(Or: What you're talking about when you're talking about style)
from left to right: Poppy Develigne, Candice Swanpoel, Kirsten Dunst, Keri Russell
all sporting looks that I find lovely and would wear in a heartbeat
About a week ago one of my good friends from high school Yunyi sent me the link to this tumblr called carefree white girl. The tumblr was meant to call attention to the "deification of white womanhood" in popular culture. Yunyi and I both had a good laugh that someone was clever enough to come up with such a tumblr, but when our conversation moved elsewhere I sorta forgot about it.
But sometimes when you're paying attention, you start to connect the dots between recurring themes that pop up in your life. I feel like I've lived the past twenty-one years vaguely skimming such themes on the surface-- the fashion magazines I peruse, the movies I watch, and the people I see on TV-- all proliferate the same notion of beauty, but I hadn't really been paying attention. Indeed, the scariest part is that even though I consider myself an open-minded person, even though I am a person of color--a hyphenated American-- I am so inundated by notions of this one standard of beauty that it's difficult at times for me to question my own notions of what I consider beautiful and how easily they conform to this said standard.
For example, I've started to write some pieces for my school's fashion and lifestyle website modachicago.com. As I was brainstorming ideas for what to write about next I thought it would be cool to do a weekly or bi-monthly post on the fashion inspiration I derive from movies, more particularly stills that are taken from movies. Because I mean sometimes when I'm watching a film everything comes together--soundtrack, scenery, style--that makes me want to extract that particular moment and transfer it to my own life.
So I started to compile a list of movies I could include in these posts. I started with Sofia Coppola because each of her movies has such a singular, cohesive aesthetic: The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, Lost in Translation. And then I thought about how much I loved the cinematography and costume design for Joe Wright's films with Keira Knightley: Pride & Prejudice, Atonement. Then An Education with Carey Mulligan, The Graduate for more of the 60s style echoed in An Education. The list started to grow and then I started to look for film stills from each of the movies to make my blog post.
The Coppola Girls
Kirsten Dunst in the 2006 September issue of Vogue with a look
inspired by her role as the title character in Marie Antoinette
Scarlett Johansson in the 2003 film Lost in Translation playing
a role as the ultimate Lonely Girl opposite Bill Murray
A younger Dunst in the dreamy Virgin Suicides that has all the
best of late 90s aesthetic
Keira Knightley in Atonement
Carey Mulligan in An Education
I then started to notice a theme that was so evident once I realized it, that it seemed almost sinister--wrong-- that I hadn't noticed it before: every single one of the looks that I had in mind all featured a beautiful white woman sporting looks that beautiful white women wear.
This blew me away. It seriously did. Because the thing is I knew this on an intellectual level--I had read about this, talked about this, understood the joke behind the "carefree white woman" tumblr but I had never really noticed how I perpetuated this idea, that I was implicated in this vicious cycle as well.
A couple minutes later, for various reasons, a) I'm a millennial with an attention that spans all of 2 minutes b) I was so freaked out by my realization that I needed to distract myself, I found myself watching a TEDtalk, funnily enough, of the model Cameron Russell. Her talk was entitled Looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model. and she ended up talking about this very same phenomenon. I think it's worth it for everyone to watch the video for himself or herself, but Russell essentially gives the answers to questions she is repeatedly asked: "how did you become a model?" "could I become a model?" etc.
Her answer to the first question? The genetic jackpot and legacy. What she means by the second thing is that for hundred of years now--essentially since our country's inception and even before with the European influence carried over by the, well, Europeans--our culture has constantly perpetuated the idea that the white woman is the standard of beauty. And over the past decades, it has narrowed down to a construction that is even more specific: a skinny young white woman with a symmetrical face, flawless complexion, and shiny hair.
This is not to say that there is something wrong with Carey Mulligan or Sofia Coppola or the fashion of white women (and men) in the 1960s or any of that. There is only something wrong when these figures and these modes of style are the dominant ideals of beauty and style (think about the whole media frenzy after the release of Marie Antoinette with Kirsten Dunst being shot by Annie Leibovitz for September 2006 issue of Vogue putting French 18th century style back on the map. Or, the mayhem surrounding Keira Knightley's stunning emerald green gown in Atonement. I can't think of one non-white actress getting as much buzz playing a role that doesn't fit into this European or western-centric notion of what is fashionable). It starts to become problematic when I can barely count the number of non-white women I view as style icons on one hand (Solange Knowles, Liu Wen, Daul Kim, Janelle Monáe) and it becomes even more problematic when I realize that none of these women have the same influence in the mass media as their white counterparts (of course, I have agency over who I decide to view as influential or not, but how much do I really?).
It's obviously difficult to uproot one's entire notions of what is beautiful or what is stylish or chic or fashionable in one fell swoop. However, the intersection of these seemingly disparate moments in my life has forced me to think about my personal conceptions of all these construction and to question how my own perceptions of myself and my sense of style are shaped by mass media representations...
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