Picturing the Woman-Child

Fashion, Feminism and the Female Gaze

Morna Laing

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350059603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

The childlike character of ideal femininity has long been critiqued by feminists, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Simone de Beauvoir. Yet, women continue to be represented as childlike in the western fashion media, despite the historical connotations of inferiority. This book questions why such images still hold appeal to contemporary women, after three, or even four, waves of feminism. Focusing on the period of 1990–2015, Picturing the Woman-Child traces the evolution of childlike femininity in British fashion magazines, including Vogue, i-D and Lula, Girl of my Dreams. These images draw upon a network of references, from Kinderwhore and Lolita to Alice in Wonderland and the femme-enfant of Surrealism. Alongside analysis of fashion photography, the book presents the findings of original research into audience reception. Inviting contemporary women to comment on images of the 'woman-child' provides an insight into the meaning of this figure as well as an evaluation of theory on the 'female gaze'. Both scholarly and accessible, the book paves the way for future studies on how readers make sense of fashion imagery.

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 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 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 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 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 j...