion system, its structures, and the ideologies that underpin it. 160 Kotz cited in Evans, ‘Masks, Mirrors, Mannequins’, 13. 161 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, 7.

Chapter 6 1

For discussion of this painting see Chapter 3 (Figure 5).

2

Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (St Leonard, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1995).

3

Breton as cited in McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity’, 3.

4

Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 33.

5

Ibid., 13.

Notes

255

  6 Ibid.   7 Ibid.   8 Ibid.   9 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ in André Breton Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane (1924; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 14. 10 Ibid., 10. 11 Ibid., 4. 12 Ibid., 4. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 40. 15 I use ‘man’ here to mirror Breton’s use in the text. Breton relationship with women and feminism was complicated, as further discussed below. 16 Ibid. 17 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (London: Routledge, 1986), 54. 18 Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 10. 19 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (USA: MIT, 1993), 2. 20 André Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, ed. André Breton, trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane (1930; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 180. 21 Chadwick, Women Artists. 22 Ibid., 13. 23 Nadeau as cited in Chadwick, Women Artists, 31. 24 Chadwick, Women Artists, 33. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 13. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 16. 29 McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity’, 4. 30 Chadwick, Women Artists, 16. 31 Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 9. 32 Ibid., 9–10. 33 McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity’.

256

Notes

34 Lois Drawmer, ‘The Dysmorphic Bodies of Alice in Wonderland’ in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myth and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Paul L. Yoder and Peter M. Kreuter (Oxford: The Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004), 281. 35 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 80. 36 Foucault as cited in Butler, Bodies That Matter, 58. 37 Breton as cited in McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity’, 3. 38 Butler, Bodies That Matter, xix. 39 For discussion of this strategy of resistance see Butler, Gender Trouble, 188. 40 McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity’, 4. 41 Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, 9–10. 42 ‘So She Sat, with Closed Eyes, and Half Believed Herself in Wonderland’, i-D, no.185, April 1999, 228–35. 43 Lewis Carroll, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ in Lewis Carroll: The Complete Works (1865; London: CRW Publishing, 2005), 46. 44 McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity’, 1. 45 Ibid., 1. 46 Ibid., 3. 47 The term garçon manqué is revealing in itself. The literal translation into English would be a boy who is lacking, a boy who is ‘wanting’, tying in with the psychoanalytic idea of woman or girl as signifying ‘lack’. For further discussion of the garçon manqué, see de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 76–7. 48 Breton, ‘Second Manifesto’, 128. 49 Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look (USA: MIT, 1997), 75. 50 Ibid., 84. 51 Chadwick, Women Artists, 138. 52 Ibid., 138, citing Tanning. 53 Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. 54 Ibid., 41. 55 Ibid., 40. 56 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, back cover. 57 Some surrealists celebrated ‘hysteria’. For instance, in 1928 Breton and Aragon sought to ‘celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Hysteria’. As such, they ‘turned to the resources of the Salpêtrié hospital archives, publishing a series of photographs

Notes

257

showing women patients in ecstatic states or attitudes passionelles’ (Chadwick, Women Artists, 35). 58 Caws, Surrealist Look, 84. 59 Ibid., 84–5. 60 Evans, ‘Masks, Mirrors, Mannequins’, 11. 61 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 77. 62 Bancroft, Fashion and Psychoanalysis, 47. 63 For discussion of the upwards gaze in the work of John Everett Millais, see Williams, ‘The Look of Little Girls’, 149. 64 Caws, Surrealist Look, 84–5. 65 Music from Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) was sampled in Meadham Kirchhoff ’s catwalk show, A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing (SS 2012), which I discuss in Chapter 8. 66 Rummel, ‘Delusive Beauty’, 9. Studies of ‘fatal’ womanhood are numerous and span a number of disciplines, including English literature, art history, cultural studies, film studies and fashion studies. Other studies include: Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (London: Routledge, 1997); Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 1991); Evans, Fashion at the Edge; Elizabeth K. Menon, Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 67 McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity’, 5. 68 De Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, 26. 69 Ibid., 26–8. 70 Breton, ‘Second Manifesto’, 128. 71 Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 35. 72 Breton, ‘Second Manifesto’, 125. 73 Problematically, Nozière’s allegation that she was sexually abused by her father was appropriated by certain surrealists as evidence of the damaging nature of the bourgeois family structure (Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis). 74 Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. The Papin sisters were discussed by Lacan in a 1933 article published in Minotaure (Mitchell and Rose cited in Evans 1999: 29, note 2). For discussion of the Papin sisters see Nicole Ward Jouve, ‘An Eye for an Eye: The Case of the Papin Sisters’ in Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation, ed. Helen Birch (London: Virago, 1993).

258

Notes

  75 Tseëlon, Masque of Femininity, 114.   76 Qvortrup, ‘Childhood Matters’.   77 For discussion of the virgin/whore dichotomy, see Bland, ‘Domain of the Sexual’. For discussion of fashion, Surrealism and the New Woman, see Evans, ‘Masks, Mirrors, Mannequins’.   78 Evans, ‘Masks, Mirrors, Mannequins’, 19.   79 Emily is a 27-year-old actor who identifies as white British. Amber is a 26-year-old features editor who identifies as white British.   80 I am relying here on Menon’s discussion of Anseaume’s essay in Evil by Design.   81 Menon, Evil by Design, 30.   82 Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 56.   83 Ibid.   84 Dyer, White, 122.   85 Ibid., 83.   86 Neiman, Why Grow Up?, 57.   87 Ibid.   88 Ibid.   89 Ibid.   90 Dyer, White, 109.   91 Ibid., 107.   92 Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 10.   93 Ibid., 16.   94 Jean is a 58-year-old project manager who identifies as white British. Smithy is a 41-year-old internal auditor who identifies as white British. Katherine is a 58-yearold teacher who identifies as white British. Poppy is a 56-year-old teacher who identifies as white British.   95 McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity’, 7.   96 Clark quoted in Imogen Fox, ‘The Close-up: Leith Clark, Stylist’, The Guardian, 4 February 2008. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/ feb/04/fashion.thecloseup (accessed 3 October 2014).   97 Bourdieu, Distinction, 54.   98 Ibid.   99 Laing, ‘Lula Girl’. 100 Bourdieu, Distinction, 55. 101 Ibid., 54.

Notes

259

102 Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 61. 103 Ibid., 59. 104 Ibid., 62. 105 Rousseau, Émile, 155. 106 Ibid., 398. 107 Mulvey notes that the jar became a box during the Renaissance. 108 Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 61. 109 Aristotle, ‘Metaphysics, Part II’. 110 McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity’, 1 and 5. 111 Ibid., 7. 112 Ibid., 8. 113 Ibid., 3. 114 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 105. For further discussion of de Beauvoir’s ‘eternal child’ and ‘imperious’ girlhood, see Chapter 5. 115 This is reminiscent of Rousseau’s discussion of sweetness and milk as ‘feminine tastes’ (Rousseau, Émile, 429) as well as ‘the ideal Aryan, with blond hair and blue eyes – hair the colour of the sun, eyes the colour of the sky’ (Dyer, White, 118). 116 Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 61. 117 Alexa Chung, It (London: Penguin, 2014). Another of Chung’s self-professed style icons is Sue Lyon in Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). 118 Robyn Powell, ‘Agyness Deyn Best-dressed over Kate Moss’, The Telegraph, 2 March 2008. Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1580435/ Agyness-Deyn-best-dressed-over-Kate-Moss.html (accessed 9 October 2015). 119 Malson, The Thin Woman, 109. 120 Evans and Thornton, Women and Fashion, 98. 121 Holland, Picturing Childhood, 178. 122 Drawmer, ‘Dysmorphic Bodies’, 279. 123 Ibid., 278–9. 124 Ibid., 279. 125 Jenks, Childhood, 1st edn, 105. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid., 105–6. 128 Catherine Driscoll, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 56–7. 129 McRobbie, Aftermath, 63.

Notes

260 130 Ibid.

131 Gamman and Makinen as cited in Drawmer, ‘Dysmorphic Bodies’, 279. 132 Coward, Female Desire, 44. 133 Pritsch, ‘Inventing Images’, 122. 134 Le Doeuff as cited in Elspeth Probyn, Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 91. 135 Pritsch ‘Inventing Images’, 139 note 9. 136 Holman is further likened to a doll through the copy that reads: ‘Beauty note: reallife dolls should have hair of spun gold’, before recommending a beauty product to achieve this end. The caption for this image also evokes the 1995 independent film of the same name by American director Todd Solondtz. 137 The model Hannah Holman appears elsewhere in the fashion media, around the same time, as a toddler-woman for Marc Jacobs’ Daisy, Eau so Fresh in 2011. 138 Carroll, ‘Alice’, 20. 139 For discussion of such press commentary in the context of North America, see Giroux, Stealing Innocence, 10. 140 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism; McRobbie, Aftermath. 141 Smith as cited in Driscoll, Girls, 44. 142 Henig, ‘What Is It about 20-somethings?’. 143 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence. 144 Lewis Carroll, ‘Through the Looking Glass’ in Lewis Carroll: The Complete Works (1871; London: CRW Publishing, 2005), 74. 145 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 105. 146 Neiman, Why Grow Up?, 5. 147 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 6. 148 Foucault as cited in Pritsch, ‘Inventing Images’, 123–4.

Chapter 7 1

Siân Cook and Teal Triggs, ‘Passion and Perception: The Visual in the Portrayal of Lolita in Nabokov, Kubrick, and Stern’ in Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, ed. John Bertram and Yuri Leving (Ohio: Print Books, 2013), 53.

2 Ibid.

Notes

261

  3 John Bertram and Yuri Leving, ‘Introduction: Colorful Misunderstandings, Graphic Misinterpretations’ in Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, ed. John Bertram and Yuri Leving (Ohio: Print Books, 2013), 17.   4 See for instance: ‘Lolita style’ in British Vogue ‘Runway Report’ supplement (February 2010).   5 Duncan White, ‘Dyeing Lolita: Nymphet in the Paratext’; in Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, ed. John Bertram and Yuri Leving (Ohio: Print Books, 2013), 157.   6 The age of consent is sixteen in the UK although this threshold is culturally specific, varying from country to country. For discussion of fashion photography featuring child models, see for instance Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence; Vänskä, Fashionable Childhood.   7 See: Morna Laing, ‘Rewriting Lolita in Fashion Photography: Candy, Consumption, and Dying Flowers’, Sexualities 23, no.5–6: 717–38.   8 See for instance: Olivia Lidbury, ‘Dakota Fanning’s Oh, Lola! Advert for Marc Jacobs Is Banned’, The Telegraph (online), 9 November 2011. Available online: http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG8876913/Dakota-Fannings-OhLola-advert-for-Marc-Jacobs-is-banned.html (accessed 13 July 2020). A behindthe-scenes video is also available on YouTube: Eosphaera, ‘Behind the Scenes – Marc Jacobs Perfume Ohm Lola – Full Video’, YouTube. Available online: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=S97y0oR0jL0 (accessed 1 July 2020).   9 Monden, ‘Lolita Fashion’, 165. 10 Alfred Appel, ‘Introduction’ in Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita (London: Penguin, 2000), xxxiii. 11 Ellen Pifer, ‘Uncovering Lolita’ in Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, ed. John Bertram and Yuri Leving (Ohio: Print Books, 2013), 145. 12 Bertram and Leving, ‘Introduction’, 15. 13 Eric Goldman, ‘“Knowing” Lolita: Sexual Deviance and Normality in Nabokov’s Lolita’, Nabokov Studies 8 (2004): 88. 14 Ibid., 87. 15 Bayma and Fine as cited in Goldman, ‘“Knowing” Lolita’, 87–8. 16 Nabokov, Lolita, 16. 17 MAC, ‘Lipglass’, MAC Cosmetics. Available online: https://www.maccosmetics. co.uk/product/19484/309/promo-skus/lipglass?ds_rl=1257881&gclid=EAIaIQob ChMIsP7fmP_-3gIVmIjVCh1U7gSaEAQYBSABEgLYNPD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds#/ shade/Nymphette (accessed 1 December 2018). See also Hadley Freeman, ‘In What World Is Naming a Lipgloss Underage a Good Idea?’, The Guardian, 23 February 2015. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/feb/23/macunderage-lipgloss-hadley-freeman (accessed 1 December 2018).

262

Notes

18 Brian D. Walter, ‘It Was Lilith He Longed For: Romanticism and the Legacies of Lolita’ in Woman as Angel, Woman as Evil: Interrogating the Boundaries, ed. Andrea Ruthven and Gabriela Mádlo (Freeland: Inter-disciplinary Press, 2012), 142. 19 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 373. 20 Pifer, ‘Uncovering Lolita’. 21 Goldman, ‘“Knowing” Lolita’, 96. 22 Barbara Bloom, ‘Cover Story’ in Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, ed. John Bertram and Yuri Leving (Ohio: Print Books, 2013). 23 Nabokov as cited in White, ‘Dyeing Lolita’, 155–6. 24 Ibid., 156. 25 Dieter E. Zimmer, ‘Dolly as Cover Girl’ in Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, ed. John Bertram and Yuri Leving (Ohio: Print Books, 2013), 172. 26 Pifer, ‘Uncovering Lolita’, 145. 27 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body. 28 Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth (California: Seal Press, 2009), 62. 29 Chung, It, 31. 30 Bertram and Leving, Lolita. 31 Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita (London: Penguin, 2000), 9. 32 The decision was published on 9 November 2011. 33 ASA, ‘ASA Ruling on Coty UK Ltd’. 34 Jobling, Fashion Spreads, 116. Issues discussed by Jobling include: freedom of speech, the conflation of image and reality, the 1979 Williams Report on pornography and Feminists against Censorship. 35 Emily is a 27-year-old actor who identifies as white British. Amber is a 26-year-old features editor who identifies as white British. 36 Jean is a 58-year-old project manager who identifies as white British. Smithy is a 41-year-old internal auditor who identifies as white British. Katherine is a 58-yearold teacher who identifies as white British. Poppy is a 56-year-old teacher who identifies as white British. 37 Nabokov, Lolita, 9. 38 That said, this threshold is culturally specific, with Jobling noting the age of consent to be twelve in Spain at the time of his writing (Fashion Spreads, 117). 39 White, ‘Dying Lolita’, 157. 40 Gill, Gender and the Media, 13. See also McRobbie, Aftermath; Whelehan, Overloaded. 41 Holland, Picturing Childhood, 191.

Notes

263

42 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence although cf. Annamari Vänskä, ‘Seducing Children’, Lambda Nordica 2–3 (2011): 69–101. 43 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), 5. 44 Foucault, The Order of Things, xix. 45 Freud, ‘Three Essays on Sexual Theory’. 46 O’Toole, Pornocopia, 234–5. 47 Jacobs as quoted in Julie Naughton, ‘Marc Jacobs Launches Lola Sister: Oh, Lola’, Women’s Wear Daily, 10 June 2011. Available online: http://www.wwd.com/beautyindustry-news/prestige/jacobs-launches-lola-sister-oh-lola-3650404 (accessed 14 December 2011). 48 Gross quoted in Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 151. 49 Another reference to this character appeared in a Vogue Paris editorial about make-up for thirteen-year-old girls (December 2010–January 2011: 158). The image of the teen-prostitute character was presented alongside the caption ‘L’âge de l’expérimentation’. 50 For discussion see Jobling, Fashion Spreads. 51 Foucault, Will to Knowledge. 52 Penny is a 56-year-old teacher who identifies as white British. Gill is a 28-year-old administrator who identifies as white British. SLK is a 30-year-old doctor who identifies as white Scottish. 53 Prada, ‘PRADA CANDY’, YouTube. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ERUaT4aJZ2E (accessed 1 December 2018). 54 Marc Jacobs, ‘Dakota Fanning – Behind the Scenes – Marc Jacobs Perfume Oh, Lola – Full Video’, YouTube. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=S97y0oR0jL0 (accessed 1 December 2018). 55 Nabokov, Lolita, 44. 56 See for instance: ‘Life Is Sweet: Indulge in a Sugar Rush’, British Vogue, May 2011, 57; ‘Candy Girls: Sweet-toothed Fashion Fans Rejoice: Bubble Gum Chic Is Here. It’s Irreverent, Fun and Dangerously Addictive’, British Vogue, March 2001, 74–5. 57 Radway, Reading Romance, 80. This is mirrored in the language used to describe angry female voices: high-pitched, hysterical, shrieking, screeching, squealing, squawking, screaming (Macdonald, Representing Women, 45–6). 58 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 340. 59 Barthes, The Fashion System, xi. 60 Ibid., xii. 61 Nabokov, Lolita, 141.

264

Notes

62 Emily is a 27-year-old actor who identifies as white British. Amber is a 26-year-old features editor who identifies as white British. 63 Nabokov, Lolita, 141. 64 Jacobs as quoted in Naughton, ‘Marc Jacobs’. 65 Annamari Vänskä, ‘Virginal Innocence and Corporeal Sensuality’, Barn 1 (2011): 49–66, 51. 66 For discussion of the way Humbert mythologizes Lolita as ‘precocious’, see Walter, ‘It Was Lilith He Longed For’. 67 Yves is a Chinese MA student at Central Saint Martins college, who appears to be in her twenties (exact age was not disclosed). Zoe is a Chinese MA student at Central Saint Martins college, who is 24 years old. 68 A single cherry is used to symbolize the hymen and where two cherries appear together, this is a symbol of lesbianism. 69 Laurel Bradley, ‘From Eden to Empire: John Everett Millais’s Cherry Ripe’, Victorian Studies 34 (1991): 179–203. 70 Pamela T. Reis, ‘Victorian Centerfold: Another Look at Millais’s Cherry Ripe’, Victorian Studies 35 (1992): 203. 71 Ibid., 203. 72 Williams, ‘The Look of Little Girls’, 124. 73 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 15. 74 Julia Twigg, ‘How Does Vogue Negotiate Age?: Fashion, the Body and the Older Woman’, Fashion Theory 14, no.4 (2010): 473. 75 James M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1911; London: Diamond 1993). 76 Ibid., 27. 77 Nabokov, Lolita, 107. 78 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 376. 79 Barrie, Peter Pan, 7. 80 Ibid., 156. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 157. 83 Jo Ellison, ‘And God Created Vanessa Paradis’, British Vogue, July 2011, 77. 84 Ibid., 79. 85 Mavor, ‘Dream-Rushes’, 174. 86 Karen de Perthuis, ‘Beyond Perfection: The Fashion Model in the Age of Digital Manipulation’ in Fashion as Photograph, ed. Eugénie Shinkle (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 170.

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  87 Ibid., 171.   88 Ibid., 172.   89 Barthes as cited in de Perthuis, ‘Beyond Perfection’, 173.   90 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body.   91 Nabokov, Lolita, 277.   92 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body.   93 Evans and Thornton, Women and Fashion, 94–5.   94 For examples of tantrums being played out in fashion photography, see: ‘Girl Crazy’ in British Vogue, June 1998 (Photographer: Terry Richardson; Fashion Editor, Kate Phelan); ‘Performance’ in British Vogue, April 2003 (Photographer, Nick Knight; Fashion Editor, Kate Phelan; Models, Angela and Frankie); ‘Bright Future’ in British Vogue, March 1999 (Photographer: Terry Richardson; Fashion Editor, Madeleine Christie, Model, Unknown); ‘The Play’s the Thing’ in British Vogue, April 2008 (Photographer: Terry Richardson; Fashion Editor, Camille Bidault-Waddington, Model, Gemma Ward); advertisement for Harvey Nichols, British Vogue, March 1999; Advertisement for Katharine Hamnett, i-D no.184, March 1999; advertisement for Colette, i-D, no.174, April 1998.   95 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code’ in Fashion Theory, ed. Malcolm Barnard (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007), 470.   96 Maureen Lehto Brewster, ‘Making Lemonade? Beyoncé’s Pregnancies and the Postfeminist Media Gaze’ in Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking, ed. Morna Laing and Jacki Willson (London: Bloomsbury 2020), 147–72.   97 The backstage video is viewable online: ‘Sunny and Sexy | Fashion Story | Vogue Italia’. 17 April 2013. Available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xcIHrVT2IS0 (accessed 4 April 2020).   98 Alice Twemlow, ‘Reflections on Covers Commissioned for the Lolita Book Cover Project’ in Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, ed. John Bertram and Yuri Leving (Ohio: Print Books, 2013), 36.   99 Ibid., 38. 100 White, ‘Dying Lolita’, 157. 101 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 32. 102 Pifer, ‘Uncovering Lolita’, 148, citing Nabokov. 103 Nabokov, Lolita, 278. 104 Ibid., 275. 105 Pifer, ‘Uncovering Lolita’, 148–9, citing Nabokov. 106 Nabokov, Lolita, 277.

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Chapter 8   1 Arnold, ‘Heroin Chic’; Rebecca Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2001); Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1996).   2 Butler, Gender Trouble, 189.   3 Ibid., 189.   4 McRobbie, Aftermath.   5 Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, 51.   6 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 198.   7 Sinikka Aapola et al., Young Femininity, 20, building on Hesford.   8 I carried out the search on 26 May 2013.   9 I was unable to track down a copy of this magazine and so rely on one particular Tumblr, where the scanned magazine pages were presented, as to their provenance (FuckYeahCourtneyLove 2013). 10 For discussion of fashion and grunge see Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Lifter, Contemporary Indie; and Laura Snelgrove, ‘Taking Us into 2000: Vogue’s Struggle with Time in the 1990s’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 4, no.1–2 (2013): 173–81. 11 Arnold, ‘Heroin Chic’, 289. 12 Bland, ‘The Domain of the Sexual’, 59–60 13 Williams ‘The Look of Little Girls’, 128. See also de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 114, 345. 14 Bland, ‘The Domain of the Sexual’, 58. 15 Liz Evans, ‘Here Comes Trouble’, Elle UK, January 1993. 16 Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal, 6–7. 17 Tseëlon, The Masque of Femininity, 11. 18 This of course brings to mind Madonna, the musician, who has reworked and remodelled discourses on female sexuality throughout her career. For discussion, see Janice Miller, Fashion and Music (Oxford: Berg, 2011). 19 Tseëlon, The Masque of Femininity. 20 Ibid., 13. 21 Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal. 22 Rousseau, Émile, 431. Yet the ‘angelic’ has not always been female-gendered. For instance, in his monograph, White (126), Dyer notes that angels were depicted as male in both the Bible and medieval art. However, ‘with the Renaissance they began

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to be depicted either as women or as men with “feminine” traits’ (Dyer, White, 126, building upon Underhill). Dyer also notes the ethnic dimension in discourses on divinity, the idea of woman as ‘angelic’ ties in with discourses linking white skin to the idea of the ‘white spirit’: whether religious, intellectual or ‘pioneering’ under imperialism. 23 Prickett, ‘Leith Clark’s Lula’. 24 For discussion of motherhood and sexuality, see MacDonald, Representing Women, 132; Orbach, Bodies, 115. 25 Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 198. 26 Ibid., 199. 27 For discussion of women as the ‘keepers’ of childhood innocence, see Giroux, Stealing Innocence, 10. For discussion of the way women came to be aligned with children in normative discourse, see Jensen, ‘The Feminization of Childhood’. 28 Butler, Gender Trouble, 185. 29 Ibid., 185. 30 Ibid., 191. 31 Ibid., 200. 32 Ibid., 189. 33 Ibid., emphasis added. 34 ‘Pretty on the Inside’, i-D no.138, ‘The Pin-ups Issue’, March 1995, 42–7. 35 This link is further cemented by Drew Barrymore’s friendship with Courtney Love as well as her romantic involvement with Eric Erlandson, another member of Hole. 36 Butler, Gender Trouble, 186. 37 i-D, no.138 ‘The Pin-ups Issue’, March 1995, 43. 38 ‘All Grown Up’ by Juergen Teller in i-D no.179, September 1998: 140–5. 39 Joan Smith, ‘Kinderwhoring’ in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Fashion Writing, ed. Judith Watt (1994; London: Penguin, 1999), 32. 40 For discussion of this press reaction to ‘Under Exposure’, see Jobling, Fashion Spreads, 112–18. 41 Smith, ‘Kinderwhoring’, 34. 42 Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’. See Chapter 4 of this book for further discussion. 43 De Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, 10–14. 44 Evans, ‘Here Comes Trouble’. 45 Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, 51. 46 Harrison, Appearances, 193.

268

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47 For discussion see: Arnold, ‘Heroin Chic’; Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety; Evans, Fashion at the Edge; Jobling, Fashion Spreads; Wallerstein, ‘Thinness and Other Refusals’. 48 Love as quoted in Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 198. 49 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 127. 50 The inclusion of this image in the set I showed to participants in reception studies raised a methodological question in that the spread appeared some seventeen years prior to the reception studies I conducted (unlike the rest of the imagery which was more contemporary). In most cases this time lag did not seem to affect the way participants read the images, since the majority seemed familiar with the codes of grunge in the 1990s, being in the relatively recent past, with some participants reading the women presented through reference to bands such as Garbage. The principal focus of the reception studies was, after all, to understand the way women read images from the perspective of the present. 51 For discussion of 1950s femininity as ‘fluffy’, see Holland, Alternative Femininities and Tseëlon, Masque of Femininity. 52 Jean is a 58-year-old project manager who identifies as white British. Smithy is a 41-year-old internal auditor who identifies as white British. Katherine is a 58-yearold teacher who identifies as white British. Poppy is a 56-year-old teacher who identifies as white British. 53 Helen Birch, ‘If Looks Could Kill: Myra Hindley and the Iconography of Evil’ in Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation, ed. Helen Birch (London: Virago, 1993), 32. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Pixar, ‘Baby Face’, Pixar Wiki, 2013. Available online: http://pixar.wikia.com/wiki/ Babyface (accessed 1 December 2013). 57 De Beauvoir as cited in Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 127. 58 Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 1996). 59 See for instance: ‘Life Is Sweet: Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice, That’s What Girlish Faces Are Made Of ’ (British Vogue, April 2005: 293); Brooke Shields’ appearance in a book entitled Sugar and Spice, published by Playboy Press (see Higonnet 1998: 150); and the introduction to an interview with Leith Clark, which reads ‘Sugar and spice and everything nice: that’s what Lula girls are made of. The sugariest and spiciest of all is Leith Clark, editor-in-chief and stylist on the side’ (Dazed Digital 2011). More recently this phrase was linked to the pay gap between men and women, in an article written by Rosamund Urwin for The Evening Standard (2015: 15). Urwin wrote: ‘There’s something in the way girls are socialized

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that lingers. We’re supposed to be sugar and spice and all things nice; we’re not supposed to be mercenary. As adults, men who ask for more know their worth but women are “difficult”.’ 60 Prickett, ‘Leith Clark’s Lula’. 61 This question was inspired by Griselda Pollock’s concept of ‘gender reversal’ in ‘What’s Wrong With Images of Women’, 43. 62 Emily is a 27-year-old actor who identifies as white British. Amber is a 26-year-old features editor who identifies as white British. 63 Emily is a 27-year-old actor who identifies as white British. Amber is a 26-year-old features editor who identifies as white British. 64 Bordo, Unbearable Weight. 65 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 136. 66 Coward, Female Desire, 42–3, emphasis in original. 67 Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, 66–7. 68 Yves is an MA student at Central Saint Martins college, who identifies as Chinese and appears to be in her twenties (exact age was not stated). Zoe is an MA student at Central Saint Martins college, who identifies as Chinese and is 24 years old. 69 Jackie Stacey, ‘Desperately Seeking Difference’ in The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, ed. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), 112–29. 70 Ibid., 129. 71 Ane Lynge-Jorlén, Between Edge and Elite: Niche Fashion Magazines, Producers and Readers (PhD thesis, London: University of the Arts London, 2009), 50. 72 Thornton, Club Cultures. 73 SHOWstudio, ‘Project Girly’. 74 Morna Laing, ‘Meadham Kirchhoff ’, SHOWstudio, 2014. Available online: http:// showstudio.com/project/girly/essay_meadham_kirchhoff (accessed 22 September 2015). 75 Edward Meadham as cited in Katie Shillingford, ‘Eye Candy: Meadham Kirchhoff ’, Dazed Digital, 6 February 2012. Available online: http://www.dazeddigital.com/ fashion/article/12574/1/eye-candy-meadham-kirchhoff (accessed 23 September 2015). 76 Butler, Gender Trouble, 189. 77 ‘Power of TWO’, British Vogue, January 2012, 140–1. 78 Aapola et al., Young Femininity, 20. 79 Yvette is a 41-year-old supporter care advisor who identifies as Black British/ Caribbean. Sayda is a 27-year-old financial administrator who identifies as Asian

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British (Bangladeshi). Shanaz is a 36-year-old charity worker who identifies as Asian British (Bangladeshi). Emma is a 29-year-old community fundraiser who identifies as white British.   80 Spencer as cited in Anneke Smelik, ‘A Close Shave: The Taboo on Female Body Hair’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 6, no.2 (2015): 237. See also Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘The Last Taboo: Women, Body Hair and Feminism’ in The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair, ed. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).   81 Coward, Female Desire.   82 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 49.   83 Faludi, Backlash.   84 Goffman, Gender Advertisements, 48.   85 Butler, Gender Trouble, 189.   86 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 122.   87 Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety.   88 Ibid., 108–9.   89 For discussion of Perry’s alter ego ‘Claire’, see Wendy Jones and Grayson Perry, Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (London: Vintage, 2007).   90 For discussion, see for instance Jacki Willson and Nicola McCartney, ‘A Look at Fishy Drag and Androgynous Fashion: Exploring the Border Spaces beyond Gender-Normative Deviance for the Straight Cis-Gendered Woman’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 8, no.1 (2017): 99–122.   91 Peter Ackroyd, Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag – the History of an Obsession (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).   92 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 122.   93 Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, 111.   94 Ibid.   95 Prickett, ‘Leith Clark’s Lula’.   96 Interview with Meadham Kirchhoff in Shillingford, ‘Eye Candy’.   97 McRobbie, Aftermath, 61.   98 Ibid., 62–3.   99 See Chapter 4 for discussion of Riviere and masquerade. 100 McRobbie, Aftermath, 65–6. 101 Ibid., 66. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid.

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104 British Vogue, April 2012, 283. 105 McRobbie, Aftermath. 106 I borrow this term from McRobbie, British Fashion Design. 107 McRobbie, Aftermath, 71. 108 Ibid., 71, building upon Dyer. 109 Carol Tulloch, ‘Resounding Power of the Afro Comb’ in Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion, ed. Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Sarah Cheang (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 126. 110 Baer, ‘Redoing Feminism’, 25. 111 Butler, Gender Trouble, 189. 112 McRobbie, Aftermath, 71.

Conclusion 1

De Beauvoir, The Second Sex.

2

McAra, ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity’.

3 McRobbie, British Fashion Design. 4

Alice Casely-Hayford, ‘Molly Goddard Collaborates with Tim Walker on New Book “Patty”’, Vogue UK (online). 11 May 2018. Available online: https://www.vogue. co.uk/article/molly-goddard-tim-walker-patty-book (accessed 26 May 2020).

5

Vogue UK, ‘Edward Enninful on How His Career Has Shaped #NewVogue’, Vogue. co.uk. Available online: https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/edward-enninful-career (accessed 8 July 2020).

6

For instance, University of the Arts London has begun publishing a zine entitled ‘Decolonising the Arts Curriculum’. The zines can be read online via the UAL website at https://decolonisingtheartscurriculum.myblog.arts.ac.uk (accessed 20 April 2020). Glasgow School of Art has also provided resources for decolonizing or diversifying reading lists. See GSA Library, ‘Alternative Reading Lists’, Glasgow School of Art. Available online: https://lib.gsa.ac.uk/diversities/alternative-readings/ (accessed 26 May 2020).

7

An important scholarly intervention also came with the publishing of Fashion and Postcolonial Critique, a collection of essays edited by Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019). In 2018 Kimberley Jenkins launched 'The Fashion and Race Database Project, described as ‘a platform filled with open-source tools that expand the narrative of fashion history and challenge misrepresentation within the fashion system’. See: The Fashion and Race Database Project, available online: https://www.fashionandrace.com/vision (accessed 20 April 2020). Earlier developments include: the founding of the Research Collective for Decolonising

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Fashion in 2012, which aims ‘to disrupt persistent Eurocentric underpinnings of dominant fashion discourse and to construct alternative narratives’. Available online: http://rcdfashion.com (accessed 20 April 2020); and The Costume Institute of the African Diaspora by Teleica Kirkland in 2011. ­  8 McRobbie, Aftermath, 4–5.   9 Ibid., 42. 10 Liv Siddall, ‘Leith Clark on women, age and publishing in The Violet Book Issue 2’, It’s Nice That, 8 December 2014. Available online: https://www.itsnicethat.com/ articles/violet-magazine (accessed 23 November 2020). 11 Baccolini, ‘Finding Utopia’, 174. 12 Wilson, ‘Magic Fashion’. 13 Bourdieu, Distinction, 54. 14 For discussion see Farley Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion; Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion (London: Pluto Press, 2014); Neiman, Why Grow Up?; Lucy Siegle, To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World? (London: HarperCollins, 2011). 15 See British Vogue: ‘More than Ever Before, a Love of Nostalgia and All Things Childlike Has Begun to Dominate Our Culture. Now There’s a Name for Its Devotees: Kidults’, December 2003, 94. Marantz Henig, ‘What Is It about 20-somethings?’. 16 Barthes, The Fashion System, xi. 17 Neiman, Why Grow Up? 18 Ibid., 32–3. 19 See for instance: ‘Play Time: Fun-loving Grown-ups Choose Watches in Paintbox Colours and Precious Leathers’ in British Vogue, June 2006, 88–9; ‘Foot Prints’ in British Vogue, November 2005, 268–9; ‘Toy Story: Chunky Jewellery in Candy Colours and Fun Feminine Motifs Signals Playtime for Adults’ in British Vogue, July 2001; ‘Candy Floss: Lip-smacking Ice-cream Shades in Sheer and Floaty Fabrics Give This Season’s Girlish Looks a Sugar-coated Glamour’ in Vogue Runway Report, supplement to British Vogue, February 2010; ‘Candy Girls: Sweet-toothed Fashion Fans Rejoice: Bubble-hum Chic Is Here. It’s Irreverent, Fun and Dangerously Addictive’ in British Vogue, March 2001; ‘Life Is Sweet: Indulge in a Sugar Rush’ in British Vogue, May 2011, 57; ‘Life Is Sweet: Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice, That’s What Girlish Faces Are Made of ’ in British Vogue, April 2005, 293; ‘The Sweetest Thing: Prepare to Crave the Most Delectable Watches of the Season’ in British Vogue, January 2002, 128–9; ‘Techno: Have Cartoon Fun with Robot Charms, Geometric Wedges and Dazzling Hologram Shine’ in British Vogue, August 2004.

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20 The origins of this phrase are disputed but I here cite Frederic Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review, May/June 2013. Available online: https://newleftreview.org/ issues/II21/articles/fredric-jameson-future-city (accessed 26 May 2020). 21 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 218. 22 For discussion of the ‘global girl’, see McRobbie, Aftermath. For discussion of labour, see for instance: Clean Clothes Campaign, ‘Improving Working Conditions in the Global Garment Industry’, Cleanclothes.org. Available online: https:// cleanclothes.org/ (accessed 8 July 2020); Farley Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion; Hoskins, Stitched Up; Safia Minney, Slave to Fashion (Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, 2007); Siegle, To Die For. 23 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism. 24 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 50. 25 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, building on the work of Pignarre and Stengers. 26 Jameson, ‘Future City’. 27 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London: Penguin, 2014).

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Appendix 1: Participant Demographics

Date Held

Group No.

Pseudonym (chosen by participant)

Age

Occupation

Occupation of Parents

Ethnic Origin

Reads Fashion Magazines or Women’s Magazines?

2.6.12

1

Penny

56

Teacher

Teacher, engineer

White British

No

2.6.12

1

Gill

28

Administrator

Teacher, engineer

White British

No

2.6.12

1

SLK

30

Doctor

Teacher, engineer

White Scottish

No

24.6.12

2

Emily

27

Actor

Training personnel, administrator/botanist

White British

Sometimes: Grazia, Hello, Elle, Vogue

24.6.12

2

Amber

26

Features Editor

Electronics manager, piano teacher

White British

Yes: Vogue, Elle, Red. Plus ‘gossip magazines’: Closer, New, Now

27.6.12

3

Zoe

24

MA student at CSM

Not stated

Chinese

Yes: Vogue

27.6.12

3

Yves

Not stated* (in 20s)

MA student at CSM

Not stated

Chinese

Not stated

12.8.12

4

Jean

58

Project manager

Insurance surveyor, housewife

White British

Yes: Good Housekeeping

12.8.12

4

Smithy

41

Internal auditor

Retired

White British

Not regularly

12.8.12

4

Poppy

56

Teacher

Teacher, accountant

White British

Yes: Good Housekeeping (regularly), Hello (occasionally)

12.8.12

4

Katherine

58

Teacher

Plumber, housewife

White British

Not often but occasionally Prima

18.12.12

5

Belle

16

Student (school age)

Not given

White British

Yes: Vogue, Elle, Look

Appendix 1: Participant Demographics

294 18.12.12

5

Ariel

Not stated* (under 20)

Student (school age)

Not given

White British

Sometimes as well as ‘random ones’ like Heat and OK

18.12.12

5

Cinderella

18

Student (school age)

Teacher

White British

Yes: Vogue, Elle

18.12.12

5

Shelby

17

Student (school age)

Not given

White British

Yes: More, Look

11.8.15

6

Yvette

41

Supporter care advisor

Artist, cleaner

Black/ Black British: Caribbean

Yes, mainly Vogue

11.8.15

6

Sayda

27

Financial administrator

Retired

Asian/ Asian British: Bangladeshi

Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Elle UK, Stylist

11.8.15

6

Shanaz

36

Charity worker

Own business

Asian/ Asian British: Bangladeshi

Grazia, Cosmopolitan, Heat

11.8.15

6

Emma

29

Community fundraiser

Retired teacher, retired accountant

White British

Very rarely

Index

Aboah, Adwoa 215 activism 2, 46, 54, 210 Addams Family Values (Sonnenfeld) 124, 126, 143 adolescence 1, 7, 47, 48, 66, 88, 101, 109, 111, 122, 153–4, 171, 185, 194, 213 adulthood 4, 5, 7–8, 34, 35, 48, 68, 88, 94, 108–13, 134, 143, 145, 151, 154, 161, 162, 175, 185, 213, 216, 217 Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) 26–7, 107, 159, 160 Age of Innocence, The (Reynolds) 39, 41, 43, 115 Alice and Leaping Fairy (Wright) 26 Alice and the Fairies (Wright) 25 Alice in Wonderland 6, 11, 122, 123, 124, 139, 142, 144, 145, 149–54, 213 All the Real Girls: More Folk, Less Factory – Bring On the Girls Who Make Things 110, 111 Andersen, Hans Christian 108 Ang, Ien 63, 70, 71, 231 n.81 Angel in the House 4, 53, 82, 149, 182 Apfel, Iris 112 Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault) 11 Ariès, Philippe 34, 35, 37, 39, 233 n.8, 236 n.62 Arnold, Rebecca 179–80, 194, 203, 205 Aronofsky, Darren 104 Arts and Crafts movement 109–13 Babyface 190 Baccolini, Raffaella 85, 86–7, 113, 216 Backlash (Faludi) 51–5, 94, 201, 211, 240 n.146, 251 n.80 Baer, Hester 2, 209 Ballaster, Rosalind 28

ballet 10, 53, 89, 104, 197 Bal, Mieke 69 Bancroft, Alison 19, 129, 229 n.41 Banet-Weiser, Sarah 54–5, 240 n.158 Barrie, James M. 171 Barry, Ben 59 Barrymore, Drew 184–5, 187, 190 Barthes, Roland 17, 19, 23, 57, 72, 75, 76, 80, 81, 87, 89, 105, 230 n.49 Barth-Jorgensen, Dorothea 94 Bartley, Luella 9 Bates, Laura 2, 54 Bell Jar, The (Plath) 21–2 Belsey, Catherine 22 Benwell, Bethan 7 Berger, John 64, 201 Bernal, Martin 90 Betterton, Rosemary 65 Big Baby 190 Birch, Helen 188 Black Swan (Aronofsky) 104 Bland, Lucy 181–2 body adult 6, 173, 213 ageing 145, 171–2 athletic 90 Black 7, 11, 208–10 cold 26, 90, 105, 106–8 deathly 75–6, 103–4, 126, 185, 193 dissatisfaction with 46 doll-like 46, 97, 153, 185, 201 hair 200–201 maternal 6, 173, 183 and mind 45, 76, 97, 119 and sensuality 99 sexualized 9–10, 28, 45, 51, 126, 142, 161–2, 194, 200

296

Index

size, weight and thinness 4, 99, 129, 144, 145, 172, 213 stiff 95, 97, 119, 129, 131, 153 trans 222 n.29 womanly 50, 144, 172, 173, 174, 176, 179 Bordo, Susan 57–8 Bourdieu, Pierre 21, 118, 139, 216 Bradbury, Lorna 96 Brennan, Corey 99 Breton, André 116–19, 122–4, 133, 134, 137–9, 142 Breward, Christopher 20, 50, 249 n.50 Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (de Beauvoir) 47–8, 133 Bronfen, Elisabeth 104, 158, 171 Brookes, Rosetta 17 Burman Baines, Barbara 93 Butler, Judith 3, 6, 13, 17, 29–32, 51, 63, 65, 85, 101, 123, 129, 154, 177, 183, 195, 196, 202–3, 205, 221 n.29 Camera Lucida (Barthes) 23 capitalism 17–18, 21, 31, 90, 99, 109, 167, 217, 218 Carrington, Leonora 123–4, 127–8, 139 Carroll, Lewis 123–4, 142, 152, 172 Caws, Mary Ann 126, 128, 130 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 14, 226–7 n.96 Centuries of Childhood (Ariès) 34–6 Chabrol, Claude 134 Chadwick, Whitney 117, 119, 122 Chambers, Lucinda 11, 90, 91, 94 Charming Lolita (von Unwerth) 164, 176 Cherry Ripe 167–72 child sexuality 11, 118, 162, 164, 224 n.66 childhood in Breton 117–18 feminization of 42–3 and labour 35, 42, 87, 216 ‘long’ 87, 216 nostalgia for 113 perpetual 43, 45–6 privilege 42, 45, 115, 118, 139–140, 213, 216 Romantic 5, 14, 36–43, 47, 68, 70, 75, 78, 80, 86–8, 112, 115, 118, 119, 140, 142, 167, 173, 175, 213 sexual drives 14, 39

social construction of 34–6 trauma 5, 39, 118 childlike femininity 1, 3–6, 8–14, 17, 26–8, 33, 51, 55, 58, 63, 67, 78, 101, 115, 116, 165, 166, 174, 177, 186, 196, 199, 201, 203, 211–14, 217, 218 investments in 5, 70–2, 87, 112, 212, 217 whiteness of 4, 43, 47, 50, 53, 67, 75, 82–3, 89–91, 93, 105, 137, 209–10, 213–14 Christianity 82 Chung, Alexa 20, 139, 144, 159, 214 Clark, Leith 8–11, 20, 51, 84–5, 103, 106, 116, 129, 131, 139, 182, 191, 205, 214, 216, 224 n.68, 250 n.74 clothing 18, 19, 22, 39, 43, 50, 53, 59, 75, 87, 89, 97, 124, 134, 156, 159, 171, 174–7, 190, 201 black 115, 119, 124, 129, 134–6, 171, 179, 197, 202 brightly-coloured 174–5 clown-like 97 fluffy 15, 49–50, 196–7, 201 tulle 90, 94, 97, 214 white 22, 40, 43, 47, 75, 80, 83, 89, 90, 95, 96, 105, 111, 119, 126, 129, 131, 134, 149, 159, 179, 190, 197 Cobain, Kurt 179, 186, 187 Comme des Garçons 124 consumption 17, 50, 54, 55, 65, 88, 114, 174–6, 217, 218 Cook, Daniel T. 39 Coppola, Sofia 47, 83–4, 93 Cottingley Fairies 24 Courtney Love: The Hole Truth 179–81 Coward, Rosalind 3, 97, 145, 194, 200 Craik, Jennifer 19, 24 Crane, Diana 59, 241 n.4, 242 n.20 curiosity 6, 28, 38, 39, 111, 112, 114, 140–3, 145, 149, 153, 154, 213, 216 Curran, James 69–70 Dahl, Sophie 248 n.23 Darling, John 37 Dawson, Jen 124, 126, 129 Day, Corinne 25, 186 Dazed Digital 9, 10 Death of the Author, The (Barthes) 57 de Beauvoir, Simone 1, 2, 7, 29, 33, 46–8, 88, 133, 153, 154, 166, 186, 190, 213

Index Devault, Marjorie L. 69 Dickens, Charles 96 digital feminism 2, 54 digital media 21, 220 n.16 digital photography 24 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 239 n.138 discourse 2–8, 11, 12, 14, 17–19, 22, 23, 27–35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 46–8, 55, 57, 61, 65, 69, 70, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82, 86, 87, 90, 97, 102, 109, 111, 112, 115, 117, 118, 123, 135, 137, 140, 143, 144, 149, 153, 156–9, 162, 164, 167, 173, 174, 176, 177, 180–3, 187, 191, 193, 211, 213–18 post-feminist 51–5, 101, 102, 211 diversity 18, 62, 209, 210, 213, 215 divinity 80–2, 182, 267 n.22 dolls 97, 119, 149, 153, 164, 172, 177, 185, 190, 197, 260 n.137 Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Difficult and Deadpan and Wonderfully Different, Lula Dreams of Wednesday 126, 127 Doyle, Arthur Conan 24 Drawmer, Lois 123, 144 Driscoll, Catherine 145 Duguid, Michelle 92, 93, 97 Dyer, Richard 23, 24, 41, 82, 90, 91, 137 Eden 37, 87, 144, 169 Elle 20, 62, 182 Émile (Rousseau) 37–40, 43, 45, 117, 137, 141, 182 Encoding-Decoding model (Hall) 60, 61 Enninful, Edward 9, 89, 215 Entwistle, Joanne 222 n.35 epistemophilia 140–2 Erlandson, Eric 178 eternal child 1, 46–8, 122, 143, 153, 213, 240 n.146 Eugenides, Jeffrey 83 Evans, Caroline 22, 28, 60, 100–1, 173, 187, 203 Eve 113, 182 Everyday Sexism Project (Bates) 2, 54 fairies 24, 115, 138 fairy tales 68, 78, 88, 89, 108, 123, 137, 141 false consciousness 59 false universalism 2, 49

297

Faludi, Susan 33, 52, 53, 240 n.146, 251 n.80 Fanning, Dakota 27, 66, 67, 106, 156, 159–69, 171, 176, 194, 214 fashion 1, 22, 49–50. see also fashion photography and capitalism 17–18, 21, 31, 90, 99, 109, 167, 217, 218 images 4, 11–13, 18, 20, 21, 27–31, 59, 61, 65, 72, 75, 113, 114, 143, 161, 176, 186, 218 and magazines 2, 5, 9, 10, 13, 50, 59, 62, 65, 67, 76, 87, 144, 156, 205, 207, 211, 224 n.67, 230 n.49 magical thinking 88–9 media 2–4, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 27, 28, 30, 51, 53, 57, 58, 61, 62, 67, 72, 76, 101, 112, 156, 161, 165, 166, 172, 176, 178, 209, 210, 213, 215 revivals 93 spreads 18, 68, 175 system 7, 17, 52, 86, 89, 144, 176, 205, 215 Fashion and Its Social Agendas (Crane) 242 n.20 Fashion and Postcolonial Critique (Gaugele and Titton) 271 n.7 Fashion as Photograph (Shinkle) 20 fashion photography 5, 6, 10, 12–14, 27–8, 60–1, 112 class and gender 59 genre of 18–21 Lolita in (see Lolita) ‘romantic’ genre of 75 and truth 21–7 Fashion System, The (Barthes) 19, 57, 75 Fass, Paula S. 86 Felix, Petal 66 female gaze 6, 13, 14, 58, 62–7, 141, 191 female sexuality 5, 6, 22, 50, 177, 186, 187, 200, 210, 266 n.18 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) 1–2, 48–51 femininity 1, 3–7, 9–11, 13, 14, 17, 20–2, 27–31, 49–50, 64, 193–4. see also childlike femininity feminism 2, 3, 14, 29, 34, 51–6, 58, 65, 70, 97, 109, 113 backlash against 51–5, 94, 97, 201, 211 digital 2, 54 Fourth Wave 2 and gay liberation 145

298

Index

intersectional 2, 29, 34, 209–10, 220 n.16, 221 n.29 popular 54–5, 215 Second Wave 2, 31, 46, 49, 99, 211, 217 feminist curiosity 6, 114, 140–3, 145, 149, 153, 154 feminization 22, 43, 42, 142 femme-enfant-fatale 6, 14, 115–17, 132–6, 143, 153–4, 213 Alice in Wonderland 123, 124, 142, 144, 145, 149–54 Breton and 117–19, 122–4, 133, 134, 137 curiosity 140–3, 145, 149, 153, 154 in fashion photography 124–32 magic and superstition 136–9 social class and privilege 139–40 Surrealism 115–24, 133–4, 151 Fiske, John 60 Flowers 93, 111, 141, 149, 171–2 in bloom 168–9 daisies 84, 167, 184 roses 22, 143 and virginity 167 focus groups 4, 12, 27, 48, 58, 62, 67–70, 72, 86, 89, 94, 105, 160, 161, 187 Forget Me Not 150, 151, 251 n.80 Foster, Hal 118 Foucault, Michel 3, 8, 11, 18, 19, 28–9, 33, 65, 69, 123, 154, 205, 239 n.138 Fourth Wave feminism 2 Fraser, Nancy 99, 109, 151, 217 Freud, Sigmund 11, 14, 39, 48, 64, 86, 115, 118, 164 Friedan, Betty 1–2, 33, 46, 48–51 Fuss, Diana 65, 71

re-signification 4, 6, 14, 116–17, 177, 179, 183, 196, 211 roles 43, 60, 63, 76, 191 and sexuality 30, 66, 123 trouble 202–3, 210 gender-neutral 141, 162, 232 n.97 Gevinson, Tavi 112 Gill, Rosalind 54 girlhood and craft 111 curious 133, 141, 143, 149 devastating 104 heteronormative 85 ‘imperious’ 143, 153 party wear 214 and poverty 108, 139 ‘precocity’ 159, 168, 176 queer 85 rebellious 133, 154 subversive 6, 133, 142, 213 sweet 129, 191 girliness 1–2, 50, 160, 177, 196–9, 200, 210, 215 Goddard, Molly 212, 214 Goffman, Erving 5, 201 Gogglebox 59, 242 n.16 Goldman, Eric 53, 157 Goldstein, Philip 58, 59, 61 Goth, Mia 26, 27 Goude, Jean-Paul 165 Great Expectations (Dickens) 96 Greene, Gayle 52, 240 n.142 grunge 8, 11, 26, 178–9, 190 Gutt, Tim 148, 150, 151 Guyland (Kimmel) 7

Gamman, Lorraine 60, 63, 145 garçon manqué 124, 256 n.47 gender constructed coherence 76, 78, 113, 185, 213 identity 61, 63, 123, 203, 218 intelligibility 29–30, 61, 69, 78, 85, 101, 183 melancholia 5, 14, 76, 101–2, 113 parody 6, 94, 149, 177, 183–4, 195, 196, 203, 205, 210, 213 politics 207 pronouns 29–30

hair afro 209 blonde 80, 105, 149, 159, 174, 179, 184, 248 n.23, 248 n.25 wigs 209 Hall, Stuart 7, 14, 22, 33, 60, 219 n.5, 243 n.36 Haraway, Donna 217–18 Harrison, Martin 18–20, 22, 61, 65, 243 n.35 Heavenly Creatures (Huseby) 5, 76, 80–9, 93, 94, 104, 105, 111, 113, 115, 123, 140, 182, 183, 192, 194

Index Hermes, Joke 63, 70, 71, 87, 231 n.81 heroin chic 6, 26, 186, 193 heterosexual 7, 30, 32, 52, 55, 62, 65, 78, 123, 178 heterosexual matrix 30, 78, 123, 178 Higonnet, Anne 39, 43, 86, 183 Hindley, Myra 188, 189 Hodkinson, Will 76 Hoggart, Richard 14, 226 n.96 Holland, Patricia 34, 68, 144, 162, 164 Holland, Samantha 50 Holman, Hannah 149–51, 260 n.136, 260 n.137 home 5, 31, 46, 50, 54, 76, 82, 85, 92–5, 101, 106–113 homeovestism 203 homoerotic desire 65 hooks, bell 3, 49, 50, 66, 82 Huppert, Isabelle 134 Huseby, Benjamin Alexander 5, 80, 93 hyper-girliness 196–7 hysteria 127, 128, 256 n.57 i-D 8–11, 66, 67, 124, 129, 162, 177, 184, 185, 187, 188, 190, 211, 214, 215, 224 n.65 Industrial Revolution 42, 108 Infantile Sexuality (Freud) 39 infantilization 3, 7, 45, 49, 51, 144, 161 innocence 4, 5, 9, 11, 22, 28, 38, 39, 42, 45, 47, 78, 80, 87, 89, 95, 111, 112, 115, 118, 119, 126, 129, 131–3, 136, 142, 149, 151, 158, 167–9, 183, 185, 186, 190, 194 intersectionality 2–3, 29, 34, 58, 209–10, 220 n.16, 221 n.29 investment 5, 20, 70–2, 87, 112, 212, 217 Jackson, Peter 82 Jacobs, Marc 6, 10, 11, 20, 27, 59, 84, 156, 159, 162, 164, 167–8, 214, 263 n.47 James, Allison 35 Jansson, Mikael 151 Jenkins, Kimberley 271 n.7 Jenks, Chris 34–6, 145 Jensen, An-Magritt 42 Jeux d’Enfants (Tanning) 124–6, 129 Jobling, Paul 4, 5, 24, 26, 262 n.34 Jones-Henry, Yasmin 67

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Jones, Terry 10 Jordanova, Ludmilla 63 Kant, Immanuel 85, 111, 113, 154 Kasterine, Cathy 25, 174 kawaii 12 kidulthood 8, 153, 217, 223 n.56 Killing Eve 214 Kimmel, Michael 7 Kinderwhore 5, 6, 8, 14, 68, 177–8, 210, 213 Meadham Kirchhoff and hypergirliness 196–9 politics of exclusion 207–9 Pretty on the Inside 184–7 Slutwalk 199–205, 208–10 Sugar ‘n’ Spite 187–96 and virgin/whore dichotomy 178–84 whiteness 207–9 Kirchhoff, Benjamin 196, 197, 205 Kismaric, Susan 24 Knightley, Keira 20, 108, 115, 116, 134–9, 142, 214 Knight, Nick 196 Kubrick, Stanley 6, 144, 155–8, 161, 174, 176 Lacan, Jacques 64, 65 La Debutante (Carrington) 128–9 Lady of Shalott, The (Waterhouse) 75, 102–4, 192 Lawrence, Thomas 43, 44 L’Ecriture Automatique 119, 121 Lehmann, Ulrich 21 Life Less Ordinary, A (Roversi) 94 Lifter, Rachel 10 Lisbon sisters (Coppola) 83–4 Little Match Girl, The (Andersen) 108 Locke, John 236 n.62 Lolita 6, 112, 144, 155–6, 176, 217 consumption, petulance and death 174–6 Dolores Haze 156–9, 166, 167, 173, 175, 176 Fanning and 162–5 fashion photography 158–9 Humbert’s view of 156–8, 161, 166, 167, 171, 173–6 lollipop 155–6, 164, 174, 176 Nabokov and misreadings 157–8

300 as nymphet 157–8, 173 Oh, Lola! 159–61 tantrums and naughtiness 165–7 Lolita subculture (Japanese) 12 Long, Long Way from Home, A (Yemchuk) 5, 106–11, 113 Love, Courtney 6, 178–86, 190, 196, 197, 201 Lula (Clark) 8–11, 20, 51, 76–80, 84–5, 89, 105, 106, 109–13, 126, 133, 143, 182, 191, 211, 213, 214, 216, 224 n.58, 224 n.67 Lusty, Natalya 122–4, 128 Lyne, Adrian 157 Lynge-Jorlén, Ane 224 n.67, 226 n.91 MacDonald, Myra 58 Machor, James L. 58, 59, 61 McAra, Catriona 6, 122–3, 133, 134, 142, 213 McQueen, Alexander 193 McRobbie, Angela 3, 11, 18, 46, 51–4, 71, 89, 101, 107–9, 145, 151, 177, 205–6, 209, 215 magic 76, 88, 112, 138, 140, 145, 207 Magritte, René 151 Makinen, Merja 145 male gaze 10, 12, 58, 64–6, 97, 141, 192, 199, 203, 205 Malson, Helen 69, 99 man-child 7 Man Repeller 205–7 Marshment, Margaret 63 Martin, Penny 11 Marx, Karl 60, 64, 87 Mary Janes 6, 124, 159, 179, 197 masculinity 7, 64, 192, 199 masquerade 71, 133, 177, 186, 206, 207, 209, 210 Mavor, Carol 42 Maynard, Margaret 19, 228 n.29 Meadham, Edward 196, 197, 205 Meadham Kirchhoff 6, 14, 106, 177–8, 196–200, 203, 205, 207–8, 210, 213–14 and hyper-girliness 196–9 Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, A 6, 177–8, 196–9, 205, 208, 210 Medine, Leandra 205

Index melancholia. see gender melancholia Menon, Elizabeth K. 137 Me Too movement 221 n.17 Michals, Duane 145–6, 149 Millais, John Everett 75, 103, 169, 170 Mitchell, W. J. T. 22 Miu Miu 11, 20, 26, 107 Monden, Masafumi 83–4, 101 Monti, Raffaelle 100 Morley, David 60, 221 n.22, 242 n.25, 243 n.36 Moss, Kate 3, 8, 25–6, 162, 164, 185, 186, 214 motherhood 23, 35, 43, 48–9, 93–4, 104, 130, 133, 143, 145, 151, 157, 171–5, 182–3, 186 Moylan, Tom 86–7 multiculturalism 18, 207, 209 Mulvey, Laura 6, 64, 65, 87, 114, 141, 142, 241 n.8 Nabokov, Vladimir 155–9, 166, 167, 174–6 nature 11, 30, 38–9, 45, 75, 117 naughtiness 165–7 Neiman, Susan 7–8, 35, 37, 108–9, 111–13, 137, 154, 217, 247 n.19 neoliberalism 8, 54–6, 60, 99, 109, 151, 216, 217 neomania 17–18 Newsom, Joanna 76–9, 89, 105 #NewVogue 215 Nixon, Sean 65 nostalgia 9, 11, 14, 71, 76, 85–9, 92, 93, 101, 113, 114, 139, 174, 207, 209, 216 Oakley, Ann 36 Oh, Lola! (Jacobs) 6, 27, 59, 66, 67, 82, 156, 159–61, 164–8, 171, 173, 175, 176, 194 Ophelia (Millais) 75, 103 Orla Kiely 129–32, 214 Orphan Annie 139 O’Toole, Laurence 162, 224 n.66 Pandora 141 Papin sisters 134, 257 n.74 Peccinotti, Harri 153 performativity 29, 33, 51, 144, 211 Perkins Gilman, Charlotte 127, 128

Index Perry, Grayson 203, 204 Peter Pan (Barrie) 171–3, 176 Peter Pan collar 111, 129, 131, 144, 179 Peter-Pan mindset 7 petulance 175–6 and precocity 167–72 Phelan, Kate 11, 92, 95, 98, 150–1, 214, 250 n.74, 265 n.94 Phillips, Barbara J. 59 Pifer, Ellen 157, 158, 175 Pivovarova, Sasha 89–99, 102–5, 152, 214 planned obsolescence 17, 31, 87, 111, 112 Plath, Sylvia 21 Polanski, Roman 130–1 politics 6, 21, 22, 29, 41, 46, 54–6, 63, 65, 67, 88–9, 201, 202, 207–10, 213–16 Pollock, Linda A. 34 polymorphous 9, 11, 68, 224 n.66 polysemy 14, 57, 60, 72, 243 n.36 popular feminism 54–5, 215 post-feminism 51–5, 94, 101–2, 108, 161, 205–7, 210, 211 Power of TWO 199, 201–3, 207–8, 210 Prada Candy 12, 112, 165, 166 Pre-Raphaelites 11, 75, 78, 103, 104, 109, 111 Pretty on the Inside (von Unwerth) 184–7 Pritsch, Sylvia 31, 72, 146 Project Girly 1, 196 Prout, Alan 35 psychoanalysis 5, 39, 64–66, 71, 118, 128, 203 Qvortrup, Jens 36 Radway, Janice A. 61–2, 71 Rapunzel 97, 103 reception study 4, 12, 14, 56, 57–62, 66, 67–70, 72, 80, 85, 86, 96, 161, 176, 177, 184, 187–96, 200, 210, 212, 216 Reis, Pamela T. 169 resonant image 68 Respini, Eva 24 Reynolds, Joshua 39, 41, 42, 115 Richardson, Bob 186 Richardson, Terry 9, 28, 162, 164, 173 Riot Grrrls 178, 199–205 Riviere, Joan 71 Roach, Jacqui 66 Rocamora, Agnès 18, 78

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Rodino-Colocino, Michelle 220 n.16 Romantic childhood 5, 14, 36–43, 47, 68, 70, 75, 78, 80, 86–8, 112, 115, 118, 119, 140, 142, 167, 173, 175, 213 Romantic woman-child 75–6 Heavenly Creatures 80–5 Long, Long Way from Home, A 106–8 Lula, Girl of My Dreams 76–80 nostalgia 85–9 whiteness 89–91 White Nights 92–106 Rose, Gillian 61 Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski) 130–2, 257 n.65 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 37–40, 42, 43, 45, 117, 137, 141, 236 n.62 Roversi, Paolo 94 Rubin, Herbert J. 70 Rubin, Irene S. 70 Rummel, Andrea 133 Runaways, The 164, 169 Russell, Cameron 30 Schiaparelli, Elsa 100, 129, 130, 135 Schoeneman, Deborah 1 schoolgirls 119, 132, 179, 185 Scott, Venetia 124 Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir) 4, 48 Second Wave feminism 2, 31, 46, 49, 99, 211, 217 sexuality 5, 6, 9, 11, 18, 22, 28–30, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 50, 65–8, 82, 118, 157, 160, 164, 168, 169, 173, 176, 177, 181–3, 186, 187, 194, 200, 201, 210 Seydoux, Léa 165–6 Shields, Brooke 164, 191, 214 Shinkle, Eugénie 19, 20 Shulman, Alexandra 9, 67, 89, 215 Slutwalk movement 2, 6–7, 14, 106, 177, 199–205, 208–10, 213, 220 n.16 Smith, Joan 185, 186 Snow, Carmel 19 social class 24 and privilege 139–40 race and 42 skin colour and 101 socialization theory 35, 36 Sombart, Werner 17 Songbird, The 76–9 Sontag, Susan 23

302 spectatorship black looks 66, 67, 245 n.73, 245 n.74 female gaze 6, 13, 14, 58, 62–7, 141, 191 male gaze 10, 12, 58, 64–6, 97, 141, 192, 199, 203, 205 oppositional gaze 66 Spirit of Geometry, The (Magritte) 151 ‘Star Girls’ 89–91 Stern, Bert 155, 156, 158, 176 Steward, James C. 39 Stewart, Susan 86 Stoppard, Lou 196 ‘sugar and spice’ 133, 191, 254 n.146 Sugar ‘n’ Spite 187–96 Sunny and Sexy 174–5 superstition 117, 136–9, 142 superwaif 3, 8, 68 Surrealism 6, 14, 151–2 Breton and 117–24, 134, 137, 142 femme-enfant-fatale 115–24, 133–4, 151 sweets and candy 68, 112, 166, 175, 191, 217, 253 n.146 symbolic production 17, 18, 21, 87 Tagg, John 23, 24 Tanning, Dorothea 117, 123–9, 139, 142 tantrums 9, 68, 165–7, 173, 217, 265 n.94 Tear-Illusion dress (Schiaparelli) 129, 130, 135 television 1, 59, 62, 70, 221 n.22 Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (Morley) 243 n.36 Teller, Juergen 2, 6, 10, 20, 84, 124, 143, 156, 159, 176, 185, 214 Tennyson, Alfred 102, 103 Testino, Mario 7, 9, 28, 89 Theyskens, Oliver 7 This Side of the Blue 103, 105 Thornton, Minna 22, 173 toddlers 47, 94 164, 178, 260 n.138 Tonkiss, Fran 70 toys 37, 68, 94, 112, 175, 190, 217, 253 n.146 Tseëlon, Efrat 50, 182 Tulloch, Carol 209 Twemlow, Alice 174 Twiggy 5, 11

Index uncertainty 145, 218 Under Exposure (Day) 25, 26, 186, 267 n.40 Urwin, Rosamund 268–9 n.59 utopia 87, 113–14, 174, 216 Vänskä, Annamari 168 Veiled Vestal Virgin, A (Monti) 100 Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y 38 Vindication of the Rights of Women, A (Wollstonecraft) 43, 45–6, 128 Violet Book 216 Violette (Chabrol) 134–5 virginal femininity 4, 115 Virgin Suicides, The (Coppola) 47, 76, 83–5, 93, 95, 101, 104 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Mulvey) 64 Vodianova, Natalia 89–90 Vogue Italia 11, 115, 116, 135, 139, 164, 174, 214 Paris 145, 151, 263 n.49 UK 6–11, 25, 27, 28, 62, 67, 68, 75, 80, 81, 89–92, 94, 95, 98, 106, 148, 150, 151, 172, 177, 186, 196, 199, 201, 202, 206, 207, 209, 210, 213–16, 222 n.41, 223 n.56, 250 n.74, 251 n.80, 253 n.146, 265 n.94, 271 n.5, 272 n.19 von Unwerth, Ellen 2, 115, 116, 134, 143, 164, 176, 179–81, 184, 185, 214 Walker, Tim 2, 5, 9, 28, 68, 92–3, 104, 214, 250 n.73 Walter, Brian 158 Waterhouse, John William 75, 102–4 Ways of Seeing (Berger) 64 Wednesday Addams 6, 124, 126, 130, 133, 143, 144, 153, 213 West, Rosemary 188 Whelehan, Imelda 54 White, Duncan 156, 161, 174 White Mischief 250 n.73 White Nights (Walker) 5, 68, 92–106 whiteness 40–1, 67, 75, 82, 89–91, 99, 207, 209, 215, 250 n.73 Why Grow Up? (Neiman) 7–8, 108–9, 217 Williams, Leslie 42

Index Williams, Robbie 7 Williams, Val 20 Willson, Jacki 64–5 Wilson, Angus 96 Wilson, Elizabeth 17, 112, 216 Winship, Janice 86 Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, A (Meadham Kirchhoff) 6, 177–8, 196–9, 205, 208, 210 Wollstonecraft, Mary 1–3, 7, 33, 43, 45–6, 48, 51, 128, 169, 237 n.83 woman 63, 119. see also childlike femininity aggressiveness 200 childlike 3, 5, 34, 87 and children 2, 33, 36, 43, 55, 57, 75, 78, 211, 216 curves 50 as eternal child 46–8, 153 as femme fatale 4, 115, 119, 133–4, 136, 141, 175, 184

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as femme fragile 133, 136 perpetual childhood 43–6 sexuality (see sexuality) woman-child 1–8, 11, 12, 14, 31, 34, 57, 59, 71, 72, 89, 97, 113, 116, 153, 164, 210, 211, 214–18 womanhood 3–6, 9, 47, 80, 113, 143, 151, 162–5, 176, 210, 211, 213, 257 n.67 Women’s Wear Daily 164 Wright, Elsie 24–6 Yemchuk, Yelena 5, 103, 106 #YesAllWomen 2, 220 n.16 Young, Iris Marion 69 Zavataros, George 203 Zelizer, Viviana A. 41 Zimmer, Dieter E. 158

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