Saturday, April 25

I wake up in Rayne’s bed around 9:00am. Her room is always nice to wake up in. For some reason, the sun never feels jarring or intruding when it shines through her windows in the morning. My husband is calling me to come downstairs to let him in, the firefighters have asked him all the questions they needed to and let him pack up some essentials from the smoldering mess of our apartment. I feel a little guilty because I didn’t think to change out of my sooty pajamas when I collapsed into Rayne’s white sheets and I must assume they smell like smoke by now. It is hard for me to tell because everything smells like smoke to me and will for a few days.

Rayne was awake writing at 3:30am and the first person to pick up my call after the firefighters got us out. The restaurant we lived over, a mom and pop sushi place we loyally kept ordering from even after the health department briefly shut them down and our minor cockroach problem coincidentally went away, was, in that early morning hour, still on fire. My husband, Andrew, had wrangled the cat into his crate before the firefighters chopped their way up to our floor. On the street, he rubbed my back as I hacked black snot onto the sidewalk and then ushered me and the cat into a car to Rayne’s. Despite the circumstances, I couldn’t help feeling very romantic about it all. I was getting on him just a day before about never holding doors open for me. It’s not that I’m surprised by how good he is in a crisis nor how good he is to me in general, but I suddenly feel very aware of it. Sometimes in my head, he’s still 19.

Andrew, my knight in flannel pajama pants and a pair of Caterpillar construction boots some sympathetic Belgian raver gave him on their way to after-afters, arrives at Rayne’s with breakfast from Apollo Bagels, which is funny because we’ve never had them before and right now seems like an odd time to follow a staycation tourist-in-my-own-city impulse. Maybe he went because we’re never in Williamsburg this early or maybe it was because he spent all the early morning from about 4am onward waiting around for the firecheif to show up and say nothing, really, of substance and so the long line seemed less daunting. I can’t tell if the toasted bagel is burnt or if my mouth is burnt, but it crackles when I bite into it. The tomato is gorgeously tender, the thin ribbon of skin on the slices don’t even catch as I take a sloppy bite. The salt and acid tang of the tomato stings my tongue in odd spots like metal zaps, but the cream cheese is soothing. It isn’t the most generous layer of cream cheese I’ve ever had on a bagel, but the consistency is far more buttery and silky than I’m used to.

After breakfast, we load the cat and the go-bags into Andrew’s car and relocate to the apartment of our best New York friends from college. Gene and Maude have offered up their couch for the weekend. Once Alamo is settled with litter and food, Andrew takes me back to our place to survey the damage. We each gather a laundry bag of clothing to serve as our respective wardrobes for the foreseeable future and decide that opting for wash and fold is completely worth it. After we drop off our smokey clothes to the laundromat, I want to walk around alone for a little while to clear my head and I want to stress eat sugar. I make my way down Knickerbocker stopping into 99 cent stores to buy packs of socks and boxers and white tee shirts we can wear immediately. It begins raining harder and I realize I should have grabbed the umbrella Gene offered me, but that wouldn’t do anything to keep my slippers dry. I am still wearing the clothing I fled the apartment in: Christmas patterned pajama pants, a big tee shirt covered in paint splatter, and rubber bottomed felt clog slippers. I am soaked-through halfway back to Maude and Gene’s. I think that I’m letting myself get wet-stray-puppy-pathetic as an excuse to outwardly look as dramatic as I feel inside and get a bit embarrassed at the thought that I am appropriating the aesthetic signifiers of homelessness. I suppose that I am technically homeless, but the not-so-serious sort where I have a good credit score and lots of people want to help me. I have no reason to be wallowing in the street.

On my walk, I also grab an assortment of checkout counter candy: orange slices, caramel creams, and Jordan almonds. I have genuinely no clue why I bought these. These are not candies I particularly like. I doubt these are candies anyone particularly likes. In hindsight, I will point to these choices as evidence that I was still operating in a state of shock 12 hours later.

For dinner, we order Tofu Pad Thai from Klom Klorm and eat it while re-watching The Wedding Banquet on Tubi because Maude and Gene say they haven’t seen it. The experience is frighteningly comforting in its familiarity and I realize I’m going to miss a lot about our burnt up apartment. It is the longest I’ve lived in a single place since high school by a factor of four. I love getting Klom Klorm and watching a movie at home. I love the feeling of my mouth being too full and the slightly rubbery give to a tightly wound jumble of noodles as my teeth press through them. I always order my Pad Thai embarrassingly mild, but right now I can blame my poor singed tongue. I finish all my tofu pieces while they’re still hot and chew on the slice of lime for something to do with my mouth to keep from slurping down the rest of the noodles because I want the last half for breakfast.

Sunday, April 26

I eat the Klom Klorm leftovers cold before I brush my teeth. The noodles have concealed together into a hard mass that I could wet and microwave if I cared too, but I’m too tired. I cut the mass into bite sized pieces with the side of my fork and it reminds me of this atrocious baked spaghetti casserole my grandma used to make for us. You’d think a recipe like that would put the marinara sauce into the casserole, but you’d be wrong. The bake is just the spaghetti noodle and some sort of sealing agent, maybe egg? Not cheese. The marinara sauce, and never enough of it, is globbed onto the cube of spaghetti once plated. I know I’m in a highly emotional state when I’m feeling nostalgic about baked spaghetti.

Gene makes me coffee with aplomb. She shows me the bag, a special brand from Cleveland, and I hear her grind up the beans and lovingly pour the hot water over the chemex while I stare into my takeout container and wrestle with my solid leftovers.

After we tour a few apartments, Andrew and I stop for lunch in Ridgewood. I order a falafel burrito at Abracadabra Magic Diner. There’s too much rice, but the harissa sauce is incredible and the falafel is perfect: fluffy and steaming tender inside with a crisp exterior. I’m still experiencing a sporadic, mildly spicy pop-rocks sensation at the sides of my tongue. The arugula in my burrito tastes to me like stinging nettle. Or, since I’ve never actually sampled singing nettle, I should say that it tastes like the weird spikey heirloom lettuce my mom used to grow that we told her to stop putting in salads because it hurt our tongues. I think maybe my tongue is just hurt already and the arugula is normal.

For dinner we burn some Red Baron Frozen Pizza and Andrew suggests we watch The X-Files with Maude because I’ve seen every episode a dozen times and it effectively calms me down.

Monday, April 27

I stop for an egg and cheese on my way to the office. The corner store near my temporary home is nearly identical to the one near my newly uninhabitable home. The egg and cheese tastes so different though. The egg is firmer and there is more cheese but no mayo or salt or ketchup, which I didn’t think you had to ask for. Maybe I used to have to ask for that years ago but stopped having to after a while, I can’t remember.

I leave work 30 minutes early to go tour some apartments. I have a bad feeling about each, but feel obligated to check them all out, just in case one could work. Since I feel so tired and low, I stop by the Pret a Manger under my office to buy a pastry and lift my mood with sugar. The cashier there who flirts with me puts an extra Harvest Cookie in the bag and gives me a meaningful wink. He angles his hand at the last moment so our fingers touch when I take the bag from him. It takes me a moment to realize he’s flirting again and not taking pity on me, since there’s no way he could know I’m a charity case right now. I dislike the way I look in the way that makes me wary of, if not outright judgemental of, anyone who seems attracted to me. The ego boost and extra cookie lift my spirits, though, because I still look a mess—I haven’t bought any replacement hair product or makeup yet. I eat both cookies on the train.

Andrew, who has been showing the Red Cross our damage, catches up with me on the last tour, then we pack up and move from Maude and Gene’s couch to a spare room at our friend Sam’s apartment in Bed-Stuy. Once we settle the cat, I take a long walk. I stop for a veggie quesadilla and a Lemon Brisk Tea in a can from Campos Grill. I can’t recall the last time I had Brisk, or any tea in a can for that matter. It feels like Jordan almonds all over again when I stare at the beverage on my red plastic meal tray.

The quesadilla is underwhelming in a phenomenal way. Almost bland. Too much avocado. I feel spoiled, like the cook could sense I needed something warm and wet and mild and comforting. The cheese stretches white and thick over the tender black beans and they look to me like a fresh set of metallic gel nails. For some reason, I like that. I like how the fajita veggies squeak against my teeth and how metal the tea tastes out of the can, too. Something about the cool shinyness of it offsets the campfire smell that I still can’t blow out of my sinus or wash out of my hair.

Tuesday, April 28

Usually on Tuesday mornings, I meet Gene and Maude at Bushwick Diner at 7am for our weekly pre-work breakfast. Maude always gets two eggs sunnyside up, avocado, and rye toast. Gene gets a variation of that sometimes, but recently has been having a muffin. She gets corned beef every great once in a while, on special occasions or when she’s really stressed out. I always have the Bushwick Wrap, which has egg whites, avocado, spinach, and scallion cream cheese. The avocado and cream cheese is a little bit of soft and fatty overkill, which is why I like it so much.

Instead, on this Tuesday, I head straight into the city from Bed-Stuy. I stop at the FiDi Whole Foods before I get to my office and eat a single-serve container of Tiramisu because I feel crazy and they put it out already, so it must be acceptable to do this. There’s coffee inside, at least. At work, I make myself an iced coffee and spiral about how much money I’m spending on food. The cash we’re getting from insurance and the Red Cross is going to go straight into the next safety deposit. So for lunch, I scrounge together something from the free fruit and chips and granola bars in the break room.

After more apartment tours, I wind up back in Bushwick. I am weirdly reluctant to leave my neighborhood, so I stop at Variety. I feel too keyed up for more coffee but I like the smell and the winding booths in there, so I order a hot green tea as an excuse to hang out for a while.

I miss having a kitchen. I had plans for the groceries in our fridge and, realistically, I could go get them. But, in practice, that would involve going to get the keys to the extra pad locks the fire department added to our busted in door from Andrew, then coughing into a face mask while I navigate all the books and shoes on the ground in the entryway that are dry now, but warped by the fire hose spray, then carting bags of food back to Sam’s apartment, then intruding on her kitchen anddirtying her dishes when she’s being so kind as to put us up. The scope of the ordeal is insurmountable, so I get the 5” Veggie Delight from Subway and feel briefly suicidal. I get it toasted with provolone on whole wheat and ask for sweet onion vinaigrette. The cucumbers at Subway are always so thick and obtrusive. Halfway through, I remember that this is the exact sandwich I had on my first ever date in high school. That guy was kind of a maniac, but at least he didn’t comment on my sweet onion breath when he kissed me after the movie.

Wednesday, April 29

I eat a banana on my morning commute and make coffee in the office. Taking the J to Broad St actually saves me time and a transfer, so I wind up circling the block before I head up to my office. I’m spending so much time this week walking around, either rushing between apartment showings or just killing time in a space where I don’t feel like I’m imposing on my generous host. For lunch, I pair a Kitchens of India Pav Bhaji Mashed Vegetable Curry pouch with a free clementine and free Garden Salsa Sunchips and a free Diet Coke.

Leaving work to check out more apartments, I finally get around to buying some razors and basic makeup at Duane Reade and the shelf of Little Debbie treats catches my eye. Did you know that they make Triple Decker Oatmeal Pies now? Little Debbie is still doing R&D. I find that amazing. It inspires me. I’m being serious. It tastes incredible. The cream center is way more marshmallow-y than I remembered, it almost has a foam-like consistency. At three layers of soft, oaty cookie, the center does not hold after two bites. The sides of the cookie are as soft and pliant as the middle—more consistent across the radius than a cake, even. I wonder if this is a characteristic unique to this innovation on the Oatmeal Pie, or whether I had always just imagined the edges having a bit of a home-baked bite.

After the apartment tours, I stop by another corner store near Sam’s apartment to get an egg and cheese for myself, as well as a bacon egg and cheese for Andrew. I tell the guy on the grill to put ketchup and mayo on mine. He puts a lot. I also buy some Quaker Chewy Dipps Chocolate Chip Granola Bars, the kind they make for fat kids so they can pretend they’re having a protein bar. I grab the box in this bodega from where it is shelved between Little Bite Brownies and Galaxy Brownies for the same reason. When I eat the sandwich perched on a stool hunched over Sam’s kitchen counter while inputting my social security number into yet another sketchy leasing agent application portal, I drip pink globs of mayo and ketchup onto my shirt. I feel so annoyed with myself, I only have so many shirts to wear right now.

Thursday, April 30

I’m communing from Sam’s this morning without even glancing at my maps app. Studying addresses and walking between available apartments has given me a stronger sense of direction. I feel like I’m adding, block by block, to my mental map of Brooklyn. I down a banana and two granola bars before I get to the train stop.

For lunch, I return to the fount of Skinny Pop and LemonCello La Croix and a shiny green apple in the co-working kitchenette. I wish I was eating left overs out of tupperware. In the past, when I was eating leftovers out of tupperware for lunch, I usually wished I was eating some expensive FiDi grain and greens salad. But now, I can see the appeal of a warm dish of leftovers.

More than anything, I am craving the roasted fingerling potatoes with sausage and green beans my mom used to make this time of year. She’d serve it warm over spinach and after dinner, when we’d clear the table, I’d pick out a few more crispy potato halves from the cast iron skillet on the stove to pop into my mouth.

I can’t tell you the last time I had that. I can tell that my parents feel frustrated by the distance right now. When I speak to them on the phone, they say they wish they could be here to help and I know they mean it. I can hear them in my head saying they wish that I was there so they could help. If I was in Ohio, we could stay in their guest room. If I was in Ohio, this probably wouldn’t have even happened in the first place. I don’t know if this is something they’re actually thinking or if I’m projecting because I feel guilty about living so far away.

I’m still thinking about those potatoes and green beans. It is frustrating to not be able to follow a craving. All week, I feel like I’ve been eating like I’m high. I’m not saying I have the munchies, I just keep finding myself following impulses and cravings with abandon. Buying another Triple Decker Oatmeal Pie in addition to a pack of Lemon Zingers from the Duane Reade after I drop off a FedEx package on my luch, I rationalize it like this: Since I don’t even know where I’ll be sleeping this weekend, it is hard to meaningfully think about the future. When it is hard to meaningfully consider the future in a concrete way, it is hard to care about your cholesterol or sugar intake.

I didn’t expect this experience to give me any more empathy for or insight into the homeless experience since I know that my circumstances are so far removed from any real danger or plight. I had renter’s insurance. But, not even a week into my new couch surfing reality, I find myself relating to the mental leaps and rationalizations of the drug addicted.

One of the realtors calls me to let me know we got approved. Of all the apartments we’ve applied to so far, this is the only one with a first-come-first-serve application policy, secured of course by a $1,000 good faith deposit. All the rest have gone to blind bidding wars. Andrew keeps saying things like, “If you offer a thousand dollars a month over asking price for an apartment rental, you’re not going to go to heaven.” and I more or less agree. This apartment, the one we can move into tomorrow, is smaller and more expensive and further from the train than our old one, though not by too wide a margin in any metric.

Dinner is fittingly celebratory. I make a sandwich with whole grain bread and Natural Power Fu Eggless Vegetarian Chicken Salad in Sam’s kitchen.

Friday, May 1

I finish the box of granola bars for breakfast. Andrew had a few yesterday so it’s not like I’m being crazy. I take in another Power Fu sandwich to work for lunch in a ziplock bag like a little kid.

Andrew picks up the keys and I box up the essentials in the old kitchen, making the most of the evening light since the electricity got turned off. We still need to launder all the rest of the clothing and linens and replace the couch and bed and rugs, so the ceramic and metal in the kitchen seems like a good place to start. Maude is wrapping each of our mugs in dishtowels before placing them in a cardboard box. She volunteered to come help today before I could even ask for help. Halfway through, we pause for dinner. Even though we’ve lived across the street from Foster Sundry for four years, Maude has somehow never tried it, so we insist she does. It’s completely a cliche, but one you should experience at least once. I have the breakfast burrito with the stringy, crispy, slightly spicy fried mushrooms. The burrito runs with oily red greasy and moisture from the creamy scrambled eggs and drips on my white tee shirt, the last of the pack.

Back in the apartment, I realize that one of our workhorse cooking implements, a big green dutch oven, is currently housing leftover cilantro lime black bean soup in the fridge. Those leftovers were already reaching their expiration a week ago when the power was cut out. Everything in there is soiled: the milk, the cottage cheese, the prebaked sweet potatoes and radishes in their foil jackets, the guacamole improperly sealed in a takeout container. At some point in the past week, the water got cut off as well, so I dump the rancid bean soup into one of the industrial trash bags accumulating by the door.

When I made that soup, Monday before last, I simmered the black beans over a mirepoix of red unions and radishes purely because I noticed the beans gave off a very purple wash when I rinsed them and I wanted to accentuate that. The slightly purple, oil slick slipperiness of the soup drips down the inside of the black contractor bag with a thicker viscosity than I was expecting. The light is dying and the lingering smokey air is starting to make me cough a little and half our glassware is still in the cupboard. Maude asks if smoke inhalation is something that hurts your body all at once or over time.

When I was approaching 4th grade, freshly plopped down into a new school system and outgrowing my substantial layers of baby fat, I decided to take some big swings RE: my personal style. I made the bold choice of only wearing black and white (with touches of red). I started to cross my 7s (this one quickly fizzled out) and became a vegetarian (this one stuck to this day).

At a Super Clips in late August, I showed my stylist a hardback that I had nabbed from my parents’ bookshelf. I was enthralled by the women illustrated on the cover of Lauren Stover’s Bohemian Manifesto. They were the blueprint. I lusted after that jet black asymmetrical pixie cut as if it could transform me into a svelte young woman smoking in a hip French cafe. After she was finished with my hair, my stylist walked me out back through the employee exit behind the strip mall to show off her creation to her coworker who was taking a smoke break between the dumpster and the Big Lots loading dock. I felt like a million bucks.

My enthusiasm for the monochromatic look waned fast, especially after I found an amazing pair of velvety purple skinny jeans at the Ohio Thrift. Not possessing the proper hand-eye coordination to use heat tools without burning my ears, my new hairstyle was usually just a puffy mess. I abandoned the idea of limiting my stylistic choices for a more “eclectic” sensibility, terminology I picked up from a home decor pamphlet among the paint chips at Lowes. I attached heaps of retro buttons and brooches I collected from art fairs and gallery openings my dad took us to onto the lapels of every jacket I owned. I slashed and sewed all my tee shirts into new and novel shapes. No outfit was complete without a colorful scarf and leg warmers my mom decorated with vintage buttons for me. On the way to school, I paused to pluck plumes of ornamental grass from our front yard and stuck them jauntily into the side of my crocheted cap like a feather on a flapper's cloche.

I actually cracked open the Bohemian Manifesto for the first time last month. My review: Among items I brought to the barber’s as a child, it ranks above a printed screenshot from a Barbie.com Flash game. But among books on the ins and outs of counter culture, I’d rank it middling. The satirical advice format for those who wish to “live on the edge” is more cute than genuinely humorous or insightful, but the full color illustrations are fun. The section of the book devoted to apparel, titled “Bohemian Threads”, expounds on the beauty of ratty thrift store treasures, garish audacity, and sentimentality. I was struck by both how misguided my childhood attempts at bohemian style were, the black and white boat neck tee shirts failing to approximate French elegance, and by how accurately those passages described the way I’ve dressed since the 4th grade.

It was heartening to read this manifesto in support of eccentric and undefinable taste because it seems to me that everywhere I turn today, I am encouraged to rigidly define my “personal style”. On social media, I am inundated by self proclaimed experts in the field of personal style. They all hawk courses or coaching services that claim to simplify your closet and life. Body type analysts offer the service of assigning you a Kibbe type and recommending the shapes and textures best suited to your features.1 Anuschka Rees, who published the personal style and wardrobe organization guide The Curated Closet in 2016, now offers virtual color-typing so you can find out once and for all if you’re truly a deep autumn or strong winter or whatever.2 The blogger behind M Gets Dressed has developed a political compass style axis on which to plot clothing for the purpose of evaluating an item’s role in your wardrobe.3 Stylist Allison Bornstein went viral with her “Three Word Method”, in which she coaches clients to define their personal style with three adjectives to guide their shopping and closet purging.4

All of this advice and services boil down to the same idea: whittling down your taste into a personal brand.

I still fight the urge to erect narrow definitions for my personal tastes. The urge to curate a signature look or scent or voice for myself hunts me. Every once in a while, especially in the bleak first few weeks of a new year, I manically and impulsively convince myself that whittling my wardrobe down to a single unified color palette or aesthetic would fix everything for me. My name is Gray, at least the name I write under, and my head began to sprout gray threads when I was still in high school. It logically follows that the color gray should define me. Last year I decided to dye a nearly white streak of gray in my hair. It looked bad and didn’t really establish me as a character in the way I had secretly hoped. I wanted a gray streak to turn me into a cartoon character, the kind who wear the same thing everyday and are easily identifiable by their simple visual idiosyncrasies.

I have made some permanent changes to my appearance recently, a couple tattoos and a wedding ring, which have exacerbated my neuroses over the question of “What do I wear?” Sometimes, when I think seriously about the permanence of these modes of self presentation, I feel less like I am assessing my own taste, or even trying to approximate the taste of my future self, and more like I am attempting to establish my own personal brand.

I had a midnight diner conversation with one of my best friends a few weeks ago about the inclusion of personal experience in nonfiction writing and the personal branding of writers in our current cultural landscape. I expressed frustration with feeling like I need to sell myself in order to justify why I am a voice of authority on a topic. I often just want to write about topics I find interesting and struggle to find the personal angle, the connection that allows my own voice in. I hope my friend understood my frustration as disappointment with myself and not a dig at her own practice. I really admire the vulnerability of her work and know that my own experiences color my writing just as much, I am often just unaware of my own predisposition and less capable of self reflection in any meaningful way.

I usually don't trust my own perspective enough to write without backing up my statements with data and the musings of those smarter than I am. So here is a musing of my own, completely unsupported by any study or article I could find: There seems to me to be an inverse relationship these days between class and a willingness to dress up or down.

I mean to say, the most high effort going-out outfits are not worn by the wealthiest girls. Peek into any expensive wine bar in the East Village on a Friday evening and you’ll find white collar professional women in the same business casual they left work in, with barely any day-to-night alterations. Conversely, it seems to me that women with comparatively less wealth dress up fancier for a Friday evening on the town. From nightclubs in New York to Miami to Nashville to Atlanta to Manchester5, working class young women from different walks of life share a common propensity for high-glam night-out looks.

A study in 2019 from University of Melbourne seems to support my anecdotal observation, concluding that “financial inequality can lead women to maximize the limited tools at their disposal, including their looks,” but I’m not sure that this draws a 1 to 1 correlation.6

However, you must admit that there is a broad range of “dressiness” represented in the outfits of women out on any given Friday evening. If you search online for “night out”, “date night”, “girls night”, or “day to night” outfits, you’ll find anything from jeans and an oversized oxford with heels to bustier-as-shirts and thigh high boots. I don’t mean to point out any salaciousness or imply that there is any vulgarity in the clothing choices here, merely the fact that the line between “daytime” and “nighttime” clothing differs greatly among women.

I think about most stringent uniforms of dress I’ve been required to adhere to, handbook dress codes from high school, retail jobs, waitress jobs. In those situations, I enjoyed the experience of changing from my waitress slacks and white blouse into a skimpy dress or low cut top from Charlotte Russe in the bathroom of a Waffle House with my friends before we went to a show. It felt like shedding one identity and emerging a brand new person.

A racial element here intersects with class. Black women in America and the UK spend a lot of time and money maintaining a higher level of grooming than their white counterparts in order to meet the more stringent beauty standard they are subjected to. Cultural forces can make the decision to dress up into less of a choice. As Hena Bryan put it in a Glamour Magazine article on the subject, “For many Black women, services like wigs, acrylic nails, lash extensions, eyebrow threading, tinting or lamination, waxes or laser, and salon visits (to maintain the natural hair under the wig) aren’t mere luxuries – they’re part of an identity that align with our societal expectations of ourselves and one another.”7

Affluent women, especially the sort of wannabe WASPs who proudly claim that wealth whispers, are of course no strangers to extravagant spending on their appearance. But this beauty spending is much more covert: balayage and gray root coverage approximating a natural hair color, relatively short gel manicures, Botox striving to be as inconspicuous an alteration as possible. It is only when these women alter their appearance in a way that is too noticeable, like having “bad work done”, that their considerable beauty spending is considered vulgar.

In the words of Dolly Parton, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap!”8

In his 1991 review of Paris is Burning for the Washington Post, critic Desson Howe remarked on how the competitors in the New York drag ball scene depicted in the documentary donned drag not just to glam up as hyper-feminine alter-egos, but to visually embody any identity beside their own. “Not only do the competitors dress up as beautiful women and Upper West Side matriarchs, they become college students, tough street kids, prissy executives, construction workers and Marines.”9 As explained in the documentary by veteran queen Dorian Corey, “realness” within voguing culture refers to the ability to pose convincingly. That agileness of appearance is an important skill for individuals who are not afforded the comforts of stability and conformity. Within the context of drag,

The chameleon-like approach to self presentation benefits those at the edges. The impoverished are not allowed to have a set in stone appearance. From work uniforms to dressing up in a “respectable” manner for interactions with bureaucratic entities, clothing is highly dictated by context. Covering tattoos for a job interview or borrowing a suit for court appearance can function like a visual code switch. The ability to do so convincingly can make the difference between a new gig and a harsh sentence.

The wealthy and successful have the luxury not only to buy fine garments and refrain at will from activities that could soil fine garments, but also to disregard conventional dressing altogether in favor of always dressing exactly like themselves. These idiosyncrasies are not eccentric in the same way a kooky aunt with gray pigtails is eccentric, there is no camp at play. The marching to one’s own drum here is instead renegade, militia like, in a very American individualistic sense. These elites have achieved, through immense wealth and unchecked power, total personal freedom and they are not willing to shake that foundation by engaging in any form of drag.

The tech mogul’s singular uniform is both a powerful visual brand and a public testament to their monastic dedication to their work. More than that, I believe, the tech mogul uniform is a brazen display of obstinance. A founder who would capitulate to dressing up in a suit and tie for a board meeting could give the impression that he would further bend to the will of the board. A founder attending a board meeting in jeans and a hoodie communicates a lack of respect for their authority.

Speaking of Bezos and his ilk, I think that Lauren Sánchez’s peekaboob bra moment at the 2025 Trump inauguration is a fascinating example of these dynamics at play. Sánchez, an entertainment reporter from Albuquerque before her engagement to the world’s second richest man, dresses provocatively and has had very obvious cosmetic surgery. One might think that her rapid ascension in class would subject Sánchez to the chameleon-like vibe-matching behavior that many wives of wealthy men partake in. Instead, her insane new level of wealth allows Sánchez to show up to an event as austere as the Presidential Inauguration with a lace bustier on display.10 By refusing to alter her own personal style to appropriately blend into the occasion, Sánchez was kind of big-dogging anyone who dared to take the political theatrics seriously.

Designers, like tech moguls, are fond of their minimalist uniforms. Phoebe Philo dresses like Steve Jobs. Karl Lagerfeld wore a black tuxedo jacket with a white shirt, black skinny jeans, and dark glasses. Muccia Prada commissioned Milan’s most exclusive tailors of children’s clothes, the Ferrari sisters on Via Bigli, to produce a cohesive wardrobe of practical clothing in an adult size.11 By obtaining this Catholic school inspired uniform, Muccia Prada positioned herself as outside of the influence of fashion and, therefore, above the influence of her peers.

I am far from the fringes, a college-educated middle class white girl, but I still engage in a fluidity of personal style that is demanded of me by the space between my career and social life. When I buy clothing, items are filtered into my closet as an item I can or can’t wear to work, an office job that requires I dress somewhat professionally but still demands too many foot errands and too much heavy lifting for cute shoes. I work in apparel design and cannot show up dressed as casually as my superiors do because they wear $500 designer sweatshirts and can tell with trained eyes that my sweatshirts are cheap. A designer sweatshirt is as business casual as a cardigan from TJ Maxx, call that girl math or whatever. I dress a certain way to go to the doctor in hopes that I’ll be taken more seriously when I bring up my weird and easy to write off endocrine issues, professional and slimming. What is the point of developing an all encompassing personal style if that means I would still have to adhere to these limiting restrictions when I’m having fun with my friends?

I love an unnecessarily long and pedantic YouTube video as much as the next midwit, but a certain genre kinda rubs me the wrong way. If you’ve spent any time watching DIY historical fashion tutorials or film costume analysis, you’ve probably seen the type of content I’m referring to: videos picking apart the inaccuracies in historical film and TV costuming. A big name fashion magazine will trot out some PHD in dress history who certainly has better things to do and they’ll ask them to find fault in every detail of any garment from Daisy Buchanan’s cloche hats to a Disney princess’s dress. Costumes are judged on a basis of “accuracy” with no consideration for their beauty or role in the characterization of the costumed player.

As much as I appreciate the detailed knowledge it takes to point out anachronistic details in historical costumes, I hate the way that this CinemaSins style of condemnation has permeated practically all conversations about historical drama. Sure, the sequined costumes in Bridgerton are super modern, but I can only handle seeing so many tweets by viewers shocked that they’ve spotted long acrylic nails in their Harlequin romance streaming slop show. To me, it all sounds a bit like, “Waiter, there is a fly in my soup and he’s wearing the wrong type of petticoat!”

I think the gut reaction to shame inaccurate costuming stems from the misconception that it is always unintentional. As if modern styling details are an oversight in the same way as that Starbucks cup that got forgotten in the background of a Game of Thrones episode. Instinctively, we rush to draw a red arrow and point out mistakes. But I urge you to reconsider. Anachronistic costumes are often not thoughtless mistakes, but intentional creative choices.

The simplest and probably most common reason to modernize a historical character’s look is to make them look better to modern audiences. What is widely considered to be beautiful has changed a lot throughout history. I, for one, do not find Late Medieval high plucked hairlines1 or Meiji period teeth blackening2 to be particularly sexy. If an audience is meant to understand a character as romantically viable, they must consider that character attractive themselves. This leads to a lot of historically inaccurate grooming in period films: shaved armpits and legs, contemporarily shaped eyebrows, and long shiny hair to name just a few. Not to mention women’s undergarments, which seem to mold the body in new ways each decade. 1950s period pieces are especially egregious in this regard. They’d put any female film character from a 1920s cabaret singer to Ivanhoe's Rowena in poke-your-eye-out bullet bras.

Sometimes these preservations of an actress’s sex appeal at the expense of historical accuracy can feel trite, if not downright misogynistic in their strict demands of how a woman must look on film. Even on the so-called makeup-free set of Pride and Prejudice (2005), you know they were sneaking some subtle rouge onto Keira Knightly in between takes. But other times, the modernization of a costume seems to be an actress-led decision. Take for example, when Emma Watson objected to wearing a corset in Beauty and the Beast (2017) on shaky feminist grounds.

This is something that I like to call the “Other Streisand Effect”, which describes the phenomenon where you just gotta let a diva do her thing. If Dakota Johnson has “iPhone Face” with her wispy curtain bangs in an Austonian drama, then Barbra Streisand brings “Diva Face” to every historical project she graces.

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), which ostensibly takes place in both 1970 and the 1810s, Streisand wears a smokey cut crease cat eye, super long nails, and hair piled high with some swoopy bangs, all signature features of her personal style at the time. She is styled similarly as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1968) despite the musical’s pre-war New York setting. And who are we to say that this is wrong? What's next? She's not allowed to belt her lungs out or whip her head around wildly in anger? I don’t see how this is any different than when she painted Oprah’s microphone white to match her outfit for a guest appearance on her show.

A more meaningful reason to modernize a character’s costume is to communicate with the audience about a character’s personality or situation. Just as an audience needs to see a good looking character in order to understand their romantic desirability within a film, they also need to be shown characters that look feminine or poor or rebellious or dour by their modern standards. A modern book set in the Middle Ages would not be written in Old English. In much the same way, historically inaccurate costumes translate antiquated visual cues into a modern parlance.

The most obvious example of this is, I think, the sneaky pair of lavender Converse lurking in the background of a single shot of Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006). Those shoes told the audience so much more about the character than if Coppola had utilized the language of symbolic 18th century mouches or ties. In Antoinette’s time, blond hair and translucent white frocks were especially evocative of childhood.3 But such a connection may be lost on modern viewers, so Coppola wisely threw in a pastel sneaker to signify Antoinette’s youthful girlishness.

My favorite feature of anachronistic costuming is its ability to visually signal the tension between the era in which the film was set and the era in which the film was created. Depictions of the 1950 Americana from the 1970s, like Happy Days (1974-1984) and Grease (1978), are somewhat satirical but broadly imbued with very personal nostalgia for carefree adolescence from a generation of adults dealing with earth shaking political and economic turmoil. Later depictions of 1950s American high school like Porkies (1981), Back to the Future (1985), and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) reflect on the time from a greater distance and with broader strokes and sometimes link the eras with some shared conservative values. By the 1990s, films like Cry Baby (1990), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Pleasantville (1998) further caricatured and satirized the 1950s with deeper cynicism.

Without visual clues as to when each of these films were created, this meta narrative would be harder for an audience to discern. But, luckily for us, details like the tapered Barrymore collar John Travolta wears to prom and the Pink Ladies’ feathered coifs stand to remind the viewer that we are watching a 1970s reminiscence on 1950s American high school, not a movie itself from the 1950s.

Sometimes, the popularity of a specific genre will permanently tie a modern decade to a historical era. High fantasy was all the rage in the 1980s. The popularity of Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy novels as well as rapidly improving special effects heralded in a slew of films like Excalibur (1981), The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982), Never Ending Story (1984), Labyrinth (1986), Princess Bride (1987). These films by no means look uniformly like any specific era of the Middle Ages. Armor is broadly impractical. The costumes sewn of synthetic gauzy and shiny fabrics glisten in dreamy soft light. Women's hair is not only worn down, a pre-renaissance rarity, but it is so unnaturally Aquanet big. Instead of staying true to historical accuracy, as an amalgamation, these films created a 1980s infused fantasy look that is still referenced in costuming today.

Another fun feature of modernizing historical garb in film is that these costumes have a more symbiotic relationship with contemporary fashion. Showing an audience a more accessible version of a bygone style can bring back an outdated fashion trend. Consider how many times you’ve seen images of Penny Lane from Almost Famous (2000) floating around Pinterest boards. Penny doesn’t look convincingly 1970s in every scene, but she sure nails the 1970s revival look that was trending when the film was released.

In 1974’s The Great Gatsby, Mia Farrow wears gauzy layers, wide brimmed hats, and pastel cut crease eyeshadow. Her outfits look as much Halston as they do Jeanne Lanvin, bridging the gap between historical accuracy and modern relevance. The 2013 remake of The Great Gatsby pulled from contemporary style in the form of stilettos, push up bras, and that shade of blush that was everywhere in the early 2010s. In turn, Daisy Buchanan alluding headbands and fringe moments trended in contemporary fashion.

I think the intentionality and importance of these accurate costuming choices can be underscored by considering their inverse: films set in the modern era that utilize retro aesthetics. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) was set in the present day, yet Uma Thurman’s iconic yellow and black tracksuit with flared legs and sambas screamed 1970s, paying homage to Bruce Lee's costume in the martial arts film Game of Death (1972). Like the retro soundtrack, the costumes were certainly meant to be evocative of the exploitation films that inspired Tarantino.

Whether or not you think that retro allusions are effective in modern-set movies, you must admit that no one ever assumes that their inclusion was made by mistake. We understand that Wes Anderson isn’t accidentally making his movies look like that. Historical costumes deserve that same benefit of the doubt. I hope that someday audiences can appreciate how much thought and intention goes into costuming a film set in the past. We must judge these stylistic choices as the artistic expressions they are, with much to say about the story and the character and the context in which they were created, instead of appraising them like museum exhibits.

The Eidolon Centre, located in Budapest, is an institution dedicated to showcasing, studying, analyzing, and appreciating vernacular photography and banal imaging in both analog and digital formats. Vernacular photography (amateur, family, or snapshot photography) is a widespread, but underrepresented genre of the history of photographic imaging, despite the fact that it represents the larger parts of our visual heritage from the last 200 years.

Their online magazine, Eidolon Journal, aims to delve into and share these stories. I wrote for them about the impact of vernacular photography on the study of dress history and popular imagination of historical fashion, particularly the way that casual family snapshots have archived the way that everyday women dress at home.

You can read the piece here.

Special thanks to Kiki Smith and Keren Ben-Horin, who graciously spoke to me about their work on The New-York Historical Museum's incredible “Real Clothes, Real Lives” exhibition, as well as Endre Cserna, who edited this article.

Is it just me, or does The Artiste (Marcella) (1910) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner not look its age? The ambiguous, almost bafflingly modern clothing of the painting’s subject stood out to me immediately when I first encountered this work. I cannot remember if I came across The Artiste (Marcella), online on some Tumblr blog or among the pages of a coffee table art book in some museum gift shop. Either way, I remember doing a bit of a double take when I read the year that it was painted. Nothing about the style of the painting, the composition or brush strokes, seemed to me at odds with sorts of 1910s art that I am familiar with. If anything, these stylistic choices are completely fitting with Kirchner’s oeuvre and the look of his peers. He was a member of the Die Brücke group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905. But something I could not articulate about the central figure rang undeniably modern.

You might recognize the piece as the cover art for the book Slouching: A Field Guide to Art and (Un)Belonging in Europe by Charlie Squire. When I complimented the cover art to Charlie on Twitter, the out-of-timeness of the painting was the element that they first mentioned. Confirmation that I wasn’t the only one seeing something odd here propelled me to dig deeper.

The main elements that stand out to me as glaringly modern have to do with the way the subject is dressed. Her hairstyle, worn long and straight, reads as very current to me. As do the bright colors and striped pattern of the sitter’s garments. The immodest cut of the dress looks especially anachronistic to my eye. To me, she seems to be wearing a sleeveless jersey knit dress that hits above the knee: a garment you could find in a GAP or H&M today, but would be out of place in 1910.

Simply put, a European woman in 1910 would not wear her hair down like that. Due to lingering Victorian moral norms, long hair was prized on a woman as a symbol of femininity and health, but was considered much too erotic to wear publicly.1 One explanation for the depiction of long, un-styled hair in this painting is that the subject is being represented in her home in a state of undress. Another explanation could be related to the fact that the sitter is not a young woman, but a young girl. Girls in “polite society” at that time could wear their hair down and un-styled until they reached about 16 years of age.2

It just so happens that the subject of this painting is assumed to be the Die Brücke associated artist’s model Lina Franziska Fehrmann. Known as Fränzi, Fehrmann was the child of Kirchner’s neighbor and was painted by the artist multiple times.3 Kirchner depicted Fränzi as a prepubescent nude in Marzella, which was also painted in 1910.4 This piece unambiguously portrays Fränzi as a child with use of visual shorthand still in parlance today: a big girlish bow worn above her ear.

I could also be misinterpreting the colors in this painting as a more literal depiction than was the artist’s intent, contributing to my perception of modernity. Kirchner self-described as a "‘color man’—a Farbenmensch", according to Jill Lloyd, who co-curated the Kirchner retrospective at the Neue Galerie in 2019.5 Vivid, hallucinogenic color permeates all of his work. Yet, in The Artiste (Marcella), the subject’s skin tone and the fur of the cat are painted in relatively realistic colors. Due to this, I am wont to interpret the black and lime striped dress, vibrant royal blue stockings, and the bright red slippers as more realistic literal representations of brightly colored clothing than expressionistic choices.

With that said, vibrantly colored clothing was not uncommon in the Edwardian era. 19th century chemist Sir William Henry Perkin accidentally discovered a powerful mauve dye derived from aniline in 1856, kickstarting the entire synthetic dye industry.6 Newly possible bright and bold colors quickly became popular in fashion and home decor. The popularity of rich jewel tones, like the colors worn in The Artiste (Marcella), in the 1910s is well documented in the color pallets and fabric ads published in women’s home journals and catalogs of the time.7

The minimal details of the subject’s garments as depicted by Kirchner may also allow a modern viewer to project anachronistic details. With little concrete to go in, my modern eye sees a type of dress I am familiar with: a tank top sleeved short shift in a tee-shirt-like jersey knit. While something about the way the fabric sits, even in this sparsely detailed depiction, reads to me as distinctly knit, this garment is not necessarily a dress. Instead of a dress, this could be an undergarment or nightgown. The explosion of factory knitting mills across Europe in the early 20th century made mass produced knit garments, like union suits inspired Gauzrib knitted vest underwear, become possible.8

Knit dresses as we know them today, a socially acceptable garment to wear out of the house, were nowhere near as popular in the 1910s as they are today, but the fad was not far off. Coco Chanel’s use of jersey knit fabric in her 1916 sportswear line more or less sparked the trend.9

Jean Patou opened his boutique, Le Coin des Sports, in 1913 and made a name for himself with comfortable jersey knit sets in ultra modern geometric patterns.10 With tennis champion Suzanne Lenglen as his muse, Patou blurred the line between clothing for sport and clothing for leisure. In addition to traditional designer clothing, Patou also made swimsuits, ski wear, and clothing for sports spectating.11

The sporty striped pattern on the garment in Kirchner's The Artiste (Marcella) almost even suggests to me that this could be a swimsuit. The cut of clothing here, tank top sleeves and micro-short legs, is like that of the women’s swimsuit popularized by Australian swimmer and silent movie star Annette Kellerman.12 The pared back one-piece style allowed women more mobility in the water than the older style woolen multi-piece bathing costumes, which weighed women down with skirts and stockings and decorative sailor collars. Kellerman modeled her swimsuit after the utilitarian bathing suits worn by men and sparked a trend so hot she started her own clothing line to meet public demand.13

Public swimming and bathing in 1910s Central Europe was an incredibly popular leisure activity. The strong spa culture of the Habsburg empire influenced the growing Central European Middle Class at the turn of the century, natural baths and hot springs were modish destinations in a growing tourism industry14 that catered to those traveling for both health and leisure.15

It naturally follows, then, that swimming and swimwear was a common subject of the painters working in this environment. In fact, a very similar swimsuit to the garment worn in The Artiste (Marcella) is depicted on a girl in fellow Die Brucke painter Max Pechstein's The Black-and-Yellow Striped Bathing Suit (1909)16.

I find it interesting, too, that just a few weeks ago, another painting depicting swimmers in striped suits went mildly viral on Twitter for the same reason: people thought it looked absurdly modern. The piece, Scène d'été (The Bathers) by Frédéric Bazille from 186917, strikes similar chords to Pechstein's with semi-dressed figures mingling as the enter and exit a shallow body of water in a pastoral setting.

I am also reminded of that clickbaity black and white photo that is shared online occasionally which purported to shows a time traveler from the present day visiting British Columbia, Canada in November of 1941.18 The man in question does look like he could have stepped right out of the 21st century. In the photo, he wears sunglasses and a varsity lettered knit sweater which, thanks to the quality of the photo, can easily be misinterpreted as a screen printed tee shirt or sweatshirt.

The connective tissue here, and subsequently the defining aesthetic of modernity, seems to be the proliferation of knit sportswear into casual dress. I hope the costumer department from that first season of Star Trek back in 1966, who boldly draped lycra where no man had before, truly know just how right they were.

Cinderella, the fairytale character as we know her today, is a bit more fresh than the concept of marrying into money. By publishing Cendrillon 1697, Charles Perrault introduced now widely accepted elements to the age-old tale like the benevolent fairy godmother and glass slippers. By setting this story at the dawn of the 18th century, he also cemented a de facto setting that would stick to Cinderella for centuries. So much so that any iteration of Cinderella adapted today still carries the shadow of a French connection. 

The common thread among all these stories is the theme of socio-economic elevation. Cinderella is a financial fairytale of a hardworking girl pulling herself up by her glass slippers. Across centuries and continents, in just about every society with enough of a class divide to call stratification, a rags to riches love fable will emerge. How ironic then, that this inspirational model of upward social mobility should be perpetually set against a backdrop of pre-revolution France. 

France was liberated from Nazi control in August of 1944. A few short months later and the French were back to what they did best: putting on fashion shows. In March of 1945, Théâtre de la Mode opened at the Louvre. Because fabric was still so scarce in post-war Europe, garments were not made to full scale. Instead, designers crafted meticulously detailed costumes for dolls just 70 centimeters tall.

How could a populace in such dire straits muster up the spirit? In bombed out Paris, who even gave a hoot about ball gowns? It might come as some surprise that the Théâtre de la Mode was a smash hit, drawing 100,000 visitors to view the exhibition in Paris before moving on to tour Europe. For many of these visitors, their French national identity was rooted in the country’s historical production of luxury goods. The Théâtre de la Mode was so important to the French in reinstating their cultural exports after WWII that the French Ambassador to Britain helped promote the exhibit.

In 1947, French designer Christian Dior unveiled his very first collection, the aptly named “New Look”. The lavish and architectural style stood in stark contrast to the direction fashion had been heading over the past few decades. In rejecting the sleek and simplistic modernity of 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s fashion, Dior not only cemented his legacy, but changed the course of 20th century design. His New Look was not a hyper modern innovation, but directly inspired by traditional silhouettes. The wide skirts and riding jackets called to mind 18th century French court fashion. This nostalgic and patriotic allusion appealed to French audiences lusting to resume their position as global taste makers.  

Unlike France, America emerged from the second World War in 1947 both victorious and flush with cash. Lucrative defense contracts were largely responsible for pulling the American economy out of the Great Depression. And because the States had seen no action on the homefront, no post war reconstruction was necessary. In 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt had passed one of the largest and most transformative social welfare acts in American history: The Servicemen's Readjustment Act, aka the GI Bill. Scholarships made higher education, and subsequent higher wage positions, an option for veterans. Low-cost mortgages and low-interest loans turned many returning soldiers into first time, if not first generation, homeowners. Land ownership securely repositioned millions of families comfortably into the middle class.

Of course, not all veterans benefitted. Conspicuous loopholes allowed this rightfully earned aid to be withheld from veterans of color. Jim Crow era admittance policies were still legally in effect at universities across the country. Racist lending and selling practices, like redlining, withheld the benefits of homeownership from the families of Black soldiers. The ramifications were disastrous. Racial wealth disparities in America increased as a direct result of the G.I. Bill, a devastating consequence that persists to this day.

The homeownership made possible to white veterans after WWII created a brand new beast- the ‘burbs. As decreased social welfare spending wreaked havoc on city living, once urban poor white families fled in droves to their new middle class suburban kingdoms. These paradigms of the American Dream were hungry for a fresh definition of decadence. Suddenly wealthy consumers across the country lusted after luxuries they were denied in wartime– sugar, butter, and silk. So they ate cake. Yankees turned to 18th century France, embracing styles reminiscent of rococo extravagance. 

Suburban America’s embrace of rococo aesthetics in the 1950s also revealed a desire for an intensely stratified social order. Acres of pristine, pointless lawns rivaled Louis XIV's manicured gardens. Inside these subdivision homes, less was not more. Wallpapers were ornate, often textured with velvet or metallic designs. Pastel tiles matched bathtubs of rose, robin’s egg, and avocado. More blatant references to 18th century France, like Toile de Jouy textiles, helped give prefab homes a palatial flair. Rizy furniture and state-of-the-art home appliances acted as candy colored class signifiers.

It's no wonder that Dior’s New Look caught on so quickly in this baby-booming environment. Like the rococo era aesthetic, the New Look was defined by excess. Bolts of heavy fabric were utilized with no thought to the expense. Under Dior’s influence, skirt lengths became longer for the first time in the 20th century. Ornate pleating crafted plump hip pads. It was no mistake that this wide skirted silhouette resembled the 18th century Robe à la Française, one of the most over the top styles of dress ever worn in Continental high society. 

In the 1950s, Dior and his fellow couture designers returned to the Robe à la Française for inspiration over and over again. Necklines were often square or shawl-like, resembling fichus. Formal Sack-back variations of the Robe à la Française, popular around the 1770s, were reinvented as capelets and trains. New Look sleeves were commonly tight and ½ length, sometimes flaring below the elbow. Accessories like umbrellas, sunhats, and cropped riding jackets were just a few of the Versailles-tinged trends that took off in the post-war era. 

Highly structured bodices of New Look gowns accentuated a nipped waist in a manner reminiscent of pre 1770s stays. Unlike curvy corsets, these 18th century undergarments created a flat side profile and funnel shaped torso. The harsh lines of mid 20th century girdles and bullet bras mimicked the geometric silhouette molded by stays in the 18th century.

Even through the 1960s as the New Look became old news, suburbanites holding court in their conversation pits clung to the rococo aesthetic as a symbol of wealth and status. The hostess dress, popularized by Lucille Ball, cleverly combined pajama pants and a housecoat into party attire. The top half of this ensemble echoed the Robe à la Française with a skirt that split down the front. The pajama bottoms paired with this robe were usually a snug pair of capris similar to the contemporaneous pedal pushers, or 18th century mens’ breeches. Hostess dresses were often worn with dainty kitten heels, a favored footwear of 1960s housewives and male French aristocrats in the rococo era. In this unexpected way, the bottom half of the outfit also bore a striking resemblance to male attire from Versailles. 

The New Look wasn’t the only French cultural export to take America by storm in the post war era. The 1950 release of Disney’s Cinderella was the studio’s 12th feature animation and 2nd princess movie. While not explicitly set in any time or place, Disney’s adaptation is fairly faithful to Charles Perrault’s French telling of Cendrillon. As a result, visual cues reminiscent of 18th century France pop up throughout the picture. Illustrator Mary Blair’s early concept sketches for Cinderella heavily reference 18th century furniture styles and fashion plates. The gown that Cinderella wears to the ball has many rococo details: padded hips, angular bodice, and choker necklace. This air of old world regal elegance sets Cinderella’s gown apart from the more Victorian influenced dresses worn by the other eligible bachelorettes in attendance. The strongest influence, however, on the Disney rendition of Cinderella’s ball gown is clearly Dior.

The success of Disney’s Cinderella ushered in a wave of fairy-godmother-fever that gripped the nation for decades. Many adaptations continued the tradition of setting the story in, or at least nodding to, the rococo era. The costuming and set design of 1955’s The Glass Slipper, starring Parisian ballerina Leslie Caron, is firmly set in mid 18th century French court life. An audience may also read a sly allusion to Marie Antoinette in the film’s fantastical bakery dance scene. In The Slipper And The Rose (1976), director Bryan Forbes recreated Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s iconic 18th-century oil painting The Swing.

In Sabrina (1954) Audrey Hepburn plays the daughter of a wealthy family’s chauffeur who transforms from a meek girl into a beautiful woman while studying at culinary school in Paris. Being invited to one of the family’s lavish dinner parties after her homecoming serves as this Cinderella story’s version of the ball. Hepburn’s show stopping Givenchy dress stuns the guests who had paid her no mind before her time abroad. The gown’s parted front and padded hips are another mid-century interpretation of the Robe à la Française, designed by Dior’s friend and contemporary.

Even the 2004 Hilary Duff vehicle A Cinderella Story pays homage to this particularly important node in the fairytale’s evolution. Duff’s romantic interest attends the costume dance as one of the Three Musketeers. While his friends arrive in 17th century costumes of lace collars and feathered caps, Chad Micheal Murray’s character appears to have missed the mark by quite a few years. He wears a late 18th century inspired ensemble consisting of a doublet jacket, flouncy cravat, and knee high boots. When he ditches his pals to dance with our orphaned heroine, the character’s outfit is recontextualized as a Louis-XIV-inspired Prince Charming costume.

Today, Cinderella is inextricably linked not just to rococo France, but also to the early 1950s in America. Sandy Powell’s costumes for the 2015 remake of Cinderella accentuated an association between the rococo era and the New Look. The costuming of this remake juxtaposed 18th century influences against 1950s accents. Powell was nominated by the Academy twice in 2015 for her costume work on Cinderella and Carol, a romance between two women set against the backdrop of Christmas in 1950s New York. Although very different settings, Powell had Cate Blanchet’s hair set in retro permanent waves for both films.

The irony of a Cinderella story in 18th century France reflects the illusion of the American Dream in the 1950s. Both are lofty rags to riches fables set in environments with strict and moralistic attitudes about class structure. Why did the rococo aesthetic and the Cinderella story appeal so strongly to suburban Americans in the 1950s? Perhaps they aspired to achieve the wealth and grandeur of the French aristocracy. Or maybe they saw the economic leaps forward taken by themselves and their peers as a Cinderella story of their own.

While some sendups are sincere, other throwback styles subvert the meanings previously associated with iconic trends. By mixing British punk aesthetics with 1700s luxury, Vivienne Westwood and Malcom McLauren commented on the debauchery of wealth and coined their oxymoronic look. The duo’s first collection, Pirates, was unveiled in 1981. Their version of 18th century fashion was bold and flamboyant. Theatrical silhouettes and primary colors emphasized the vulgarity of overindulgence. The couple was already well known in London for masterminding the punk image out of SEX, the boutique they ran in the 70s, so trends from the Pirates collection were quickly adopted by new wave and punk subcultures in England.

The New Romantics inverted the intentions of the New Look. Dior crafted rococo inspired gowns that paid homage to the Sun King’s reign. In contrast, London street youth in the 1980s did not lament the fall of aristocracy. Their mimicry of rococo aesthetics was not a sincere form of flattery. Gaudy outfits juxtaposed period costume finery with rags. Tights and heels as men’s apparel no longer carried connotations of wealth or power. Artists like Boy George and Adam Ant wore ostentatious doublets, braided hair, and heavy makeup to express kitsch androgyny. The film Amadeus in 1984 and Falco song Rock Me Amadeus in 1985 spread interest in Mozart’s era to a wider pop culture audience. By 1987, Blackadder had reached its third season. The popular comedy lampooned Georgian era upper crust, reinforcing a foppish popular impression of late 18th century aristocracy.

Other brands have played on the rococo theme in the 21st century by toying with iconography- parasails, beauty marks, and toile de jouy tapestry. Valentino’s Fall 2010 collection featured a cage-like hoop skirt coordinating ensemble resembling a model-sized birdcage. Japanese brand Liz Lisa played on the similarities of Harajuku kawaii and rococo femininity for Spring RTW in 2011. Barbara Palvin marched a model holding a live lamb down the runway for Etam Lingerie that same season. Jeremy Scott paired towering pastel powdered wigs with giant tiered cakes as dresses for Mochino’s Fall 2020 runway. 

Westwood pearls and corsets made a major comeback with the onset of the 2020s. Celebrities like FKA Twigs, Bella Hadid, and Dua Lipa were all photographed in the structured top in 2019. Before long, Shein and Amazon began pumping out the “corset tops”, somewhat of a misnomer. The garments were, of course, more similar to 18th century stays in silhouette. 

At the same time, Westwood’s Orb and Saturn pearl choker began trending alongside pleated skirts and argyle sweater vests. The iconic piece of jewelry celebrated a similar resurgence in popularity as the Return to Tiffany heart pendant, which also complimented Early Aughts preppy argyles and plaids. This second life of Westwood iconography was divorced from the brand’s – origins. By then a Dame of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Westwood’s brand was a respected designer label– just like Tiffany and Co. However, many individuals jumping on the trend did not purchase genuine designer pieces. Instead, many sourced Westwood influenced clothing and accessories from fast fashion brands. 

Gen-Z trendsetters of all genders sported faux, of course, pearl chokers. These necklaces, with or without knockoff orb logo pendants, became the must-have of the moment. Before long, any association with punk fashion was lost. Instead of lambasting the aesthetics of opulence, followers of this Westwood resurgence trend were utilizing fast fashion dupes to wholeheartedly and unironically imitate the wealthy. Almost as a harbinger of the soon-to-be discussed to death “Old Money look”, the rococo aesthetic functioned earnestly aspirationally again, just as it did in mid-century suburbia.    

On the train to go see The Taste of Things, Tran Anh Hung's new cooking driven romance set in 1880s France, my eye is drawn to the LED screen across the car. Disembodied hands silently roll dough, slice it into thin strips, and assemble the strips into capital letter Xs and Os before baking the shapes at an unspecified temperature for an unspecified length of time. When the cookies come out of the oven, the hands slather on pink icing and rain down heart shaped sprinkles. I find the odd viscosity and unnatural pink deeply unappetizing.

This Valentine’s Day themed installment, still running into March, is just the latest in an endless stream of off putting cooking content that the MTA is running between ads. Last April, Willa Glickman got to the bottom of the phenomenon in an article for Hell Gate. The apparent purpose of these cooking videos, ranging in content from an omelet cooked in a plastic bag to something called "brie-ghetti pie", is simply to catch the eye. 

These videos, produced by First Media for their cooking brand So Yummy, are not instructional. The recipes are not real. Few measurements or cooking times are ever communicated. Replicating a dish, as if that is something you would even want to do, would be impossible. Their content is more like ASMR or baby sensory videos, distracting passengers and gluing glassy eyes to the screen before an ad can pop up. 

Everything is a cooking video now: hypnotic and aspirational and sensual and mundane. The life-hack style cooking videos of So Yummy’s ilk invaded Facebook years ago. My TikTok algorithm feeds me women reciting their personal narratives while their hands peel potatoes and fry garlic. Almost daily, I see svelte health influencers ensuring that their toned torsos are in frame as they introduce their “What I eat in a day” videos. Vlog style “Day in my life” content always mentions mealtime. Food stylists are always sharing their tips and tricks on social media, letting us in on the inedible secret ingredients that make food ads look so appetizing. On Instagram reels, I fall in love with these three charismatic Chinese rapping grandmothers who prepare lavish feasts for their families while mugging for the camera in funky sunglasses.

Culture wars play out over videos of trad-wives baking muffins and stay at home girlfriends preparing chicken and rice. Instead of debates this year, we should force the presidential candidates to compete in a time limited cooking challenge. Perhaps with some sort of secret ingredient rule. I’d love to see Biden lose his mind when the Chopped studio kitchen’s ice cream machine inevitably breaks down. 

I can barely scroll through Twitter without seeing someone’s two cents on a clip of Nara Smith, the beautiful young wife of a Mormon male model and mother to toddlers with crazy silly names, making a meal from scratch in a black silk house robe. She holds every utensil like an injured baby bird and her feather trimmed sleeve cuffs are always just about to dip into the batter. 

The verdict is still out on Smith. She is either a brainwashed victim of a backwards cult, or a pampered micro-celebrity living her dream life. Endless discourse is generated by internet commentators who either criticize her glamorization of a narrow and dated role for women, or are racially motivated haters and are simply jealousy of a biracial Black woman displaying her luxury lifestyle. Her cooking techniques are hotly debated. What seems ignored in all the noise is the fact that Smith is neither a chef nor a career-less mom. She is an influencer and, like So Yummy, her soothing and slightly uncanny videos are incredibly good at grabbing eyes.

In a piece for The Baffler that focuses on another Mormon mommy cooking video star, Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, writer Gaby Del Valle described the trad wife phenomenon as “pioneer burlesque”. I had the pleasure of seeing Del Valle read her piece at a Limousine reading last fall. One of Neeleman’s perfectly choreographed cooking videos, a caprese sandwich with homemade mozzarella and ciabatta, was projected silently on the wall behind Del Valle as she followed her piece with selections from the diaries of pioneer women detailing the harsh realities of their often short and painful lives. 

I loved The Taste of Things because I love all Food Movies. While I rank Babette’s Feast and Tortilla Soup and Eat Drink Man Woman as prime examples of the genre, I don’t necessarily mean movies about chefs and cooking. To me, a Food Movie is more about expression than execution. Big Night takes place in a restaurant, but I think Moonstruck is a better Food Movie just by the way Cher cooks a steak for Nic Cage when she can’t think of any other way to communicate with him. Some Nancy Meyers and all Nora Ephron movies are food movies in the same way that some Nancy Meyers and all Nora Ephron movies are good movies. 

Something a Food Movie captures that food content lacks: dining. Sure, the cook in a TikTok may conclude the video by indulging in the first bite of their creation, but the short form medium doesn’t allow us to linger at the table. In Food Movies, the cooking may be as flashy and absorbing as a So Yummy tutorial, but the emotionality of the food comes through in scenes of eating. 

The first 38 minutes of The Taste of Things is a single extended cooking scene. There is no music, just the sounds of the rustic French kitchen. The relationships between the characters are slowly revealed through interactions and dialogue strictly regarding the preparation of a feast. Film reviewer Sheila O’Malley praised the way that food dazzles the eye in this scene with the camera never ceasing it’s flourishing movements. But it is not until characters serve each other and break bread together that they say more than they could with words. To quote O'Malley: “In "The Taste of Things," no distinction is made between cooking for someone and loving them. It's "all one".”

I’m from a long line of comfort eaters and comfort cookers. My dad fondly recalls the weight he put on in college when his mom would make him mashed potatoes and meatloaf while he pulled all-nighters. I remember the peanut butter and crackers my mom would lovingly bring up to my room with a glass of milk when I was beside myself cramming for AP tests and finals. I can’t always conjure up the right thing to say when someone I love is feeling bad, but you can be sure that I’ll bring over something to eat. And when I’m stressed and overwhelmed, the first thing I reach for is something sweet and fattening.

In college, I tried in many ways to shake this habit. One of my misguided methods was like exposure therapy but dumb: I watched videos of people gorging on junk food in the hopes that the disgusting display would dissuade my own consumption. Maybe you’ve seen these videos online as well. Videos in the Mukbang genre, a Korean portmanteau of “eating” and “broadcast”, range in content from ASMR-like role-play where a pretty girl pretends to share a meal with the viewer to graphic displays of eating prowess in which the Mukbanger consumes food in jaw-dropping quantities or at astounding speeds. A 2023 review of booming popularity in Mukbang content in the The Cureus Journal of Medical Science describes the “phenomenon of vicarious satiation, in which the viewers' desire to eat specific foods is affected by watching the Mukbangers eating the same food”.

The American Nicholas Perry, known by his YouTuber nom de plume Nikocado Avocado, popularized the entertainment style among Western audiences. In 2022, he made this pivot from YouTube to OnlyFans, explicitly tapping into the erotic undertones that connote many Mukbangs. From the salacious wet sounds of chewing and slurping to the Mukbanger’s moans of delight, the non-sexual videos can be utilized like porn. In 2018, researchers posited in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction that taboo fascination with female embarrassment surrounding food desire may drive the fetishization of female Mukbangers. Explicitly erotic or not, Mukbang videos are at times eerily similar to the “dirty as movies could get” porn that space aliens watch in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. 

“Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an hour and a half–soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples. And then the father put the cat and the dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too. 

“After a while, the actors couldn’t eat any more. They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.”

The wanton waste of food featured in mukbangs bothers many. Similar criticism was cast at Adam Richman’s Man Vs Food on the Food Network. The competitive eating travel show premiered in 2008. Critic Charlie Brooker wrote for The Guardian that “if food is the new porn, this is an all-out orgy between wobbling gutsos and farmyard animals – a snuff orgy, no less, since the latter end up sawn in half and smothered in BBQ sauce.” Celebrity chef Alton Brown called the show gluttonous and disgusting: "That show is about gluttony, and gluttony is wrong. It's wasteful. Think about people that are starving to death and think about that show. I think it's an embarrassment."

Some of the recipes churned out by the cooking content mills are so repulsive, their creation is hardly any different from destruction. Perhaps you’ve seen one of these viral abominations: the Spaghetti-O pie, the noodle burgers with Nerds candy, the hand-mashed “Nacho Table”, or maybe the honeycomb pasta bake, just to name a few. Besides the inedible food, these videos share odd similarities. The cooks are all thin white women, most with nicely manicured nails and coiffed hair. The women in these videos manhandle the ingredients bizarrely, squeezing ground beef through their fingers performatively and mashing melted cheese into their countertops. In many, a disembodied male voice behind the camera groans in encouragement as the woman makes increasingly odd choices in her cooking.

An investigation last year by Eater in 2021 traced many of these videos back to one guy: a viral marketing mogul and professional magician named Rick Lax. Is it fetish content? Is it supposed to be funny? Is it generating clicks? All I can tell is that it’s an awful waste of perfectly good ingredients.

The destruction isn’t limited to the edible. In the past few years, the landscape of videos focused on consumer goods like makeup has experienced a violent upheaval. Where unboxing and review videos once dominated, social media platforms today are overrun by accounts broadcasting the methodical destruction of soap by boxcutter. I am mesmerized by videos of glass bottles full of Orbeez tumbling down a marble staircase, raptly wondering if the pasta sauce shaped bottle or the pickle jar will make it further down the stairs before cracking open and unleashing their deluge of tiny bouncing rubber balls.

Retail therapy isn’t enough anymore, the people want guts. These days, just about everyone is chasing the euphoric high of needless destruction historically only felt by delinquent youths egging houses and throwing stones at small mammals. The Monster Truck rally is no longer a fringe event, it is a daily observance. It is an exercise in hedonism just short of perversity: snuff videos of stuff. 

The items on the chopping block are often very feminine, like flowery soap and eyeshadow pallets. This seems to me to be a far cry from destruction-based media of decades past like Monster Truck rallies and Jackass stunts. I am reminded of another of my favorite Food Movies and the closest thing I can think of as a “Jackass for girls”: the 1966 experimental Czechoslovak New Wave film Daisies. The film follows two nihilistic young women who embark on what the Criterion Channel describes as “a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure.”

The beautiful heroines of Daisies love food. They gorge on delicacies and gleefully engage in a raucous, hedonistic food fight. Just as the production of food in The Taste of Things is framed as a personal artistic expression, consumption of food in Daisies becomes a mode of self expression. 

As a shy eater, I’m hyper aware of the messages I send with every bite. If I want seconds, I prefer to wait and sneak into the kitchen at night. In high school, I’d only pick at my lunch in the cafeteria. It wasn’t until I was alone, in a band practice room or at the back of the school bus, that I could really dig in. Eating feels so visceral and vulnerable, hardly something I want to do in a crowd.

I hate how public consumption is in New York. I have no car to eat my lunch in, so my coworkers always know when I’m on a diet. Two separate point and shoot street photographers have captured images of me scarfing down a late lunch on the afternoon sidewalks of Midtown: protein bars in one instance and a falafel gyro in the other. I am too terrified to really consider what both of these men found so compelling about the tableau. 

It’s not just eating on the street that makes me so uncomfortable, all public consumption makes me itch. I imagine uninterested eyes on the train judging me for scrolling on my phone instead of leafing through a chic paperback. Last year, I asked my fiance for a The Baffler magazine subscription for my birthday so I’d have something interesting and engaging (read: visibly pretentious, cool) to read on my commute. But I always forgot the paper copies at home and ended up reading the articles on my phone anyway.

I read Robert Rusbam's review of The Taste of Things for The Baffler after I wrote the majority of this essay, a timeline that a writer's critique group in Hoboken can corroborate. I should have felt proud that I had identified some of the same comparisons that Rusbam, a writer I admire, was drawn to: namely So Yummy subway videos and Babette’s Feast. Instead, I felt embarrassed. I felt as though what I write, like what I cook, is little more than the sum of its parts. Metaphorically speaking, how many of my ingredients am I lovingly plucking from a flourishing veggie garden in the French countryside and how many ingredients am I cursing when I find them at the bottom of the Chopped basket of my mind.

My tastes have been formed algorithmically. The suggested posts from aesthetic blogs on Tumblr that introduced my malleable teen brain to Daisies were no more attuned to my interests than the TikTok For You page that served me up some Spaghetti-O Pie. Video platform algorithms prioritize attention and nothing makes me watch to the end like a recipe. When I am shown a cooking video I am immediately curious, and occasionally morbidly curious, to see how it turns out. When I sit on the train, force fed yet another revolting food video from the screen before me, it makes sense to me that I wasn’t the first to compare these omnipresent food images to the delightful cooking visuals in The Taste of Things. Gross food content is inescapable and I am comforted in the knowledge that I am not the only one who cannot seem to look away.

I was very annoyed when, shortly after I became engaged, it dawned on me that the saccharine coquette trend bubble would burst within the year. From “I’m sick and tired of bows!” tweets directed at Sandy Liang’s SS24 collection to Dazed asking "has the coquette trend gone too far?", tastemakers of all stripes have given their two cents; framing hyper-feminine romantic aesthetics as regressive or anti-intellectual or simply played out. With my nuptials now 9 months out, bow-hatred is brewing and it appears likely that widespread negative opinions RE: lace ruffles, swan emojis, silk rosettes, and ornately decorated cakes will gestate before my big excuse to wear a white gown. Not to make this about me, but how unfair! 

It’s not as if I worship at the altar of the in vogue, but I am easily embarrassed and somewhat weak willed. The cacophony of think pieces and social media analyses on the subject (of which I have contributed to) has been enough of a deterrent to propel me in a more minimalist direction when perusing wedding cakes on Pinterest. As I said, I am weak.

In this jaded landscape of cool today, passé tomorrow, material desire evokes a feeling in me that is best described as a “pre-embarrassment”. Buying into a micro-trend feels like falling for a practical joke. The new and shiny always glimmers like a too-clean penny on the sidewalk– surely superglued there to the pavement by some prankster waiting just out of sight with candid camera in hand. 

What are cool-hunters to do but race to the bottom? Sometimes it feels as if every major cultural commentator is playing a game of chicken, all in competition to first accurately declare that a trend is over. One finger on the pulse, the other on the hair trigger impulse to deem something, anything, obsolete. The goal is no longer early-adoption in the trend cycle, but early-derision. It scratches the same itch as claiming “I always got a bad vibe off of them,” when allegations emerge about a celebrity or pretending that you never cared for a show when it loses the plot in later seasons. 

Prognosticating the un-cool is a safer bet than trying to sniff out the up and coming. It allows the critic to flex status through knowledge of chic cosmopolitan consumption habits, yet maintains a distance from the act of consumption which allows the critic to position themselves as “above” influence.

TikTok comedian Pooja Tripathi describes her videos as "🌇 City satire 🌃". The subjects of her sketch comedy range from POV: Hinge Date in Murray Hill to POV: Bushwick Party. The line between casting aspersions and defining aspirations is often blurred. In one sketch lambasting the affectations of image obsessed cosmopolitans, Girlies getting ready to go out by NYC neighborhood, she wears a different outfit for each character: UES Girlie, Williamsburg Girlie, Bushwick Girlie, LES Girlie, etc. In the caption, Tripathi clarifies that all clothing is by a local designer, Constanza New York.

The Starter Packs of NYC page on Instagram, helmed by The Cut’s senior social editor Sasha Mutchnik, posts similar memes described by Interview Magazine as “sparse collages that define niche downtown archetypes”. The images amalgamate recognizable status symbols, like Aesop hand soap or Marlboro Gold Label cigarettes or Roujie ballet flats, into caricatures of Manhattanite over-spenders. Much more pronounced than in Tripathi’s content, it is difficult to discern where the derision ends and the native marketing begins.

In a recent post, Starter Packs of NYC opens with a collage poking fun of the ubiquitous bow trend before the carousel of images transitions into in-person coverage of Sandy Liang’s FW24 show. The official Instagram account of the beauty brand Clinique, tagged in due to the inclusion of Black Honey Almost Lipstick between a matcha latte and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, commented “🖤🍯🎀”.

I was aware of this genre of hyper-local meme page before I moved to New York. As a rural midwestern teen, I followed pages like Nolita Dirtbag. Alex Hartman, the man behind Nolita Dirtbag, made a name for himself with memes about dudes who drench themselves in Santal 33 before wearing custom Bode to the natural wine bar. On some level, this brand of humble-braggy self-deprecation painted the same type of delusionally aspirational image of city life in my head as Sex and the City. How different is a meme poking fun at Salomons and Espresso Martinis from Manolos and Cosmos taking center stage in a dramedy? Both dispatches from the coastal elite couch lifestyle porn in a thin veneer of critical introspection.

HBO’s Girls HBO’s was initially marketed as spiritual successor to Sex and the City. Lena Dunham’s lampooning of the young and resentful in 2010s Greenpoint anticipated the current dearth of stylish satirists trying to have it both ways– lambasting hipsters while simultaneously archiving their cultural moment in the sun. A 2012 review of the Girls pilot in the Guardian predicted that the show would leave a very different mark than Sex and the City, “Not only is Girls the exact opposite of the show HBO is promoting it to be, it could actually inspire a few New York residents to call it quits, pack their bags and start a new, less embarrassing, life elsewhere.” 

More than a decade on, this reasonable prediction is proving false. The show’s legacy is invoked often in discussions of 2010s aesthetic resurgences from Indie Sleaze to the return of Twee. Brooklyn comedians Amelia Ritthaler and Evan Lazarus host an HBO Girls rewatch podcast with a rotation of Bushwick cool-kids guest mics. Ritthaler and Lazarus, who are both in their 20s and were teens when Girls was airing, credit the show with making them "the insufferable people they are today". I’ve caught myself feeling similarly: eating a falafel on a park bench in Manhattan with my legs akimbo and suddenly wondering if I look anything like the girls in the Girls print ad I saw in an InStyle magazine in middle school at my doctor’s office. I was previously unaware that that image was so deeply seared into my brain. I chastise my child-self: “You’re missing the point by idolizing her!”

Girls tackles Hannah's character flaws head on, but pulls back from ever fully casting any of the titular girls as entirely morally depraved. Films like American Psycho and Wolf of Wall Street, works often cited in accusations of misled character idolization, take a harsher approach. Where criticism of the hipster lifestyle in Girls is limited by the self referential nature of the work, only brushing at times on issues of hypocrisy or gentrification, media tackling the yuppie scum lifestyle can fully vilify the young urban professional. 

Even in films where yuppies aren’t stabbing bums in a back alley when they should be returning video tapes à la Patrick Bateman, their moral failings are discussed in plain terms. In The Big Chill, adult friends from college gather for the funeral of their mutual friend who had killed himself. After dinner, the weary friends go around the table describing ways in which they have failed to live up to the idealistic plans they had in undergrad. One character left public defense for private practice, another is a failed writer and unhappy housewife. Another character spends a good chunk of the runtime trying to convince other friends to do insider stock training. 

The aesthetic trappings and affectations of yuppieness are played for laughs in movies from Something Wild to Beetlejuice and Trading Places to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Memphis Milano home renovations and bottles of Evian act as sight gags in these toothless satires in the same way that a potted Fiddle leaf fig elicits a chuckle when you’re scrolling through Starter Packs of NYC. Neither necessarily good or bad, you recognize these as frivolous hallmarks of the leisure class. 

But yuppie critical media often digs deeper than the aesthetic rebuke. In Fatal Attraction, Michael Douglas plays a yuppie lawyer whose extramarital philandering leads his family into danger. In Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks' yuppie character Daniel Miller is far from a villain. As the viewer, you root for Daniel as he romances Meryl Streep’s upstanding Julia. Even so, the relatable leading man is nearly denied entry into heaven due to his selfish fear and weakness of will.

Maybe this is where modern spoofs of the conspicuous consumer fails in my eyes. I doubt that satirists of Aesop hand washing class are taking aim at the ostentatiousness of bourgeois pretension. The urge to cast the first droll stone at a snobby trend is the same compulsion that drives cultural commentators to proclaim the death of a fad: an obsession with being ahead of the curve. Until Nolita Dirtbag implies that men who wear Aimé Leon Dore may literally be going to hell, I think he’s talking out of his ass.

There was a genre of photography that absolutely ran my corner of the internet in the early 2010s. It is impossible for me to say whether photos of skinny teens being a smidge mischievous were inescapable on Tumblr and Pinterest, or if the almighty algorithm simply clocked how longingly I poured over these images and calibrated my feeds accordingly. 

A few years later, when I was finally sneaking out and partying around campfires, I am unsure if my motivation was purely adolescent hedonism, or if I was chasing the high of recreating these images I had seared into my brain. In that sense, my wild teenage escapades amounted to a pretty by-the-numbers rebellion. 

Last year’s “teenage dirtbag” trend on TikTok, which involved sharing images of one’s younger self taking part in teenage-y dirtybag-y activities, made me reevaluate the iconography of teenage delinquency. Despite how much I desperately attempted to visually recreate the music videos and Skins episodes and Pinterest images that crafted my idea of what being a cool teenager meant, I have very few “dirtbag” photos. I came of age firmly in the age of surveillance. Many of my friends had tracking apps on their phones, which my parents thankfully deemed too invasive or too much of a technical headache to deal with. We spent as much time lusting after the taste of rebellion as we did meticulously leaving no trace of our escapades. That included never taking pictures, lest a cell phone get into the hands of a parent. 

A genre of aspirational image that often pops up under Pinterest’s suggested “teenage dirtbag aesthetic” search term is the CCTV selfie. A gaggle of teenage girls pose under the security camera footage displayed over a store’s entrance or self-checkout as a central figure snaps the pic. Perhaps these photos are popular due to the simple fact that the high angle and grainy effect of security camera footage amount to an immensely flattering reflection. But maybe there is some meaning here, intentional or not, in the documenting of one’s own surveillance 

Being surveilled is the baseline state for the modern young person. Voyeuristic cameras don’t just exist in the convenience store parking lot where you drink your slushy, they’re also on your parent’s Ring doorbell and in your back pocket. When the actions captured by both can incite punishment, what difference is the phone camera from the camera above the Target self-checkout?

To position oneself as a surveilled entity is to assert that you possess the capacity to contravene. A young girl who might never actually venture into the world of kleptomania may instead photograph herself posing for a store’s security camera, the assertion that she could engage in theft is subtextually left up to the viewer. 

Eric Höweler coined the term “Paranoid Chic” in a 2002 article for architecture magazine Volume to describe the phenomenon of surveillance inspired fashion imagery, and how those images transformed the condition of unwanted attention into a luxury commodity.  Referencing Givenchy and Versace advertisements peddling in recreations of surveillance footage, Höweler made the point that the voyeuristic nature of surveillance footage fascinates and repulses the viewer by making them complicit in the observation of the pictured individual.1 As put it for Höweler Loud Paper’s Paranoia issue, “Surveillance is sexy. Big Brother is watching, so you have to look good.”2

Manchester band The Get Out Clause filmed an entire music video in 2007 effectively for free by utilizing security cameras. The band performed in front of over 80 security cameras before requesting the footage from shopkeepers, which British law mandates they release.3 The resulting video, shared to YouTube, was inventive and cool enough to warrant brief virality for the otherwise unknown rock band.4 Like Cheap Trick at Budokan using the sounds of cheering Japanese fans to springboard into American stardom5, The Get Out Clause manufactured an air of celebrity and import by playing to an audience of digital voyeurs. By documenting instances in which they were surveilled, the band visually insisted they were worth watching. 

Actual celebrities, the ones hounded for paparazzi photos, are less inclined to welcome surveillance. In the age of the gossip mag, many celebrities responded to unwanted photography with offensive gestures, rendering the resulting photos too explicit for print. Designer Saif Siddiqui launched an anti-paparazzi scarf in 2015 that bent light in order to ruin any potential flash photo of the wearer. Celebrities from the Jonas Brothers to DMX to Paris Hilton were spotted in the scarf not long after.6

While a nasty inconvenience, I’m sure, paparazzi surveillance allows celebrities the unique opportunity to silently send a message. Julia Roberts still refuses to admit that her DIY tee shirt reading “A Low Vera” was in any way a reference to her now-husband Danny Moder's then-wife Vera Steimberg.7 Roberts was photographed practically gloating in the shirt in 2002, positioning her jacket just-so to ensure the slogan readable, as gossip magazines reported that Steimberg was resisting divorce from Moder.

In much the same way, the average person can communicate through their own surveillance. By purposely posing for a red light camera as one might the souvenir photo cameras on a roller coaster, the driver of the infracting car gains subjectivity within the image. If she later shares this surveilled selfie online, pouty lips and peace sign hand gesture just barely visible through the windshield and photo grain, the image is completely recontextualized. 

When I stare into the all seeing eye of the Target self checkout camera, I usually fix my hair and always jut my chin out slightly in an effort to conceal the flabby slope of my soft jaw. In effect, I pose without really meaning to. I wonder how long Target holds on to this footage. According to urban legend, Target will wait until you’ve shoplifted $1,000 or $800 or $2,000 over multiple visits in order to charge you with grand larceny.8 Would that require Target to keep all security footage in perpetuity, racking up permanent records in dusty data storage centers? It seems far-fetched, but if my image may actually live forever in the name of retail theft prevention, I might as well try to straighten my bangs. For better or worse my teenage revelries exist only in my memories and my late night run for Annie’s Shells & White Cheddar is caught on tape.

The term Victorian is tossed around a lot in fashion. Most often, it is used in reference to the puffy shoulders, tiny wasp waists, and high collars popular at the tail end of the 19th century. By this point in history, the eponymous Queen Victoria was the stern old killjoy of Kinks album cover fame and her reign was nearing its end. But that image of Victorian aesthetics is so narrow. Officially, the era began in 1834 with Queen’s coronation and ran all the way to her death in 1901, encompassing two thirds of the 19th century. This era saw the height of colonial wealth and power in England, the growth of a fashionable middle class, and the advent of industrial clothing production. All together, these factors and factories spurred trends in clothing to develop at a rapid, steam-powered rate. Dresses designed across this 67-year span are as varied as you can imagine. And the pace of fads fading in industrialized fashion has been chugging along ever since.

Contemporary fashion styling advice has coined a wordy dichotomy you might be familiar with: “big pants little shirt” versus “big shirt little pants”. Similarly, the shift in popular dress across the Victorian era could be described as a progression from “big skirt, little shoulders” in the Early Victorian period to a Late Victorian preference for “big shoulders, little skirt”. There was a clear shift from a bottom heavy to a top heavy silhouette. 

This transformation across the Victorian era was more than a simple change in skirt circumference, it charted revolutions in technology, urbanization, gender roles, and cultural values. And what's more, these trends are still revolving. Americans across the 20th century waffled between echoing Early Victorian fashions and emulating Late Victorian styles. These cycles can reveal something deeper than purely aesthetic similarities. When people adopt a trend that mirrors a predecessor from a different time and place, it provides insight into what similarities these groups shared and what differences separate them. 

Wide skirts juxtaposed against narrow, sloping shoulders were all the rage in the Early Victorian era. Ethereal and column-like Regency styles, which had thus far dominated the 19th century, were being cast aside in favor of dresses with heft. Tastes in women’s gowns moved from, as fashion historian C. Willett Cunnington describes it, “exuberantly romantic” to the “droopingly sentimental.” Bell sleeves and bishop sleeves, which taper out around the lower arm and wrist, were popular in the 1830s and 1850s. Even super bulky sleeve styles, like en gigot or mutton sleeves, began partially down the arm, creating the illusion of a sloping shoulder. Wide boat-necks accentuated the shape. These verging-on off-the-shoulder necklines often featured delicate trimmings. Flat spans of lace known as Bertha collars encircled the shoulders of many Early Victorian ladies.

As shoulders became narrower, skirts grew wider. In the 1830s, the decade of Victoria’s coronation, multi-layer crinolines replaced airy, hip skimming skirts. Just a few years later in 1847, women grew weary of heavy layers and the cage crinoline, a modern update to the hoop skirt, came into vogue. Wide skirts are feminine and fertile, like a frou frou wedding cake or the hips of Venus de Willendorf. Even today, wide skirts are often considered romantically pastoral, reflecting a longing for bygone days of well-defined waists and gender roles. Most traditional stagings of The Nutcracker, a ballet set in early 19th century Germany, feature Mother Ginger as a maternal character with a hoop skirt the size of a tent. Her children, the Polichinelle, perform dazzling acrobatics as they pop out from under her dress. The enduring pop-culture image of Mary Todd Lincoln is probably her 1861 First Lady portrait. In it, she is swallowed by the wide neck of her voluptuous gown. Her shoulders shrug under a girlish lace bertha. Woven into her long hair is a crown of flowers looking juvenile against her mature face.

Conversely, the Late Victorian period celebrated slimmer skirts paired with big, poofy sleeves. Around the 1870s, capacious crinolines were replaced in popular fashion by narrow bustles that padded the behind, but not the hips. Leg skimming skirts appealed to growing populations of city slickers with no need to clamber down a country road. As a result, skirts whittled down to a near hobbling circumference by the 1900s. 

Industrialization and urbanization expanded roles women could inhabit. Suffragettes cut an imposing stance in their pigeon-breasted blouses with metropolitan puffy sleeves. Unlike en gigot cuts of the 1830s, the Late Victorian take on mutton sleeves specifically inflated around the upper arm to create the illusion of wide shoulders. Décolletage baring necklines were shed in favor of more modest high collars. Women wore cravats and vests with menswear inspired shirtwaists. The masculine silhouettes and accessories skewed gendered expectations. 

Top-heavy Late Victorian silhouettes dominated fashions of the 1930s and 1940s. Slinky bias-cut dresses, pioneered by designer Madeleine Vionnet, were all the rage. Panels of these garments were cut on the diagonal of a weave, inefficient of fabric, to better drape and cling to the wearer. This cut was unique in its ability to show off a woman’s body and wealth at the same time. These slim skirts accentuated the drama of voluminous shoulder pads and mutton sleeves. Snug to the leg pencil skirts were also a fad, often paired with a menswear-inspired suit jacket. 

Trending genderbending apparel reflected shifting social norms regarding sex in the 1930s and 1940s. Many more American women who would have otherwise been homemakers joined the workforce during WWII, occupying roles left vacant by combat-aged men. Elements borrowed from practical workwear, a necessity on a factory floor, seeped into women’s fashion.

Evolving ideas about gender are also evident in Hollywood pictures from those decades, particularly in films of Howard Hawks. Hawksian Women, as his female characters were nicknamed, took no nonsense. Rosalind Russell wore a playful but masculine pinstripe suit and matching top hat in Hawks’ 1940 hit His Girl Friday. She played a divorcee with moxy chasing the newspaper's next big scoop. Lauren Bacall, another Hawksian muse, took on roles in gritty film noirs alongside her husband, Humphrey Bogart. Her famous personal style was distinct for her sleek waves and broad shouldered silhouette. 

Katherine Hepburn’s statuesque physique and brash type casting also helped popularize the “borrowed from the boys” look. 1940 saw the release of perhaps Hepburn’s most beloved film, The Philadelphia Story. She was costumed in her signature look: a sleek and strong silhouette that reflected her character’s uncompromising “goddess” personality. 

Strong female personalities continued to dominate the silver screen throughout the decade. In 1946, Joan Crawford won an Oscar for her performance as an entrepreneur with a complicated past in the thriller Mildred Pierce. Her oversized fur coat visually portrayed the character’s fortitude and drive. The Academy’s 1947 Best Actress winner, Olivia de Havilland, tugged on heartstrings as an unwed mother who fights to remain in her son’s life after losing her fiancé in WWII. Loretta Young won as Best Actress in 1948 for her role in The Farmer’s Daughter. She played a down-to-earth country girl who runs for Congress and, despite the deceitful efforts of an extreme nativist political group, wins a seat in the House of Representatives. Costumes for all of these Oscar cinching roles reflected the era specific grit those characters exhibited.  

Aesthetics of the Early Victorian era are defined in reference to their successors. Antebellum. Pre-Industrial. And in the 1950s, a conservative longing for “the good old days” was in the zeitgeist. It makes sense, then, that this decade saw a revival of the crinoline. After wide skirts fell from favor in the Late Victorian era, they remained unfashionable and dowdy for decades. All of that changed after World War II. Meager progress in both racial and gender equality that had occurred for the war effort begot a violent reaction in the 1950s. Many American women who had entered the workforce in the absence of men were forced back into the confines of home life. 

Paired with saddle shoes and a demure angora cardigan, the poodle skirt became an icon of 1950s teen culture. Gaudy and juvenile, oversized and ultra-feminine, wide skirts reemerging in women’s fashion reflected changing expectations for women in American culture. As television rose to challenge movie theaters, vampy leading ladies were replaced by dutiful suburban TV housewives. A frightfully demure femininity. For young girls, career aspirations and casual dating became more taboo. The concept of teenagers dating for marriage, or “going steady”, replaced courtship among American youth. In 1950, the average American woman got married at the tender age of 20.3 years old, the youngest age recorded since the census began tracking that data in 1890. 

Besides family oriented sit-coms, Westerns ruled the small screen in the 1950s, further connecting the decade to the Early Victorian time period. Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and The Lone Ranger topped TV rating charts throughout the decade. Country western music also surged in popularity, with artists like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline gaining pop success. South of the border inspired peasant tops and square dancing skirts found modest popularity in women’s fashion, reflecting the widespread enthusiasm for Western themes in American consumer culture. Westerns were morality plays, crafting American values with heroic myths of the nation’s past.

Queen Victoria, as an imperialist monarch and general fuddy duddy, probably deserves to be remembered as a dour old hag. Beautiful pastel portraits of a young regent are rarely imagined at the mention of her name. Instead, drab black and white photos of a severe looking old woman are called to mind. Photography becoming popular late in Victoria’s life might be to blame. The most accurate depictions of Victoria are snapshots of her twilight. 

Although long after her death, the British Invasion might also be culpable for this mockery of her majesty. Anti-establishment tastemakers of the Youthquake era in Great Britain often took aim at The Crown. Cover art for The Kink’s Arthur and the album’s hit single, Victoria, feature illustrations of the Queen looking weathered and mean. As does the Sex Pistol’s cover for God Save the Queen. Similarly unkind illustrations of Victoria were used in the collage style animation of Terry Gilliam, who worked with Monty Python. 

As a result of the British Invasion, American trends in the late 1960s and 1970s borrowed most heavily from Late Victorian visuals. The Gay 90s aesthetic, which celebrated progress at the turn of the previous century, was popular from the late 1960s through the 1970s. This aesthetic touched design from fashion and décor to film and print media. Imagery associated with the Gay 90s include Tiffany lamps, player pianos, and Penny-farthing bicycles. Interior design in Ruby Tuesday restaurants and set design in The Muppets are prime examples of the wide appeal this aesthetic had. 

The Peacock Revolution of this era in men’s fashion also took inspiration from late 19^th century fashion. Many looks paid homage to Oscar Wilde, whose work had the most attention in the 1890s. Garish colors and luxe fabrics gave menswear of the late 1960s and 1970s a lavishness that rivaled women’s fashion. 

In turn, women’s apparel adopted menswear elements of equal flamboyance. Diane Keaton’s 1940s inspired Annie Hall costume in 1977 introduced spunky, Hawksian power dressing to a new generation. The 1970s were a big decade for women in film. New Hollywood, an incredible period of American cinema, paraded new talent and created more serious roles for actresses. Defining films of this genre like Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, and They Shoot Horses Don’t They all leaned into comparisons to the Golden Age of Hollywood by placing their plots in 1930s and 1940s settings.

Running counter to opulent Gay 90s and Peacock Revolution aesthetics was the laid-back hippy look, which spoke to a more natural beauty. Once the exclusive style of flower children freeloaders, the 1970s saw a wider adoption of the boho look. By the mid 1970s, the popularity of Late Victorian and Early Victorian styles were overlapping. Miniskirts and mutton sleeves were seen alongside trends like bell bottoms and bell sleeves. In that way, popular fashion of the mid 1970s began to reintroduce bottom-heavy and pastoral styles evocative of the Early Vicotrian era. Industrial progress wasn’t quite passe, but an earthy back to nature vibe was definitely in the mix.

Prairie skirts and peasant blouses became hugely popular in the mid 1970s. Media about the turn of the century waned as film and TV turned its focus to mid 19^th century settings with media from gritty Spaghetti Westerns to Little House on The Prairie. Americans’ patriotic obsession with westward expansion coincided with the country’s 200^th birthday in 1976. The ​​U.S. Bicentennial parade in D.C. was marshaled by none other than Johnny Cash. Another celebratory event, The Bicentennial Wagon Train Pilgrimage involved driving a covered wagon across each state, this time from west to east. Interestingly, Old West inspired styles, like peasant blouses and prairie skirts, had emerged as countercultural garb of eco-conscious hippies. Yet, they became recontextualized as a symbol of rugged American individualism and patriotism when they hit the mainstream.

Besides clear Early Victorian influence, 1970s trends also took inspiration from fellow bottom heavy decade, the 1950s. Soft cardigan sets and wider skirts on dresses came into fashion. KOOL-FM, the first all oldies radio station, began broadcasting crooners and doowop 24/7 from Phoenix, Arizona in 1971. Media like Grease in 1978 and Happy Days, premiering in 1974, highlighted a nostalgia for simpler times in the wake of challenging countercultural movements, an unwinnable war, and a tumultuous political climate.

The 80s were, without question, a top-heavy decade in women’s fashion. Big hair, garish makeup, and stately shoulder pads all vied for attention in the top quarter of a woman’s frame. Gone were bell bottoms, replaced by spandex leggings and jeans so tight they appeared to be painted on. The Sloane Ranger style, as dubbed by Ann Barr in her 1982 official handbook, was a distinctly Late Victorian inspired fad popularized by Princess Diana and Ralph Lauren. This subgenre of preppy fashion borrowed heavily from Late Victorian trends: high collars, tweed elbow patches, and cameo jewelry.

Like the Late Victorian era, the 1980s were also a time period of rapid advances in technology and urbanization. Yuppies, young urban professionals, moved to cities at staggering rates. As both an uplifting result of Women’s Lib and a depressing outcome of Reaganomics, women joined the workforce in droves. One factor driving this influx of female employment was improvement in gender equality. But, again like the Late Victorian age of Robber Baron tycoons, the 1980s also saw drastic alienation of workers from fruits of their labor. Subsequent stagnation of wages from laissez faire economic policies made it harder for a family to subsist on a single income, which in turn made it necessary for more and more women to seek formal employment.

Films from this era rarely depict the less positive forces that drove women into the workforce. From Working Girl to Terminator, big studios with big budget optimism were cashing in on girl-power narratives.

After the unparalleled success of Jaws in 1975, movie studios began to focus their efforts on family friendly popcorn flicks. The rise of the blockbuster came at the expense of smaller budget productions. Cynical, challenging films were greenlit by big studios less frequently than they had been in the 1970’s New Hollywood era. 

Reagan also had a hand in this sanitization of the big screen. A veteran of Hollywood himself, the President used his flair for the theatrics to stoke a raging culture war in America. Galvanized by having the Gipper in the White House, the religious right campaigned against sex, Satanism, and anti-authoritarianism in media. The Satanic Panic, sparked by false accusations of “satanic ritual abuse” and fueled by daytime talk show hosts, sent conservatives across the country into a tailspin of moral paranoia. Rock CDs and Dungeons and Dragons games were pulled from the bedrooms of suburban teens. With them went any apparel resembling goth or punk styles. Hysteria around AIDs further moralized fashion. Openly expressing themselves through their appearance became even more fraught for gay men. These 1980s anxieties of the religious right mirrored the buttoned up social mores of the Late Victorian era. 

Victoria’s prudish reputation is largely misplaced. She was deeply attracted to her husband Albert, who fathered her nine children and lent his name to the practice of piercing one’s penis. Whether or not the rumor of Prince Albert’s piercing is true, the Queen certainly did not “Lie back and think of England” and stuffy Victorian culture was not due to her personal priggishness. Instead, the strict Victorian moral code may have been connected to the rise of the bourgeoisie, as is posited by Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin. Increasing class hierarchies of industrial society forced Victorians to clamor for prestige. They did so by showing off not only their fanciest possessions, but also by exhibiting their impeccable manners. Buttoned up opulence defined clothing trends in the Late Victorian era because to be modest and wealthy was a moral accomplishment. A century later, the exact same values of puritanical prosperity persuaded women in the 1980s to dress in a very similar manner.

There is a specter haunting Pinterest- the specter of cottagecore. The incredibly online look took fashion publishing by storm in 2020, but the pastoral aesthetic was popular online over a decade earlier. Mori Girl style, which literally translates to “Forest Girl”, sprung from a secret board on Japanese social media site Mixi in 2006. This aesthetic took inspiration from illustrators like Beatrix Potter, Tasha Tudor, and Hayao Miyazaki. The Mori Girl look caught fire in Tokyo. It tapped into desires held by many young women in the bustling metropolis- to lead a simpler life, to indulge in feminine frivolousness, and to feel more in touch with nature. Mori Girl looks were well documented by Harajuku street fashion photographers and widely dispersed internationally by micro bloggers. 

American teens interpreted this look as Cottagecore. The suffix was adopted from other aesthetics and musical genres popular online in the mid 2010s. The suffix “wave”, as in New Wave or Vaporwave, typically implies interpretation or synthesis. To -wave is to remake something old into something new. But the suffix “core”, as in Nightcore and Normcore, usually denotes concentration or derivation. To -core is to make something a parody of itself. Influences from Early and Late Victorian eras are muddled together in Cottagecore, boiled down to a sum lesser than their parts.

Early to the party was Batsheva Hay, whose floral dresses dominated NYFW coverage in the spring of 2020. The puffy sleeve designs were inspired by 1980s Laura Ashley dresses, but the fabrics were bright and modern. Although clearly a descendant of haughty Late Victorian mutton sleeved shirt-waists, Hay’s frocks were covered in Vogue as a celebration of “rural domesticity”. Lirika Matoshi’s strawberry patterned Tea Dress also took inspiration from Late Victorian apparel, this time with a nod to dresses of the 1940s. Despite the fact that it most closely resembled something a swinging dame might have worn to a Big Band dance hall, the NYT reported the dress as a fantasy of the pastoral and “lost innocence”. As the Cottagecore frenzy reached fast fashion retailers, the message became even more mixed. Big puffy sleeves are paired with big puffy skirts. Terms like rustic and frilly were used interchangeably. 

The aesthetics of futures depicted in science fiction are pretty much stuck in the past. Perhaps to echo the environment in which the genre as we know it emerged, worlds of dystopian fiction are frequently modeled after the Late Victorian era. Sci-fi settings are often influenced by early science fiction writers, like Mary Shelly and H. G. Wells, but also by the very unscientific novels of Charles Dickens and nonfiction writing of Karl Marx. Dickens chronicled the human misery all around him in the 19^th century and Marx concluded the culprits were industrialization and capitalism. British sci-fi critic Paul Kincaid dubbed the relationship between science fiction and Marxism “oddly symbiotic” in his book Red Planets. As a result, speculations on how these forces might cause further pain in the future naturally adopt Late Victorian aesthetics. It is easy to imagine a street urchin on a 25th century terraformed Mars sounding like Oliver Twist. “Oi mistah, can ye spare me a bitcoin?” Punk and gothic clothing, the steampunk sub-genre specifically, is highly influenced by Late Victorian trends.

Less directly, the sci-fi neo-noirs like Blade Runner adopt Late Victorian aesthetics by way of 1940s interpretations. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film was based on Phillip K. Dick’s 1968 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, meaning both the source material and adaptation were produced during periods of Late Victorian style top-heavy trends in popular fashion. Rachael’s shoulder padded suit and Gibson-Girl-meets-Victory-Rolls bouffant evoke Industrial Revolution associations while also referencing the femme fatales of film noire. Another work of fiction tied to both the Late Victorian era and a 20th century decade it influenced is War of the Worlds. Originally published in 1898, the H.G. Wells' book is best known today for Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast interpretation in 1938.

But in reality, it is unlikely that the future will really look this uniformly bleak and buxom. Instead, top-heavy and bottom-heavy silhouettes in women’s’ fashion may just cycle in and out of vogue ‘til the earth stops circling the sun. More likely, like a fan on the highest rpm, the speed of fast fashion will reach a point where these trends circle one another at an imperceivably rapid pace; constantly and simultaneously semi-visible.  

The Cronenberg siblings are efficient storytellers. As director David Cronenberg swiftly introduces us to our protagonists, costume designer Denise Cronenberg wastes no time in characterizing them through their clothing. Within the first moments of 1986’s The Fly, we meet Seth Brundle, a scientist developing a teleportation device, and Veronica Quaife, a spunky young reporter on the science beat, mid conversation. Veronica, or Ronnie, is wearing an ungodly amount of leather. Only an actress as devastatingly beautiful as Geena Davis could convincingly pull off a leather skirt, bomber jacket, and capacious over-the-shoulder bag as chic meet-the-press happy-hour attire. On anyone else, it could appear obscene. Besides costuming a character, these garments stand to represent what Ronnie will bring into Seth’s work and life.

Clothing immediately becomes a medium of interaction between Ronnie and Seth. After convincing her to come observe his new invention at his live-in lab, the first thing Seth asks from Ronnie is an article of clothing. He requests “something of sentimental value” in order to demonstrate his telepods’ on an inanimate object, the extent of their teleporting abilities at that junction. Intrigued and obliging, she proffers a single sheer black stocking. Although the telepods are still incapable of transporting living beings, this erotic gesture foreshadows that impending scientific breakthrough by symbolically transforming the stocking from an inanimate object into a sentimental object of desire. When it appears in the second pod, it is somehow more than just a matrix of nylon and spandex fibers. It is still warm.

By comparison, Seth’s wardrobe is lifeless. On her second visit to his loft, Ronnie discovers that Seth wears the same drab outfit everyday. In his closet hang five identical white shirts, tweed suit jackets, and black slacks. The five identical pairs of dusty brown dress boots lined up on the floor always cracks me up. He explains that he “Learned it from Einstein. This way I don't have to expand my thought on what I have to wear next, I just grab the next set on the rack.” Ronnie is unimpressed.

We learn that Ronnie was educated as a scientist, but works as a reporter for a science magazine. She understands Seth’s analytical approach to life but, as a sleuth and a writer, her actions are often driven by instinct. She has a gut feeling about Seth’s invention and follows him home. Her understanding of the human, “the flesh”, is illustrated with a steak she brings over to the loft to cook for Seth. Instead, he sends half the slab of meat through the telepods, rendering it indescribably inedible. The distinction of the flesh and its ability to craze is enlightening to Brundle, altering his approach to coding the machine and paving the way towards the successful teleportation of a living being. The sanctity of the scientific method is peeled away in this experiment. Pillowtalk bleeds into hypothesizing. Materials migrate from the kitchen into the lab. For the first time, Brundle is working out of his uniform. His jacket is off and Ronnie is in his shirt, leaving him in just his white tee and slacks as he plates the two cuts of meat. 

Ronnie’s editor and jealous ex-boyfriend confronts her over her budding relationship with Brundle in a department store as she is buying a leather jacket for Seth. Like the steak, this sartorial flesh represents a human element beyond Brundle’s analytical grasp. The first time an animated creature survives teleportation, Brundle has completely discarded his once rigidly uniform wardrobe. He wears a casual buffalo plaid flannel in soft grays and dusty reds. Like the steak and the leather jacket, this shirt was presumably also purchased for him by Ronnie 

Lack of clothing is just as communicative as apparel choices in The Fly. Be they monkey, fly, or human, one must enter the telepods nude. The morning after Seth’s teleportation, his body gains new capabilities. He galivants around his laboratory shirtless, flipping around exposed beams like a gymnast. Unlike the carnal, human nakedness displayed the night before, this nudeness feels distinctly less human. Ronnie looks on in silence wearing only his white shirt as Seth swings from the rafters in the cold light of day.

After his feats of newfound strength, Brundle stops by a vendor in St. Lawrence Market to pick up a small golden heart shaped locket for Ronnie. As the story progresses, Ronnie’s wardrobe transforms as well. Her initial Hawksian silhouette softens with tactile knits and feminine colors. Her approach to dressing for the cold weather of Toronto shifts from leather layers to blanket-like scarves and berets. 

The next time they sleep together is the first time Ronnie notices a physical manifestation of Fly DNA in Brundle. She quickly becomes worried after plucking thick, insect-like hairs out of his back, but Brundle pays them no mind. His nudeness is no longer human as he urges her to be cleansed with teleportation in his underwear. Ronnie’s new locket shines behind the collar of her plush white robe as she resists Seth’s urging of her into the telepod. 

After Ronnie’s departure, Seth doesn’t even bother to put on a shirt under his leather jacket before he stalks his way to a dive bar. When Ronnie next returns to the apartment, bearing an inhuman DNA analysis of the plucked wiry hairs, Brundle is again nearly nude and evidence of decay mars his face. Ronnie’s entrance interrupts a familiar scene, Brundle dragging a protesting one-night-stand wearing only her jean jacket toward the telepods.

Eventually, as Seth Brudle transforms into Brundlefly, he ceases wearing clothing all together. Despite this, the gold heart charm continues to hang heavy around Ronnie’s neck for the remainder of the film as an ever present reminder that she still deeply cares for a man who is clearly gone.

The only piece of jewelry I wear everyday is a chain with two golden lockets. In the larger oval locket, I keep a lock of my boyfriend’s hair that he mailed to me a few years ago when we went long distance after college. Last winter, I found a small vintage heart locket in Kensington Market while visiting friends in Toronto and added it to the chain. In the heart, I keep a tiny braid of strands from my mom and two sisters. While gifting a lock of hair has long been a token of affection, hair jewelry specifically was very common in the Victorian era as a mourning practice. It’s incredibly saccharine and just a smidge morbid.

Yet even in the throes of “insect politics”, Brundlefly exhibits a similarly human weakness for nostalgia by displaying his lost body parts in a makeshift “museum”. Crammed behind his bathroom mirror, the vestiges of Seth Brundle sit starkly against Brundlefly’s reflection. Half scientific curiosities and half sentimental keepsakes, like a mother’s meticulously kept baby book, the collection of molted appendages remind me of Victorian mourning rites as much as the locket.

Ronnie’s final on screen outfit is the softest garment we see her in. The shapeless, matronly gray sweater dress is a far cry from any of her stylish outfits from the beginning of the film, but makes sense as the garment she would throw on for a frantic late night trip to an abortion clinic. After she is abducted from the clinic by Brundlefly, he attempts to merge the two in order to decrease the percentage of fly DNA in his body. As he throws Ronnie into the telepod, her opaque gray leggings contrast from the sheer stocking she sent through the transportation device on her first visit to the loft. Even as she levels a rifle to kill Brundlefly, the creature begging to be put out of its misery, the locket at Ronnie’s collar shimmers in the lab’s unnatural blue glow.

On top of the bed sits my boyfriend, our cat, and a pile of clothes that don’t fit me right tonight. I’m changing out of my third outfit that Andrew had deemed “Perfect! Gorgeous!” and my palms are beginning to itch. I change my bra before putting on a different blouse because this one doesn’t go with boobs. If my frantic fashion show continues much longer, I know I risk entering and maintaining a very weird mood for the rest of the evening.

‘What was wrong with that last one?” Andrew asks, calmly petting Ozzie as the pile of intermingled clean and dirty laundry on the duvet grows. “You looked great in that.”

“Thank you,” I bark, fearing I might already be resigned to acting weird all night, pulling my shirt self-consciously away from my body like a nervous tick. “But that’s the point. It was too flattering. It looked like I was trying too hard.” I ditch the dress with the deep V and cinched waist for an oversized sweater and a miniskirt. Nice and safe. Borderlining effortlessly cool, if you don’t consider the absolute wreck I’ve made of my closet. Now, if I do not look good, at least it will look like an accident. 

When we finally arrive at the incredibly casual bar, a few friends compliment my sweater. I deflect with studied Midwestern skill. “Oh thanks, I just found it at the Goodwill forever ago. It’s so comfy though.” 

It's kind of like those goofy faces us girls would make in middle school, huddled before the lens of a digital camera for a photo op. The intentional ugliness a preemptive strike against the looming possibility of judgment. It says, “Hey! You can’t fault me if I’m not trying!”

Looking back on those photos now, it is insane to consider how much we concealed the effort we exerted on our appearances. At my middle school, it was common practice for girls to flat iron their hair pin-straight before throwing it into a “messy” bun. To completely disregard your appearance was impossible in that social and hormonal climate. But to make plain that you did care was even more crass.

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If you were to consult historical advertisements and incendiary satirical cartoons1, you might think that tight-lacing corsets to the point of body mutilation was an epidemic among 19th century women. Male writers of the era penned impassioned pleas for women to stop wearing their corsets too tight, citing that the practice was responsible for misshapen livers and female hysteria. This opposition was so well documented that it has stood the test of time, despite the fact that few of these claims were rooted in reality.2

The truth is that the images used to advertise corsets were no more representative of the average woman in the Victorian era than Victoria’s Secret ads were to women in the 2000s. Even at the dawn of photography, sly collage techniques were engineered to fake unrealistic depictions of women’s bodies in commercial images.3 As for the supposed medical concerns, none were substantiated. Rather, urban legends of corsetry built a narrative— women were so frivolous and vain that they would trade their health for a slimmer figure.

Another crime of vanity among polite Victorian society was the visible use of makeup. While veering into a “painted” look was considered taboo, it was also impossible to maintain the beauty standard of clean skin and pinched pink cheeks without a touch of artifice. In the prudish social environment of the Victorian era makeup was heavily associated with sex workers. So even though sparing use of makeup was widespread, it was a dirty secret for many women. In stark comparison to the styles of the late 18th century (think Marie Antionette’s powdered white visage), bold looks like eyeliner and painted lips fell out of favor. 

One of the boldest looks of 18th century French aristocracy was the false beauty mark. Fake beauty marks emerged in Europe in the late 1500s as a clever way to turn a blemish into a cosmetic accessory. At a time when faces were regularly marred by syphilis and smallpox, this ornamental forgery remained a beauty staple for centuries. By the 18th century, the moleskine stickers evolved from small dots resembling moles to an array of geometric shapes with a symbolic language all their own. Tiny stars, hearts, diamonds, and crescent moons dotting powdered faces silently communicated cheeky messages akin to the designs on a My Little Pony’s butt. Beyond that, the flashy mouches communicated that the wearers were fashionably imperfect. Both a sign of physical defects and aristocratic affectation, the English became critical of the increasingly French practice.4

After fake beauty marks fell out of fashion in England, they became more associated with the elderly and disfigured. A French man remarked upon surveying the trend in 1719’s London that "The Use of Patches is not unknown to the French ladies; but she that wears them must be young and handsome. In England, young, old, handsome, ugly all are bepatch’d until Bed-rid." Over time, patches became increasingly associated across Europe with aging sex workers and aristocrats wishing to minimize blemishes turned to skin lightening agents like lead and arsenic.5

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The Victorian era’ sudden heel turn on powder and rouge reminds me of the way makeup has evolved over the past decade. Many self-professed beauty gurus found fame on YouTube in the early 2010s. Creators like Tati Westbrook, James Charles, and Nikita Dragun built media careers and product lines off of the audiences they grew with full glam makeup tutorials.6

Things began to change in 2014 when Into the Gloss beauty columnist Emily Weiss launched the Glossier brand, which offered only 6 skus.7 Within a few years, cakey foundation and colorful matte lips were cast aside in favor of airy BB creams and barely there lip oils. The “no makeup makeup” look ushered in the era of multi-step skincare regimes. Bathroom sinks once littered with lip kits and celebrity eye palettes became adorned by rows of serums and toners. Clear skin became not just a beautiful trait, but a mark of virtue. A bright, glowy skin proved that you drank lots of water and ate healthy food. Some might even claim that your gracefully aging skin could be chalked up to “being unproblematic”.8

Similarly prudish attitudes about makeup exist today as well. Before and after images of extreme makeup makeovers circulate online with jokes that men must take a girl swimming on the first date.9 Spanx and hair extensions are equated to false advertisement, as if my body is a bag of meat brandishing the threat of cellulite like salmonella. Women feel pressure to squish themselves into narrow definitions of beauty in any way they can, but cannot let on that they are doing so. It is not only necessary to conceal your body, you must also conceal the very fact that you have something to hide.

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I wore a lot of vintage dresses in middle and high school. I’ll admit that a twee proclivity was partially to blame, but my main motivation was a flattering fit. I got boobs too big and too early. And despite hours a week spent dancing and an occasional laxative habit, I was hippy before I was out of braces. In hindsight, which is far more forgiving than the eyes of a self-conscious teenage girl’s, I was still pretty thin. But I hated the way I looked in jeans and a tee shirt. Modern clothing, with its reliance on stretchy fabric, either hung from my chest or clung too tightly to the ounces of flesh I wanted to rip off in the bathroom. 

Vintage dresses were my solution. Cotton weaves and actual tailoring felt so much more flattering than poly-span fabric blends. Full skirts past my knees artfully concealed my rear while sweetheart necklines revealed just enough cleavage to be called something as classy as “decolletage”. I violently cinched patent leather belts at my waist as if to prove a point. To my dismay, many other shapely women had come to a similar conclusion. For every Zoey Deschanel wannabe out there in the early 2010s, a hundred plus size girls turned to retro style retailers like ModCloth for cute and flattering frocks. As embarrassing as it is to admit today, I hated the association.

I was far from the only person who balked at the idea of sharing a look with people I deemed less attractive. In 2006, Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries gave a shockingly frank interview for Salon. In explaining his target market, Jeffries ranted, “We go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.”10

A trend that is flattering is quick to catch on, but that sudden ubiquity can become the nail in the coffin of its own coolness. A trend that is exclusionary doesn’t run the risk of appealing to, and subsequently disseminating in popularity among the unattractive. It remains in the hard to pull-off echelons of “I wish I could wear that!”

The trends that burn the brightest and briefest are the ones that push flattery into the realm of fraud. Clothing that alters the body to the point of deception, like bullet bras or those yoga pants with ruching at the butt crack, makes people uncomfortable in an uncanny valley way. Such bold faced duplicity invites criticism and mockery. As soon as those trends fall out of fashion, they become the laughing stock of that decade, emblematic of how insane women used to dress out of vanity or insanity.

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TikTok has ushered in a new generation of advice on how to flatter your frame. In styling tip videos, two recordings of a woman will silently dance below looming symbols to denote an outfit’s passing or failure. The woman under the check mark will conceal her insecurities and balance her proportions with ease. Her doppelganger under the red X will fall prey to fashion faux pas, like horizontal stripes. On a platform primarily aimed at young adults and teens, I can’t help but be surprised by how many of these fashion rules feel dated and judgy. I struggle to find the appeal of information regurgitated from the scenes of What Not to Wear where Stacy London and Clinton Kelly point out a contestant’s back rolls in their horrific 360 degree mirror.

But other styling advice on TikTok strays from this refrain of flattery. In place of the pursuit of flattering clothing, a new popular ideal has developed, claiming that the true mark of style is dressing without thought to your body shape or attractiveness. In December of 2022, a video titled “stop only wearing flattering clothes.”11 went viral. In it, an aggrieved woman laments the years she spent dressing with the sole goal of appearing thinner, as opposed to choosing clothing that reflected her personal taste, flattery be damned. 

The same philosophy of dressing fueled Leandra Medine Cohen’s Man Repeller12, which she began as a fashion blog in 2010, but quickly evolved into a popular site for fashion commentary and advice with multiple contributors. Man Repeller championed quirky accessories, off beat silhouettes, and clashing patterns. It was fashion writing for the girls’ girls, who didn’t care if they looked hot because they wanted to look cool. By the time Medine Cohen stepped down in 2020 amidst stories of racist treatment from former employees of color coming out, the publication had left an indelible mark on the way that many Millennial women approached clothing. 

Rejecting flattering fashion is an intergenerational trend, the Gen Z kids today are wearing baggy jeans under flowy peasant dresses. They are flaunting slight muffin tops in totally Y2K bedazzled low rise jeans. Saying no to the rules is cool. Whether revealing or concealing, these styles project supreme confidence by denying the impulse to externally shape one’s body.

But there are still narrow and rigid expectations for women, they’re just different now. Not only should you be effortlessly beautiful, but that nonchalance must be driven by a radical acceptance of all body types. I’m not just embarrassed because my arms are flabby, I’m also embarrassed that I even find my arms embarrassing. What am I, a Cathy cartoon? Being visibly self-conscious about my body marks me as a bashful loser and bad feminist. 

The otherwise conventionally attractive women going viral for flaunting unflattering fashions are all hyper aware of their minor aesthetic transgressions. It’s like seeing someone walk around with toilet paper stuck to their shoe— these women must combat the discomfort that comes from looking at someone and not knowing for certain if they’re fully aware of their flaws. The language they use to describe their styles is defensive. By wearing low rise jeans without her hip bones jutting out, this TikTok influencer is making a statement and being brave. The very presence of this commentary disproves the neutrality she feigns towards her appearance. By loudly and intentionally reclaiming what is wrong with them, these women are also demonstrating awareness of and, in some sense, showing penance for their shortcomings as beautiful objects.

My first foray into makeup was a stick of concealer borrowed from my mom in middle school to conceal pimples. It was a sorry look: no mascara, no tint to the lips, just crusty beige blotches all over my pink face. These days, there are other options.

The yellow star shaped pimple patches that are popular right now remind me so much of the 18th century’s decorative mouches. Bright and bold, these hydrocolloid stickers defensively call attention to the types of blemishes I try in vain to hide. They’re clinically proven and cute to boot. They say “Don’t worry, I know I have a pimple right here and I’m taking care of it!” I wonder if any tween girls still cover their pimples with almost-the-right-shade concealer that cakes up on scabs and only serves to further clogs their pores. I wonder why I still cover my pimples like that.