Morna Laing - Picturing The Woman-Child - Fashion, Feminism and The Female Gaze-Bloomsbury (2021)

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
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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

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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
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For Isobel and Brian
vi
Contents
List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements xii
Preface xiv
1 Introduction 1
Part One
2 Fashion Photography and Gender 17

3 Childlike Femininity: A History of Feminist Critique 33
4 Between Image and Spectator: Reception Studies
as Visual Methodology 57
Part Two
5 The Romantic Woman-Child, Lost from Home 75

6 Fashion’s ‘Femme-Enfant-Fatale’: Surrealism,
Curiosity and Alice in Wonderland 115
7 Rewriting Lolita in Fashion Photography 155
8 Kinderwhore: From Catwalk to Slutwalk 177
Conclusion 211
Notes 219
Bibliography 274
Appendix 1: Participant Demographics 293
Index 295
List of Figures
1 Elsie Wright, Alice and the Fairies, July 1917. © SSPL/Getty Images 25
2 Elsie Wright, Alice and Leaping Fairy, August 1920. © SSPL/Getty
Images 26
3 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las Meninas, c. 1656.
© Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado 38
4 Illustration from Émile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1778. Engraved
by Noel Le Mire 40
5 Joshua Reynolds, The Age of Innocence, c. 1788. © Tate 41
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 44
7 ‘Joanna Newsom: Songbird’. Lula, no.10, 2010. Photographer:
Annabel Mehran. Stylist: Isabel Dupré. Model: Joanna Newsom.
© Annabel Mehran 77
8 ‘Joanna Newsom: Songbird’. Lula, no.10, 2010. Photographer:
Annabel Mehran. Stylist: Isabel Dupré. Model: Joanna Newsom.
© Annabel Mehran 79
9 ‘Heavenly Creatures’. British Vogue, March 2006. Photographer:
Benjamin Alexander Huseby. Fashion Editor: Miranda Almond.
Models: unknown. © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd 81
10 Film still from Heavenly Creatures, 1994. Director: Peter Jackson.
Actors: Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey 83
11 Film still from Heavenly Creatures, 1994. Director: Peter Jackson.
Actors: Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey 83
12 Film still from The Virgin Suicides, 1999. Director: Sofia Coppola.
Actor: Kirsten Dunst 84
13 ‘Star Girls’. British Vogue, December 2010. Photographer: Mario
Testino. Fashion Editor: Lucinda Chambers. Model: Natalia
Vodianova. © Mario Testino 90
14 ‘Star Girls’. British Vogue, December 2010. Photographer: Mario
Testino. Fashion Editor: Lucinda Chambers. Model: Sasha
Pivovarova. © Mario Testino 91
List of Figures ix
15 ‘White Nights’. British Vogue, January 2007. Photographer: Tim

Walker. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Model: Sasha
Pivovarova. © Tim Walker Studio 92
Walker. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Model: Sasha Pivovarova.
© Tim Walker Studio 95
Walker. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Model: Sasha Pivovarova.
© Tim Walker Studio 98
18 Raffaelle Monti, A Veiled Vestal Virgin, 1846–7. Photo
© Kevin Tebutt 100
19 John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott. 1888. © Tate 102
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 103
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 106
22 Advertisement for Miu Miu, 2011. Photographer: Bruce Weber.
Model: Hailee Steinfeld. © Bruce Weber 107
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 110
24 ‘Keira Knightley’. Vogue Italia, January 2011. Photographer:
Ellen von Unwerth. Stylist: Leith Clark. Model: Keira Knightley.
© Ellen von Unwerth 116
25a ‘L’Écriture Automatique’, La Révolution Surréaliste, no.9–10,
October 1927 120
25b L’Écriture Automatique’, detail, La Révolution Surréaliste, no.9–10,
October 1927 121
26 Dorothea Tanning, Jeux d’Enfants, 1942. © ADAGP Paris, 2020 125
27 Film still from Addams Family Values, 1993. Director: Barry
Sonnenfeld. Actor: Christina Ricci 126
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 127
29 Elsa Schiaparelli, ‘Tear-Illusion’ dress, 1938 130
30 Advertisement for Orla Kiely, 2009. Photographer: Catherine
Servel. Stylist: Leith Clark. Model: Skye Stracke. © Catherine Servel 131
x List of Figures
31 Rosemary’s Baby, 1968. Director: Roman Polanski. Actors: Mia

Farrow and John Cassavetes. © Getty Images 132
32 Violette, 1978. Director: Claude Chabrol. Actor: Isabelle Huppert 134
33 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 146
35 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 147
Six gelatin-silver photographs with hand-applied text. © Duane
39 ‘Forget Me Not’. British Vogue, May 2011. Photographer: Tim Gutt.
Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Set Design: Shona Heath. Model:
Hannah Holman. © Tim Gutt 150
40 Illustration to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by John Tenniel, 1865 150
41 ‘Forget Me Not’, British Vogue, May 2011. Photographer: Tim Gutt.
Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan. Set Design: Shona Heath. Model:
Hannah Holman. © Tim Gutt 151
42 Illustration to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by John Tenniel, 1865 152
43 Promotional image for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, 1962. Photographer:
Bert Stern. Actor: Sue Lyon. © Getty Images 155
44 Dakota Fanning at Marc Jacobs SS2012 After Party, September
2011. Photographer: Dimitrios Kambouris. © Getty Images 163
45 Promotion for Marc Jacobs new perfume Daisy in Copenhagen,
Denmark, 2015. Photographer: Francis Dean. © Getty Images 168
46 John Everett Millais, Cherry Ripe, 1879 170
List of Figures xi
47 Eric Erlandson, Courtney Love and Melissa Auf Der Maur, 1995.
© Getty Images 178
48 ‘Courtney Love: The Hole Truth’. Interview magazine, March 1994.
Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Model: Courtney Love.
49 ‘Courtney Love: The Hole Truth’. Interview magazine, March
1994. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Model: Courtney Love.
50 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 185
51 ‘Sugar ‘n’ Spite’. i-D no.143, August 1995. Photographers: Davies
and Davies. Models: members of girl band Fluffy. © Davies and
Davies 188
52 Portrait of Myra Hindley (1942–2002). © Getty Images 189
53 Meadham Kirchhoff, A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, SS2012.
Photographer: Stuart C. Wilson. © Getty Images 197
Photographer: Victor Virgile/Gamma-Rapho. © Getty Images 198
55 ‘Power of TWO’, British Vogue, January 2012. Photographer:
Philip Sinden. © Philip Sinden 201
56 Grayson Perry dressed as his alter-ego, Claire, 2004. Photographer:
Dave M. Benett. © Getty Images 204
57 Screen grab from Man Repeller, 2010 206
Photographer: Stuart C. Wilson. © Getty Images 208
59 Molly Goddard, AW 2017. Photographer: Tim P. Whitby.
© Getty Images 212
60 Molly Goddard, AW 2017. Photographer: Niklas Halle’n. © Getty
Images 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 xiii
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 xv
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.
xvi
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 post-
war North America – asking: ‘Why aren’t girls forced to grow up – to achieve
2 Picturing the Woman-Child
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 3
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-à-
vis 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
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, hetero-
normative 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 ‘woman-
child’ 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.
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 7
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
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
Introduction 9
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:
Dazed Digital: It’s so girl-crushy. In the real world, it feels like girls are competi-
tive, 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 sexu-
alized. 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
Introduction 11
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 Pre-
Raphaelites 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 ‘woman-
child’ 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
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 13
‘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
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.
Part One
16
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
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
Fashion Photography and Gender 19
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
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 long-
standing 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
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
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
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 post-
production 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 woman-
child 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
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 long-
standing 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
Childlike Femininity 35
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
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,
the Romantic child tends to be associated with Genevan philosopher Jean-

Jacques 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
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
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
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
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
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 girl-
children 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
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
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
‘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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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 woman-
child 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
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
Between Image and Spectator 59
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
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 meaning-
making, 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 socio-
cultural 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 production-
content-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
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
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.
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, self-
aware 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
‘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
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
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,
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
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.
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 near-
ubiquitous ‘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
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:
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 subject-
positions 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
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
74
5
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
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 77
Figure 7 ‘Joanna Newsom: Songbird’. Lula no.10, 2010. Photographer: Annabel

Mehran. Stylist: Isabel Dupré. Model: Joanna Newsom.
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 Pre-
Raphaelite 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 high-
school 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 subject-
position 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,
Figure 8 ‘Joanna Newsom: Songbird’. Lula no.10, 2010. Photographer: Annabel

Mehran. Stylist: Isabel Dupré. Model: Joanna Newsom.
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
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 …
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
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
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
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
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
‘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-touched-
by-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:
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 never-
ending 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
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-five-
year 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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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,
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’ subject-
positions 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
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
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 Pre-
Raphaelite 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
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 Pre-
Raphaelite 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
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 ‘woman-
child’, 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
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-and-
white 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.
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
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
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 stick-
figure’.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
Figure 23 ‘All the Real Girls: More Folk, Less Factory – Bring On the Girls Who
Make Things’. Lula no.3, 2006. Photographer: Gen Kay.
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
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.
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
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 femme-
enfant 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
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
Fashion’s ‘Femme-Enfant-Fatale’ 117
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
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
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 femme-
enfant 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 real-
life female members of the movement. Chadwick suggests that the trope of the
Figure 25a and 25b ‘L’Écriture Automatique’, La Révolution Surréaliste no.9–10.

October 1927.
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 Marie-
Berthe 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
of the femme-enfant.33 For instance, she suggests that male members of the
movement may have self-feminized through identification with the femme-
enfant, 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 re-
signified 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
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
Figure 26 Dorothea Tanning, Jeux d’Enfants, 1942.

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
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
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
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 trompe-
l’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 femme-
enfant 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
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
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.
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
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 femme-
enfant 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
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:
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
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,
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.
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’?
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 self-
identified 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 subject-
positions, 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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
in the foreground (not unlike Alice in Figure 42), veiled in pink with a world-
weary 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.
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
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 subject-
position 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
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
Rewriting Lolita in Fashion Photography 157
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 pop-
cultural 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 girl-
child 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
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
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
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
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 ‘post-
feminism’, which undermines the gains of feminism through ‘crude or offensive
stereotypes … reclaimed as ironic, playful or even subversive comments or send-
ups’.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.
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
Figure 44 Dakota Fanning at Marc Jacobs SS2012 After Party, September 2011.
Photographer: Dimitrios Kambouris via Getty Images.
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
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
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-the-
scenes 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
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
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
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
Figure 46 John Everett Millais, Cherry Ripe, 1879.

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
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
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 non-
reproductive 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
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
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
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 life-
giving 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 post-
feminist 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
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.
Kinderwhore: From Catwalk to Slutwalk 179
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 knee-
high socks, not unlike the patent shoes and pelerine socks of a schoolgirl, or
the surrealist automaton in Chapter 6. She playfully negotiates a large shell-
on-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
Figure 48 ‘Courtney Love: The Hole Truth’. Interview magazine, March 1994.
The fears and expectations to which Arnold refers are tied up in long-
standing discourses that draw upon the virgin/whore dichotomy which has
underpinned discourses on acceptable and unacceptable femininities in
the West.
Figure 49 ‘Courtney Love: The Hole Truth’. Interview magazine, March 1994.
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
‘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
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 woman-
child.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
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
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
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 subject-
position 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
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
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 twentieth-
century Britain.
As the discussion progressed, the participants drew upon additional discursive
resources, locating members of Fluffy somewhere between mass murderers and
Figure 52 Portrait of Myra Hindley (1942–2002). Photo by Keystone via Getty

Images.
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 baby-
turned-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
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?
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 woman-
child 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.
[…]
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…
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?
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:
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
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 hyper-
femininity 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
Figure 54 Meadham Kirchhoff, A Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, SS2012. Photographer

Victor Virgile/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.
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 re-
signifying 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.
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
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,
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…
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
Figure 56 Grayson Perry dressed as his alter-ego, Claire, 2004. Photographer: Dave
M. Benett. © Getty Images.
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
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
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]
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.
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.
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 ‘woman-
child’ is not singular but instead appears in various guises, as indicated by the
headings of my empirical chapters: the Romantic woman-child, the femme-
enfant-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
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 re-
signification 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
Conclusion 213
(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 girl-
childhood 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
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 editor-
in-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 bubble-
gum 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
Conclusion 215
(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 twenty-
first 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.
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
Conclusion 217
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
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/rise-
and-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
220 Notes
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.
Notes 221
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
222 Notes
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, Post-
structuralism 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.
Notes 223
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’.
224 Notes
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-and-
paste 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’, i-
D, 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 high-
quality 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
Notes 225
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-clarks-
lula (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).
226 Notes
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
Notes 227
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).
228 Notes
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.
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).
Notes 229
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).
230 Notes
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.
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.
66 Kismaric and Respini, ‘Fashioning Fiction’, 31.
67 Dyer, White, 110.
Notes 231
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).
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).
232 Notes
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.
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.
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.
99 For further discussion of binaries as a way of marking cultural difference, see Hall,
‘The Spectacle of the “Other”’.
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).
Notes 233
102 For discussion see Chapter Five.

103 Pritsch, ‘Inventing Images’, 136.
105 Ibid., 169.
106 Ibid., 169.
107 Ibid., 201.
108 Ibid., 191.
Chapter 3
1 Hall, ‘The Work of Representation’, 33.

2 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. unknown (1966; London: Routledge,
2002), 346.
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.
234 Notes
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).
Notes 235
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.
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.
236 Notes
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.
55 Ibid., 180.
56 Ibid., 158.
57 Neiman, Why Grow Up?
58 Steward, The New Child, 17.
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).
Notes 237
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).
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.
78 Ibid., 24.
79 Ibid., 27.
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.
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 Eighteenth-
century Girlhood’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 4, no.2 (2011):
199–222.
92 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 13–14.
238 Notes
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.
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.
Notes 239
124 Ibid., 38.

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.
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.
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.
240 Notes
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).
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).
150 Ibid., 92.
151 McRobbie ‘Post-feminism’, 255–64.
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.
Notes 241
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-fashion-
week (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.
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.
242 Notes
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).
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.
Notes 243
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.
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.
244 Notes
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.
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.
Notes 245
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.
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-editor-
edward-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.
246 Notes
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.
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.
Notes 247
Chapter 5

2 Dyer, White.
3 Laing, ‘Lula Girl’.
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/joanna-
newsom-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.
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.
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.
248 Notes
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.
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.
Notes 249
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.
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.
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?.
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.
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.
250 Notes

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
Notes 251
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/charles-
dickens/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.
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’.
106 Ibid., 97.
107 Monden, ‘Contemplating in a Dream-like Room’, 142.
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.
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

126 ‘A Long, Long Way from Home’, Lula, no.7, 2008.
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).
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).
134 Ibid., 167, building on Goodman.
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.
143 ‘Flowers in December’, Lula, no.9 2009, 123, emphasis added.
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-
254 Notes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
68 De Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, 26.
69 Ibid., 26–8.
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.
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.
85 Ibid., 83.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 107.
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-year-
old teacher who identifies as white British. Poppy is a 56-year-old teacher who
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.
101 Ibid., 54.
Notes 259

103 Ibid., 59.
104 Ibid., 62.
106 Ibid., 398.
107 Mulvey notes that the jar became a box during the Renaissance.
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).
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.
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.
260 Notes
130 Ibid.
131 Gamman and Makinen as cited in Drawmer, ‘Dysmorphic Bodies’, 279.
132 Coward, Female Desire, 44.
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: real-
life 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.
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-Oh-
Lola-advert-for-Marc-Jacobs-is-banned.html (accessed 13 July 2020). A behind-
the-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/mac-
underage-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.
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.
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/beauty-
industry-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).
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).
59 Barthes, The Fashion System, xi.
60 Ibid., xii.
264 Notes

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.
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.
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.
Notes 265
87 Ibid., 171.
88 Ibid., 172.
89 Barthes as cited in de Perthuis, ‘Beyond Perfection’, 173.
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.
104 Ibid., 275.
105 Pifer, ‘Uncovering Lolita’, 148–9, citing Nabokov.
266 Notes
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).
3 Ibid., 189.
5 Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, 51.
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
Notes 267
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.
24 For discussion of motherhood and sexuality, see MacDonald, Representing Women,
132; Orbach, Bodies, 115.
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’.
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.
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’.
268 Notes
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.
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
Notes 269
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”.’
61 This question was inspired by Griselda Pollock’s concept of ‘gender reversal’ in
‘What’s Wrong With Images of Women’, 43.
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).
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
270 Notes
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
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.
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).
94 Ibid.
96 Interview with Meadham Kirchhoff in Shillingford, ‘Eye Candy’.
98 Ibid., 62–3.
99 See Chapter 4 for discussion of Riviere and masquerade.
101 Ibid., 66.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid.
Notes 271
104 British Vogue, April 2012, 283.

106 I borrow this term from McRobbie, British Fashion Design.
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.
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
272 Notes
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.
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’.
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.
Notes 273
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).
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 Pseudonym Age Occupation Occupation Ethnic Reads Fashion
No. (chosen by of Parents Origin Magazines
participant) or Women’s
Magazines?
2.6.12 1 Penny 56 Teacher Teacher, White No
engineer British
2.6.12 1 Gill 28 Administra- Teacher, White No
tor engineer British
2.6.12 1 SLK 30 Doctor Teacher, White No
engineer Scottish
24.6.12 2 Emily 27 Actor Training White Sometimes:
personnel, British Grazia, Hello,
administra- Elle, Vogue
tor/botanist
24.6.12 2 Amber 26 Features Electronics White Yes: Vogue,
Editor manager, pi- British Elle, Red. Plus
ano teacher ‘gossip maga-
zines’: Closer,
New, Now
27.6.12 3 Zoe 24 MA student Not stated Chinese Yes: Vogue
at CSM
27.6.12 3 Yves Not MA student Not stated Chinese Not stated
stated* at CSM
(in 20s)
12.8.12 4 Jean 58 Project Insurance White Yes: Good
manager surveyor, British Housekeeping
housewife
12.8.12 4 Smithy 41 Internal Retired White Not regularly
auditor British
12.8.12 4 Poppy 56 Teacher Teacher, ac- White Yes: Good
countant British Housekeeping
(regularly),
Hello (oc-
casionally)
12.8.12 4 Katherine 58 Teacher Plumber, White Not often but
housewife British occasionally
Prima
18.12.12 5 Belle 16 Student Not given White Yes: Vogue,
(school age) British Elle, Look
294 Appendix 1: Participant Demographics
18.12.12 5 Ariel Not Student Not given White Sometimes

stated* (school age) British as well as ‘ran-
(under dom ones’
20) like Heat and
OK
18.12.12 5 Cinderella 18 Student Teacher White Yes: Vogue,
(school age) British Elle
18.12.12 5 Shelby 17 Student Not given White Yes: More,
(school age) British Look
11.8.15 6 Yvette 41 Supporter Artist, Black/ Yes, mainly
care advisor cleaner Black Vogue
British:
Carib-
bean
11.8.15 6 Sayda 27 Financial ad- Retired Asian/ Vogue, Harp-
ministrator Asian er’s Bazaar,
British: Cosmopolitan,
Bangla- Elle UK, Stylist
deshi
11.8.15 6 Shanaz 36 Charity Own business Asian/ Grazia,
worker Asian Cosmopolitan,
British: Heat
Bangla-
deshi
11.8.15 6 Emma 29 Community Retired White Very rarely
fundraiser teacher, British
retired ac-
countant
Index
Aboah, Adwoa 215 ballet 10, 53, 89, 104, 197

activism 2, 46, 54, 210 Bal, Mieke 69
Addams Family Values (Sonnenfeld) 124, Bancroft, Alison 19, 129, 229 n.41
126, 143 Banet-Weiser, Sarah 54–5, 240 n.158
adolescence 1, 7, 47, 48, 66, 88, 101, 109, Barrie, James M. 171
111, 122, 153–4, 171, 185, 194, 213 Barry, Ben 59
adulthood 4, 5, 7–8, 34, 35, 48, 68, 88, 94, Barrymore, Drew 184–5, 187, 190
108–13, 134, 143, 145, 151, 154, Barthes, Roland 17, 19, 23, 57, 72, 75, 76,
161, 162, 175, 185, 213, 216, 217 80, 81, 87, 89, 105, 230 n.49
Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) Barth-Jorgensen, Dorothea 94
26–7, 107, 159, 160 Bartley, Luella 9
Age of Innocence, The (Reynolds) 39, 41, Bates, Laura 2, 54
43, 115 Bell Jar, The (Plath) 21–2
Alice and Leaping Fairy (Wright) 26 Belsey, Catherine 22
Alice and the Fairies (Wright) 25 Benwell, Bethan 7
Alice in Wonderland 6, 11, 122, 123, 124, Berger, John 64, 201
139, 142, 144, 145, 149–54, 213 Bernal, Martin 90
All the Real Girls: More Folk, Less Factory Betterton, Rosemary 65
– Bring On the Girls Who Make Big Baby 190
Things 110, 111 Birch, Helen 188
Andersen, Hans Christian 108 Black Swan (Aronofsky) 104
Ang, Ien 63, 70, 71, 231 n.81 Bland, Lucy 181–2
Angel in the House 4, 53, 82, 149, 182 body
Apfel, Iris 112 adult 6, 173, 213
Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault) 11 ageing 145, 171–2
Ariès, Philippe 34, 35, 37, 39, 233 n.8, 236 athletic 90
n.62 Black 7, 11, 208–10
Arnold, Rebecca 179–80, 194, 203, 205 cold 26, 90, 105, 106–8
Aronofsky, Darren 104 deathly 75–6, 103–4, 126, 185, 193
Arts and Crafts movement 109–13 dissatisfaction with 46
doll-like 46, 97, 153, 185, 201
Babyface 190 hair 200–201
Baccolini, Raffaella 85, 86–7, 113, 216 maternal 6, 173, 183
Backlash (Faludi) 51–5, 94, 201, 211, 240 and mind 45, 76, 97, 119
n.146, 251 n.80 and sensuality 99
Baer, Hester 2, 209 sexualized 9–10, 28, 45, 51, 126, 142,
Ballaster, Rosalind 28 161–2, 194, 200
296 Index
size, weight and thinness 4, 99, 129, social construction of 34–6

144, 145, 172, 213 trauma 5, 39, 118
stiff 95, 97, 119, 129, 131, 153 childlike femininity 1, 3–6, 8–14, 17, 26–8,
trans 222 n.29 33, 51, 55, 58, 63, 67, 78, 101, 115,
womanly 50, 144, 172, 173, 174, 176, 179 116, 165, 166, 174, 177, 186, 196,
Bordo, Susan 57–8 199, 201, 203, 211–14, 217, 218
Bourdieu, Pierre 21, 118, 139, 216 investments in 5, 70–2, 87, 112, 212, 217
Bradbury, Lorna 96 whiteness of 4, 43, 47, 50, 53, 67, 75,
Brennan, Corey 99 82–3, 89–91, 93, 105, 137, 209–10,
Breton, André 116–19, 122–4, 133, 134, 213–14
137–9, 142 Christianity 82
Breward, Christopher 20, 50, 249 n.50 Chung, Alexa 20, 139, 144, 159, 214
Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome Clark, Leith 8–11, 20, 51, 84–5, 103, 106,
(de Beauvoir) 47–8, 133 116, 129, 131, 139, 182, 191, 205,
Bronfen, Elisabeth 104, 158, 171 214, 216, 224 n.68, 250 n.74
Brookes, Rosetta 17 clothing 18, 19, 22, 39, 43, 50, 53, 59, 75,
Burman Baines, Barbara 93 87, 89, 97, 124, 134, 156, 159, 171,
Butler, Judith 3, 6, 13, 17, 29–32, 51, 63, 174–7, 190, 201
65, 85, 101, 123, 129, 154, 177, 183, black 115, 119, 124, 129, 134–6, 171,
195, 196, 202–3, 205, 221 n.29 179, 197, 202
brightly-coloured 174–5
Camera Lucida (Barthes) 23 clown-like 97
capitalism 17–18, 21, 31, 90, 99, 109, 167, fluffy 15, 49–50, 196–7, 201
217, 218 tulle 90, 94, 97, 214
Carrington, Leonora 123–4, 127–8, 139 white 22, 40, 43, 47, 75, 80, 83, 89, 90,
Carroll, Lewis 123–4, 142, 152, 172 95, 96, 105, 111, 119, 126, 129, 131,
Caws, Mary Ann 126, 128, 130 134, 149, 159, 179, 190, 197
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Cobain, Kurt 179, 186, 187
(CCCS) 14, 226–7 n.96 Comme des Garçons 124
Centuries of Childhood (Ariès) 34–6 consumption 17, 50, 54, 55, 65, 88, 114,
Chabrol, Claude 134 174–6, 217, 218
Chadwick, Whitney 117, 119, 122 Cook, Daniel T. 39
Chambers, Lucinda 11, 90, 91, 94 Coppola, Sofia 47, 83–4, 93
Charming Lolita (von Unwerth) 164, Cottingley Fairies 24
176 Courtney Love: The Hole Truth 179–81
Cherry Ripe 167–72 Coward, Rosalind 3, 97, 145, 194, 200
child sexuality 11, 118, 162, 164, 224 n.66 Craik, Jennifer 19, 24
childhood Crane, Diana 59, 241 n.4, 242 n.20
in Breton 117–18 curiosity 6, 28, 38, 39, 111, 112, 114,
feminization of 42–3 140–3, 145, 149, 153, 154, 213, 216
and labour 35, 42, 87, 216 Curran, James 69–70
‘long’ 87, 216
nostalgia for 113 Dahl, Sophie 248 n.23
perpetual 43, 45–6 Darling, John 37
privilege 42, 45, 115, 118, 139–140, Dawson, Jen 124, 126, 129
213, 216 Day, Corinne 25, 186
Romantic 5, 14, 36–43, 47, 68, 70, 75, Dazed Digital 9, 10
78, 80, 86–8, 112, 115, 118, 119, Death of the Author, The (Barthes) 57
140, 142, 167, 173, 175, 213 de Beauvoir, Simone 1, 2, 7, 29, 33, 46–8,
sexual drives 14, 39 88, 133, 153, 154, 166, 186, 190, 213
Index 297
Devault, Marjorie L. 69 Faludi, Susan 33, 52, 53, 240 n.146, 251 n.80
Dickens, Charles 96 Fanning, Dakota 27, 66, 67, 106, 156,
digital feminism 2, 54 159–69, 171, 176, 194, 214
digital media 21, 220 n.16 fashion 1, 22, 49–50. see also fashion
digital photography 24 photography
Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 239 n.138 and capitalism 17–18, 21, 31, 90, 99,
discourse 2–8, 11, 12, 14, 17–19, 22, 23, 109, 167, 217, 218
27–35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 46–8, 55, 57, images 4, 11–13, 18, 20, 21, 27–31, 59,
61, 65, 69, 70, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82, 86, 61, 65, 72, 75, 113, 114, 143, 161,
87, 90, 97, 102, 109, 111, 112, 115, 176, 186, 218
117, 118, 123, 135, 137, 140, 143, and magazines 2, 5, 9, 10, 13, 50, 59,
144, 149, 153, 156–9, 162, 164, 167, 62, 65, 67, 76, 87, 144, 156, 205,
173, 174, 176, 177, 180–3, 187, 191, 207, 211, 224 n.67, 230 n.49
193, 211, 213–18 magical thinking 88–9
post-feminist 51–5, 101, 102, 211 media 2–4, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 27, 28,
diversity 18, 62, 209, 210, 213, 215 30, 51, 53, 57, 58, 61, 62, 67, 72, 76,
divinity 80–2, 182, 267 n.22 101, 112, 156, 161, 165, 166, 172,
dolls 97, 119, 149, 153, 164, 172, 177, 185, 176, 178, 209, 210, 213, 215
190, 197, 260 n.137 revivals 93
Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Difficult spreads 18, 68, 175
and Deadpan and Wonderfully system 7, 17, 52, 86, 89, 144, 176, 205, 215
Different, Lula Dreams of Fashion and Its Social Agendas (Crane)
Wednesday 126, 127 242 n.20
Doyle, Arthur Conan 24 Fashion and Postcolonial Critique (Gaugele
Drawmer, Lois 123, 144 and Titton) 271 n.7
Driscoll, Catherine 145 Fashion as Photograph (Shinkle) 20
Duguid, Michelle 92, 93, 97 fashion photography 5, 6, 10, 12–14, 27–8,
Dyer, Richard 23, 24, 41, 82, 90, 91, 137 60–1, 112
class and gender 59
Eden 37, 87, 144, 169 genre of 18–21
Elle 20, 62, 182 Lolita in (see Lolita)
Émile (Rousseau) 37–40, 43, 45, 117, 137, ‘romantic’ genre of 75
141, 182 and truth 21–7
Encoding-Decoding model (Hall) 60, 61 Fashion System, The (Barthes) 19, 57, 75
Enninful, Edward 9, 89, 215 Fass, Paula S. 86
Entwistle, Joanne 222 n.35 Felix, Petal 66
epistemophilia 140–2 female gaze 6, 13, 14, 58, 62–7, 141, 191
Erlandson, Eric 178 female sexuality 5, 6, 22, 50, 177, 186, 187,
eternal child 1, 46–8, 122, 143, 153, 213, 200, 210, 266 n.18
240 n.146 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) 1–2,
Eugenides, Jeffrey 83 48–51
Evans, Caroline 22, 28, 60, 100–1, 173, femininity 1, 3–7, 9–11, 13, 14, 17, 20–2,
187, 203 27–31, 49–50, 64, 193–4. see also
Eve 113, 182 childlike femininity
Everyday Sexism Project (Bates) 2, 54 feminism 2, 3, 14, 29, 34, 51–6, 58, 65, 70,
97, 109, 113
fairies 24, 115, 138 backlash against 51–5, 94, 97, 201, 211
fairy tales 68, 78, 88, 89, 108, 123, 137, 141 digital 2, 54
false consciousness 59 Fourth Wave 2
false universalism 2, 49 and gay liberation 145
298 Index
intersectional 2, 29, 34, 209–10, 220 n.16, re-signification 4, 6, 14, 116–17, 177,
221 n.29 179, 183, 196, 211
popular 54–5, 215 roles 43, 60, 63, 76, 191
Second Wave 2, 31, 46, 49, 99, 211, 217 and sexuality 30, 66, 123
feminist curiosity 6, 114, 140–3, 145, 149, trouble 202–3, 210
153, 154 gender-neutral 141, 162, 232 n.97
feminization 22, 43, 42, 142 Gevinson, Tavi 112
femme-enfant-fatale 6, 14, 115–17, 132–6, Gill, Rosalind 54
143, 153–4, 213 girlhood
Alice in Wonderland 123, 124, 142, 144, and craft 111
145, 149–54 curious 133, 141, 143, 149
Breton and 117–19, 122–4, 133, 134, 137 devastating 104
curiosity 140–3, 145, 149, 153, 154 heteronormative 85
in fashion photography 124–32 ‘imperious’ 143, 153
magic and superstition 136–9 party wear 214
social class and privilege 139–40 and poverty 108, 139
Surrealism 115–24, 133–4, 151 ‘precocity’ 159, 168, 176
Fiske, John 60 queer 85
Flowers 93, 111, 141, 149, 171–2 rebellious 133, 154
in bloom 168–9 subversive 6, 133, 142, 213
daisies 84, 167, 184 sweet 129, 191
roses 22, 143 girliness 1–2, 50, 160, 177, 196–9, 200,
and virginity 167 210, 215
focus groups 4, 12, 27, 48, 58, 62, 67–70, Goddard, Molly 212, 214
72, 86, 89, 94, 105, 160, 161, 187 Goffman, Erving 5, 201
Forget Me Not 150, 151, 251 n.80 Gogglebox 59, 242 n.16
Foster, Hal 118 Goldman, Eric 53, 157
Foucault, Michel 3, 8, 11, 18, 19, 28–9, 33, Goldstein, Philip 58, 59, 61
65, 69, 123, 154, 205, 239 n.138 Goth, Mia 26, 27
Fourth Wave feminism 2 Goude, Jean-Paul 165
Fraser, Nancy 99, 109, 151, 217 Great Expectations (Dickens) 96
Freud, Sigmund 11, 14, 39, 48, 64, 86, 115, Greene, Gayle 52, 240 n.142
118, 164 grunge 8, 11, 26, 178–9, 190
Friedan, Betty 1–2, 33, 46, 48–51 Gutt, Tim 148, 150, 151
Fuss, Diana 65, 71 Guyland (Kimmel) 7
Gamman, Lorraine 60, 63, 145 hair

garçon manqué 124, 256 n.47 afro 209
gender blonde 80, 105, 149, 159, 174, 179, 184,
constructed coherence 76, 78, 113, 185, 248 n.23, 248 n.25
213 wigs 209
identity 61, 63, 123, 203, 218 Hall, Stuart 7, 14, 22, 33, 60, 219 n.5, 243
intelligibility 29–30, 61, 69, 78, 85, 101, n.36
183 Haraway, Donna 217–18
melancholia 5, 14, 76, 101–2, 113 Harrison, Martin 18–20, 22, 61, 65,
parody 6, 94, 149, 177, 183–4, 195, 196, 243 n.35
203, 205, 210, 213 Heavenly Creatures (Huseby) 5, 76, 80–9,
politics 207 93, 94, 104, 105, 111, 113, 115, 123,
pronouns 29–30 140, 182, 183, 192, 194
Index 299
Hermes, Joke 63, 70, 71, 87, 231 n.81 Jones, Terry 10
heroin chic 6, 26, 186, 193 Jordanova, Ludmilla 63
heterosexual 7, 30, 32, 52, 55, 62, 65, 78,
123, 178 Kant, Immanuel 85, 111, 113, 154
heterosexual matrix 30, 78, 123, 178 Kasterine, Cathy 25, 174
Higonnet, Anne 39, 43, 86, 183 kawaii 12
Hindley, Myra 188, 189 kidulthood 8, 153, 217, 223 n.56
Hodkinson, Will 76 Killing Eve 214
Hoggart, Richard 14, 226 n.96 Kimmel, Michael 7
Holland, Patricia 34, 68, 144, 162, 164 Kinderwhore 5, 6, 8, 14, 68, 177–8, 210, 213
Holland, Samantha 50 Meadham Kirchhoff and hyper-
Holman, Hannah 149–51, 260 n.136, girliness 196–9
260 n.137 politics of exclusion 207–9
home 5, 31, 46, 50, 54, 76, 82, 85, 92–5, Pretty on the Inside 184–7
101, 106–113 Slutwalk 199–205, 208–10
homeovestism 203 Sugar ‘n’ Spite 187–96
homoerotic desire 65 and virgin/whore dichotomy 178–84
hooks, bell 3, 49, 50, 66, 82 whiteness 207–9
Huppert, Isabelle 134 Kirchhoff, Benjamin 196, 197, 205
Huseby, Benjamin Alexander 5, 80, 93 Kismaric, Susan 24
hyper-girliness 196–7 Knightley, Keira 20, 108, 115, 116, 134–9,
hysteria 127, 128, 256 n.57 142, 214
Knight, Nick 196
i-D 8–11, 66, 67, 124, 129, 162, 177, 184, Kubrick, Stanley 6, 144, 155–8, 161, 174,
185, 187, 188, 190, 211, 214, 215, 176
224 n.65
Industrial Revolution 42, 108 Lacan, Jacques 64, 65
Infantile Sexuality (Freud) 39 La Debutante (Carrington) 128–9
infantilization 3, 7, 45, 49, 51, 144, 161 Lady of Shalott, The (Waterhouse) 75,
innocence 4, 5, 9, 11, 22, 28, 38, 39, 42, 45, 102–4, 192
47, 78, 80, 87, 89, 95, 111, 112, 115, Lawrence, Thomas 43, 44
118, 119, 126, 129, 131–3, 136, 142, L’Ecriture Automatique 119, 121
149, 151, 158, 167–9, 183, 185, 186, Lehmann, Ulrich 21
190, 194 Life Less Ordinary, A (Roversi) 94
intersectionality 2–3, 29, 34, 58, 209–10, Lifter, Rachel 10
220 n.16, 221 n.29 Lisbon sisters (Coppola) 83–4
investment 5, 20, 70–2, 87, 112, 212, 217 Little Match Girl, The (Andersen) 108
Locke, John 236 n.62
Jackson, Peter 82 Lolita 6, 112, 144, 155–6, 176, 217
Jacobs, Marc 6, 10, 11, 20, 27, 59, 84, 156, consumption, petulance and death
159, 162, 164, 167–8, 214, 263 n.47 174–6
James, Allison 35 Dolores Haze 156–9, 166, 167, 173, 175,
Jansson, Mikael 151 176
Jenkins, Kimberley 271 n.7 Fanning and 162–5
Jenks, Chris 34–6, 145 fashion photography 158–9
Jensen, An-Magritt 42 Humbert’s view of 156–8, 161, 166,
Jeux d’Enfants (Tanning) 124–6, 129 167, 171, 173–6
Jobling, Paul 4, 5, 24, 26, 262 n.34 lollipop 155–6, 164, 174, 176
Jones-Henry, Yasmin 67 Nabokov and misreadings 157–8
300 Index
as nymphet 157–8, 173 melancholia. see gender melancholia

Oh, Lola! 159–61 Menon, Elizabeth K. 137
tantrums and naughtiness 165–7 Me Too movement 221 n.17
Lolita subculture (Japanese) 12 Michals, Duane 145–6, 149
Long, Long Way from Home, A (Yemchuk) Millais, John Everett 75, 103, 169, 170
5, 106–11, 113 Mitchell, W. J. T. 22
Love, Courtney 6, 178–86, 190, 196, 197, Miu Miu 11, 20, 26, 107
201 Monden, Masafumi 83–4, 101
Lula (Clark) 8–11, 20, 51, 76–80, 84–5, Monti, Raffaelle 100
89, 105, 106, 109–13, 126, 133, 143, Morley, David 60, 221 n.22, 242 n.25, 243
182, 191, 211, 213, 214, 216, 224 n.36
n.58, Moss, Kate 3, 8, 25–6, 162, 164, 185, 186,
224 n.67 214
Lusty, Natalya 122–4, 128 motherhood 23, 35, 43, 48–9, 93–4, 104,
Lyne, Adrian 157 130, 133, 143, 145, 151, 157, 171–5,
Lynge-Jorlén, Ane 224 n.67, 226 n.91 182–3, 186
Moylan, Tom 86–7
MacDonald, Myra 58 multiculturalism 18, 207, 209
Machor, James L. 58, 59, 61 Mulvey, Laura 6, 64, 65, 87, 114, 141, 142,
McAra, Catriona 6, 122–3, 133, 134, 142, 241 n.8
213
McQueen, Alexander 193 Nabokov, Vladimir 155–9, 166, 167, 174–6
McRobbie, Angela 3, 11, 18, 46, 51–4, nature 11, 30, 38–9, 45, 75, 117
71, 89, 101, 107–9, 145, 151, 177, naughtiness 165–7
205–6, 209, 215 Neiman, Susan 7–8, 35, 37, 108–9, 111–13,
magic 76, 88, 112, 138, 140, 145, 207 137, 154, 217, 247 n.19
Magritte, René 151 neoliberalism 8, 54–6, 60, 99, 109, 151,
Makinen, Merja 145 216, 217
male gaze 10, 12, 58, 64–6, 97, 141, 192, neomania 17–18
199, 203, 205 Newsom, Joanna 76–9, 89, 105
Malson, Helen 69, 99 #NewVogue 215
man-child 7 Nixon, Sean 65
Man Repeller 205–7 nostalgia 9, 11, 14, 71, 76, 85–9, 92, 93,
Marshment, Margaret 63 101, 113, 114, 139, 174, 207, 209,
Martin, Penny 11 216
Marx, Karl 60, 64, 87
Mary Janes 6, 124, 159, 179, 197 Oakley, Ann 36
masculinity 7, 64, 192, 199 Oh, Lola! (Jacobs) 6, 27, 59, 66, 67, 82,
masquerade 71, 133, 177, 186, 206, 207, 156, 159–61, 164–8, 171, 173, 175,
209, 210 176, 194
Mavor, Carol 42 Ophelia (Millais) 75, 103
Maynard, Margaret 19, 228 n.29 Orla Kiely 129–32, 214
Meadham, Edward 196, 197, 205 Orphan Annie 139
Meadham Kirchhoff 6, 14, 106, 177–8, O’Toole, Laurence 162, 224 n.66
196–200, 203, 205, 207–8, 210,
213–14 Pandora 141
and hyper-girliness 196–9 Papin sisters 134, 257 n.74
Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, A 6, 177–8, Peccinotti, Harri 153
196–9, 205, 208, 210 performativity 29, 33, 51, 144, 211
Medine, Leandra 205 Perkins Gilman, Charlotte 127, 128
Index 301
Perry, Grayson 203, 204 Rodino-Colocino, Michelle 220 n.16

Peter Pan (Barrie) 171–3, 176 Romantic childhood 5, 14, 36–43, 47, 68,
Peter Pan collar 111, 129, 131, 144, 179 70, 75, 78, 80, 86–8, 112, 115, 118,
Peter-Pan mindset 7 119, 140, 142, 167, 173, 175, 213
petulance 175–6 Romantic woman-child 75–6
and precocity 167–72 Heavenly Creatures 80–5
Phelan, Kate 11, 92, 95, 98, 150–1, 214, Long, Long Way from Home, A 106–8
250 n.74, 265 n.94 Lula, Girl of My Dreams 76–80
Phillips, Barbara J. 59 nostalgia 85–9
Pifer, Ellen 157, 158, 175 whiteness 89–91
Pivovarova, Sasha 89–99, 102–5, 152, 214 White Nights 92–106
planned obsolescence 17, 31, 87, 111, 112 Rose, Gillian 61
Plath, Sylvia 21 Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski) 130–2, 257
Polanski, Roman 130–1 n.65
politics 6, 21, 22, 29, 41, 46, 54–6, 63, 65, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 37–40, 42, 43, 45,
67, 88–9, 201, 202, 207–10, 213–16 117, 137, 141, 236 n.62
Pollock, Linda A. 34 Roversi, Paolo 94
polymorphous 9, 11, 68, 224 n.66 Rubin, Herbert J. 70
polysemy 14, 57, 60, 72, 243 n.36 Rubin, Irene S. 70
popular feminism 54–5, 215 Rummel, Andrea 133
post-feminism 51–5, 94, 101–2, 108, 161, Runaways, The 164, 169
205–7, 210, 211 Russell, Cameron 30
Power of TWO 199, 201–3, 207–8, 210
Prada Candy 12, 112, 165, 166 Schiaparelli, Elsa 100, 129, 130, 135
Pre-Raphaelites 11, 75, 78, 103, 104, 109, Schoeneman, Deborah 1
111 schoolgirls 119, 132, 179, 185
Pretty on the Inside (von Unwerth) 184–7 Scott, Venetia 124
Pritsch, Sylvia 31, 72, 146 Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir) 4, 48
Project Girly 1, 196 Second Wave feminism 2, 31, 46, 49, 99,
Prout, Alan 35 211, 217
psychoanalysis 5, 39, 64–66, 71, 118, 128, sexuality 5, 6, 9, 11, 18, 22, 28–30, 39, 40,
203 42, 43, 46, 50, 65–8, 82, 118, 157,
160, 164, 168, 169, 173, 176, 177,
Qvortrup, Jens 36 181–3, 186, 187, 194, 200, 201, 210
Seydoux, Léa 165–6
Radway, Janice A. 61–2, 71 Shields, Brooke 164, 191, 214
Rapunzel 97, 103 Shinkle, Eugénie 19, 20
reception study 4, 12, 14, 56, 57–62, 66, Shulman, Alexandra 9, 67, 89, 215
67–70, 72, 80, 85, 86, 96, 161, 176, Slutwalk movement 2, 6–7, 14, 106, 177,
177, 184, 187–96, 200, 210, 212, 216 199–205, 208–10, 213, 220 n.16
Reis, Pamela T. 169 Smith, Joan 185, 186
resonant image 68 Snow, Carmel 19
Respini, Eva 24 social class 24
Reynolds, Joshua 39, 41, 42, 115 and privilege 139–40
Richardson, Bob 186 race and 42
Richardson, Terry 9, 28, 162, 164, 173 skin colour and 101
Riot Grrrls 178, 199–205 socialization theory 35, 36
Riviere, Joan 71 Sombart, Werner 17
Roach, Jacqui 66 Songbird, The 76–9
Rocamora, Agnès 18, 78 Sontag, Susan 23
302 Index
spectatorship uncertainty 145, 218

black looks 66, 67, 245 n.73, 245 n.74 Under Exposure (Day) 25, 26, 186, 267
female gaze 6, 13, 14, 58, 62–7, 141, n.40
191 Urwin, Rosamund 268–9 n.59
male gaze 10, 12, 58, 64–6, 97, 141, utopia 87, 113–14, 174, 216
192, 199, 203, 205
oppositional gaze 66 Vänskä, Annamari 168
Spirit of Geometry, The (Magritte) 151 Veiled Vestal Virgin, A (Monti) 100
‘Star Girls’ 89–91 Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y 38
Stern, Bert 155, 156, 158, 176 Vindication of the Rights of Women, A
Steward, James C. 39 (Wollstonecraft) 43, 45–6, 128
Stewart, Susan 86 Violet Book 216
Stoppard, Lou 196 Violette (Chabrol) 134–5
‘sugar and spice’ 133, 191, 254 n.146 virginal femininity 4, 115
Sugar ‘n’ Spite 187–96 Virgin Suicides, The (Coppola) 47, 76,
Sunny and Sexy 174–5 83–5, 93, 95, 101, 104
superstition 117, 136–9, 142 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
superwaif 3, 8, 68 (Mulvey) 64
Surrealism 6, 14, 151–2 Vodianova, Natalia 89–90
Breton and 117–24, 134, 137, 142 Vogue
femme-enfant-fatale 115–24, 133–4, Italia 11, 115, 116, 135, 139, 164, 174,
151 214
sweets and candy 68, 112, 166, 175, 191, Paris 145, 151, 263 n.49
217, 253 n.146 UK 6–11, 25, 27, 28, 62, 67, 68, 75, 80,
symbolic production 17, 18, 21, 87 81, 89–92, 94, 95, 98, 106, 148, 150,
151, 172, 177, 186, 196, 199, 201,
Tagg, John 23, 24 202, 206, 207, 209, 210, 213–16,
Tanning, Dorothea 117, 123–9, 139, 142 222 n.41, 223 n.56, 250 n.74, 251
tantrums 9, 68, 165–7, 173, 217, 265 n.94 n.80, 253 n.146, 265 n.94, 271 n.5,
Tear-Illusion dress (Schiaparelli) 129, 130, 272 n.19
135 von Unwerth, Ellen 2, 115, 116, 134, 143,
television 1, 59, 62, 70, 221 n.22 164, 176, 179–81, 184, 185, 214
Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies
(Morley) 243 n.36 Walker, Tim 2, 5, 9, 28, 68, 92–3, 104, 214,
Teller, Juergen 2, 6, 10, 20, 84, 124, 143, 250 n.73
156, 159, 176, 185, 214 Walter, Brian 158
Tennyson, Alfred 102, 103 Waterhouse, John William 75, 102–4
Testino, Mario 7, 9, 28, 89 Ways of Seeing (Berger) 64
Theyskens, Oliver 7 Wednesday Addams 6, 124, 126, 130, 133,
This Side of the Blue 103, 105 143, 144, 153, 213
Thornton, Minna 22, 173 West, Rosemary 188
toddlers 47, 94 164, 178, 260 n.138 Whelehan, Imelda 54
Tonkiss, Fran 70 White, Duncan 156, 161, 174
toys 37, 68, 94, 112, 175, 190, 217, 253 White Mischief 250 n.73
n.146 White Nights (Walker) 5, 68, 92–106
Tseëlon, Efrat 50, 182 whiteness 40–1, 67, 75, 82, 89–91, 99, 207,
Tulloch, Carol 209 209, 215, 250 n.73
Twemlow, Alice 174 Why Grow Up? (Neiman) 7–8, 108–9, 217
Twiggy 5, 11 Williams, Leslie 42
Index 303
Williams, Robbie 7 as femme fragile 133, 136

Williams, Val 20 perpetual childhood 43–6
Willson, Jacki 64–5 sexuality (see sexuality)
Wilson, Angus 96 woman-child 1–8, 11, 12, 14, 31, 34, 57,
Wilson, Elizabeth 17, 112, 216 59, 71, 72, 89, 97, 113, 116, 153,
Winship, Janice 86 164, 210, 211, 214–18
Wolf in Lamb’s Clothing, A (Meadham womanhood 3–6, 9, 47, 80, 113, 143,
Kirchhoff) 6, 177–8, 196–9, 205, 151, 162–5, 176, 210, 211, 213,
208, 210 257 n.67
Wollstonecraft, Mary 1–3, 7, 33, 43, 45–6, Women’s Wear Daily 164
48, 51, 128, 169, 237 n.83 Wright, Elsie 24–6
woman 63, 119. see also childlike femininity
aggressiveness 200 Yemchuk, Yelena 5, 103, 106
childlike 3, 5, 34, 87 #YesAllWomen 2, 220 n.16
and children 2, 33, 36, 43, 55, 57, 75, Young, Iris Marion 69
78, 211, 216
curves 50
as eternal child 46–8, 153 Zavataros, George 203
as femme fatale 4, 115, 119, 133–4, 136, Zelizer, Viviana A. 41
141, 175, 184 Zimmer, Dieter E. 158
304

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Picturing the Woman-Child

Also by Morna Laing and published by Bloomsbury

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo

First published in Great Britain 2021

Copyright © Morna Laing, 2021

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute

Cover design by Adriana Brioso

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5958-0

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

List of Figures viii

2 Fashion Photography and Gender 17

5 The Romantic Woman-Child, Lost from Home 75

15 ‘White Nights’. British Vogue, January 2007. Photographer: Tim

31 Rosemary’s Baby, 1968. Director: Roman Polanski. Actors: Mia

differentials between differently situated groups of women, as well as explaining

Defining the woman-child

in evaluating whether the ‘woman-child’ was capable of shedding her Second

discourses on womanhood, acted out on adult bodies through fashion, make-up

That coherence is partially undone in images of the rebellious

resistance to growing up in adults as a general category.55 Her discussion of

Magazines and methodology

In order to trace patterns in representation, I collected more than 2000 images

As such, the magazine represents an attempt to sidestep the sexualization

As such, images of childlike femininity in i-D represent a point of difference

The structure of this book

The research underpinning this book is interdisciplinary in scope, drawing from

Fashion Photography and Gender

Capitalism’s favourite child

Writing in 1902, the German sociologist Werner Sombart described fashion as

material production, which concerns the production of the article of clothing

The genre of fashion photography

Fashion photography can be understood as one element within fashion media

fashion photography to around 1890.16 Jennifer Craik offers a more expansive

Christopher Breward observes that the ‘standard literature on fashion

Fashion photography comprises a wide array of practices (editorial and

Photography and truth

labour of making things mean.’53 Producers make choices at every stage of an

filters and other techniques of manipulation. This perception is key to making

confuse and/or conflate Day’s grunge-style representation of Kate Moss

‘Under Exposure’ was part of a wider aesthetic of ‘documentary realism’ in

From fashion images to female selves

As the previous section attests, fashion photography plays a key role in

It is by virtue of such chains of meaning that childlike femininity has crystallized

omission from Foucault’s oeuvre is significant if one accepts gender as key to

If the actual subject of a fashion photograph cannot keep up with her

This chapter has theorized fashion as a phenomenon that is intimately connected

photography is key to the ongoing negotiation between cultural discourse and

Since, in order to say something meaningful, we have to ‘enter language’, where

critics –pertaining to both internal inconsistencies and intersectional omissions.

Childhood as a social construct

Romantic childhood can be understood as shorthand for a particular way of

the Romantic child tends to be associated with Genevan philosopher Jean-

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

In his treatise, Rousseau mythologized children as closer to the state of

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

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

of Romantic childhood thus spoke to the experience of privileged children, and

Mary Wollstonecraft: Women kept in a state of

The supposedly genderless nature of childhood in visual representation

‘infantine airs’ and left to an existence as ‘overgrown children’.83 While Rousseau

List of Figures viii

2 Fashion Photography and Gender 17

5 The Romantic Woman-Child, Lost from Home 75