Two Sabrinas

I agree with Kelly that race (and sexuality) is decidedly absent from this week’s readings which were concerned primarily with the social mobility of white, heterosexual women through fashion. Again we are confronted with similar problems that we faced when discussing psychoanalysis, where the white, heterosexual female becomes the universal woman in the binary view of gender difference. What I did find useful about these readings was the differentiation of women in to types that Berry discusses in detail and both Stacey and Studlar allude to. Although separating women out into various types could be seen as yet another way to mask diversity and create generic versions of women, I think what it does draw attention to is that, at least from the 1930s onward, marketing strategies for fashion and beauty culture revolved around the idea that identity (and almost exclusively femininity) was a conscious performance.

Many of the films discussed in this weeks readings, Audrey Hepburn’s Sabrina being an excellent reference point, were almost exclusively concerned with class mobility through fashion. I found the areas where this social mobility intersected with European High fashion and American popular culture to be some of the most interesting parts of the discussion. Although I’m not a fashion buff by any means, it’s quite obvious that the big stars still prefer their Versaces and Diors as the mark that they have truly reached the upper class echelon. Berry’s reading of Roberta as the “synthesis between fashion and popular culture,” namely European versus American ideals, Stacey’s nuanced account of British women’s appropriation of Hollywood star fashion and Studlar’s analysis of Audrey Hepburn and Givenchy fashion all explore this intersection of America with the European in terms of social mobility and femininity (69). Studlar’s analysis of Hepburn in Sabrina as “the new standard of feminine beauty as narrow and underdeveloped was not instigated by Givenchy or Hepburn, but Hepburn epitomized this type in movies, where it was a decided contrast to the shapely, buxom norm of female stars” situates her, again, as a type of femininity (162). When Sabrina returns to the Larabee’s literally nothing has changed about her but her clothes, she doesn’t, however, just conform to the fashions of the other upper class ladies of Long Island, but incorporates Givency’s couture fashions as a way to take her youthful, androgynous body and transition to a (new) mature femininity. In comparing Hepburn’s 1954 Sabrina to the disastrous 1995 remake I have to say that fashion was the primary reason for that film’s failure as much as it was the reason for the original’s success. The remake, although still sending Sabrina off to Paris to transition into mature femininity, had her return with simply beautiful clothes, the complication of Hepburn in conjunction with Givenchy typifying a new type of femininity through clothes is not possible in the remake where such an image had been around for 50 years. Fashion as a means to social mobility is thus historically and culturally located.

On a completely unrelated note, many of the articles were concerned with product tie-ins and “soft sell” or product placement in the woman’s film and made the point again and again that women were the prime consumers and thus the target market for much of cinema and advertising. I haven’t done any research on this but the because of the immense popularity of action films, aka The Dark Knight, in the past ~10 years, I think the woman as the primary consumer has been replaced by teenagers as the primary consumer, at least in cinema, spending frivolously their middle class parent’s disposable income. Batman is then the perfect figure to sell all the newest gadgets to this younger consumer that, arguably looking at Apple’s marketing campaign, is less concerned with fashion and more concerned with technology as identity. Ie. the popularity of facebook and myspace. Again, I dovetail to virtual fashion and virtual consumption as the new site of identity.