CHAPTER 16
Botox, Booties, and Bods
The diatribes were falling on deaf ears. About how women were being commodified. About how girls were being eroticized. About society’s fixation on body image. In fact, women (and men) by the tens of millions were more concerned than ever before about their appearance, their personal style, their bods. Americans, seeking methods for feeling better about themselves, more attractive to their mates, and less depleted by the ravages of age, were resetting their clocks to Dorian Graylight Savings.
I call comedian Joan Rivers for her insight. (Our conversation takes place in 2011; she would pass away in 2014, at age eighty-one, from complications related to a surgical procedure on her larynx.)
Rivers had been a trailblazing comic. She’d developed her brash and sassy voice by building on the take-no-prisoners approach of risqué forerunners such as Belle Barth and “Moms” Mabley. She’d made her name by pointing out others’ social and physical blunders. But she was equally frank about her own flaws, getting bonus miles out of her Jewish Princess preoccupations; her looks (“My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on”); and her arid love life (“My vagina is like Newark—men know it’s there, but they don’t want to visit”). Sexual relations were an essential part of her act, and yet she professed to find the sex act highly overrated. (Her take on anal said it all: “You can do other things! You can click on email! You can read a magazine!”)1
As the ’90s became progressively more synthetic, Rivers embraced that drift, waxing genuine about her own artifice. With zingers about her lifts and lipo, cosmetic surgery had found its biggest booster. (“My face,” she quipped, “has been tucked in more times than a bedsheet at the Holiday Inn.”) Like her predecessor Phyllis Diller, Rivers would demystify the process by discussing the “work” she’d had done—and she’d insist that her sisters in the Plastic Class do the same.
She explained to me that she’d started on this offensive around the time she landed her own late-night talk show on Fox in 1986. “I got very taken to task [in] the early ’80s and ’90s,” she said, recalling an incident she found particularly galling. “I sat at a dinner table with four major movie stars, all of [whom] had such scars behind their ears you could have run the B&O Railroad across them. Each one said to me, ‘What was it like?’” Grow up, she told them—a signature line of hers. “Nobody was telling the truth. I got very angry. I come out of the Gloria Steinem generation, where we worked so hard to get women to be ‘a woman on your own’ and be a sister to each other.… Either we’re together or we’re not together. So I decided to advocate—to say, ‘I am doing this and you can do this and you should do this’ and became very vocal about it.”
Plastic surgery was, prima facie, a fabrication. But Rivers seized the subterfuge and recast it as an empowerment tool. Sharing knowledge about one another’s treatments, she said, was “truly an outgrowth of the women’s movement, of saying, ‘Here’s another truth we can tell each other—to help each other.’” And yet, I asked her, wasn’t second-wave feminism built on the authentic? The organic? “Don’t give me that,” she snapped. “Gloria Steinem always bleached her hair.… I used to say to [fellow feminists], ‘Why are you shaving your legs?’ In those days you shaved. It was all about ‘men like me au naturel.’ It was nonsense. Half the bras that were burned were padded.”2
Flash forward to the decade under discussion. Rivers would contend that she finally recognized a change in attitude. “A lot of what happened in the ’90s,” she believed, “is that we learned you could have both. Women said, ‘I can be strong and empowered and this-and-that, but I can also use my sex appeal. I’ve got an extra weapon.’ It’s great.” She added, laughing, “And when all else fails—cry!”3
Indeed, the entire cosmetic gamut was destigmatized, from peels to microdermabrasion to breast enhancement surgery. And Rivers was at the center of that shift. Patients, as Sander L. Gilman points out in his book Making the Body Beautiful, were being referred to as “clients.” Surgeries became “corrections.” Operations became “procedures.” From 1981 to 1996, writes Gilman, “the total number of all aesthetic surgical procedures” would increase more than sixfold, “exceed[ing] 1.9 million [or] about one procedure for every 150 people in the United States every year.” And starting in the ’90s, the majority of Americans seeking such surgeries, which had long been the province of the elite, would come from the lower- and middle-class income range.
At the same time, Rivers had also become a connoisseur of celebrity surface. Previously, film fans had watched the Academy Awards telecast out of a fascination with actors, filmmakers, and their craft; to get swept up in the spectacle; and to thrill to the thunder of a great horse race. Come the early ’90s, though, that horse had gone to pasture. Moviegoers were less taken with screen performances than with the drama of stars’ private lives. They became less concerned with critical reviews than with which film won each week at the box office.4 To many Oscar-night viewers, all that began to matter was the clothes.
Beginning in 1994, Joan Rivers, as the harridan of fashion gaffes, almost single-handedly made the “arrivals” sideshow at the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards more compelling in some ways than the ceremonies inside. Along with her daughter, Melissa, she carpet-bombed the stars on the red carpet for the E! network, helping turn the mere act of showing up somewhere into a pastime, even a profession.5 “Somebody said that Melissa and I made walking into a building an event,” she remarked, “and that’s absolutely true. The Academy Awards are very boring. Nobody cared who won Best Cinematographer. Nobody has any more attention span—and that was starting [back] then.”
The E! network’s executives, Rivers remembered, “said that Melissa and I could ask anything we wanted—just spice it up.… So we began to ask very shallow, funny questions. And one of the questions was, ‘Who are you wearing?’ because I figured they knew that answer. It became an overnight hit.”6
And yet, I asked, wasn’t the red-carpet cattle call part of a deliberate plan by high-end designers? A way to get the great unswathed at home to go out and buy their clothes? “It wasn’t a plot at all,” said Rivers. “In the beginning [the stars] were still dressing themselves. And they looked like trailer trash—and it was fabulous. For every chic woman that walked in, you had Demi Moore who made her own bicycle pants one year, and you go, ‘It’s the Academy Awards, you ass.’ That’s what made it. People began to watch—to see this. And then the designers said, ‘Wait a second. If they’re going to announce my name on television, let me see if I can dress these people.’”
Not quite. By the late 1980s, according to Patty Fox, in her book Star Style at the Academy Awards, “socially and professionally connected women were hired to be liaisons between the fashion designers and the film and television industry. A major goal was to get Hollywood stars zipped into designer clothing on Oscar night.” The race to dress the town’s top talent really began in earnest, pre-Rivers—in the late 1980s and early ’90s—insists Bronwyn Cosgrave, whose Made for Each Other: Fashion and the Academy Awards is the definitive study of women’s style on that enchanted evening. That’s when designer Giorgio Armani, working with L.A.’s fashion-savvy Wanda McDaniel, led the way in aggressively courting actresses to don their threads for the traipse down the red carpet. Armani’s competitor at the time was Fred Hayman, who at his pioneering boutique on Rodeo Drive stocked a veritable “Oscar closet” from which the stars could pick and choose.7 “The competition between Armani and Hayman as they vied to dress Hollywood during 1990’s Oscar season,” writes Cosgrave, “spared women the expense of buying dresses, so the practice of commissioning great costume designers to make them halted. The rivalry between Armani and Hayman also established fashion competition as integral to the buildup heralding the Academy Awards.”
In any case, it was Joan Rivers, microphone in hand, who more than anyone turned celebrities’ arrivals at anything into sport, commerce, and theater—a visual mash-up of fashion, flesh, and farce. She had fond memories of her maiden telecast. “The first one I spoke to on the red carpet was John Travolta,” she told me, “because I knew him. I think his words to me were, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’”
Her response: “I was trying to be nice. ‘A girl’s got to make a living.’”
And what was he wearing that night?
“At that point, just a simple sheath and ballet slippers.”
Unlike some of their forebears in the second-wave feminist movement, ’90s women seemed much more comfortable cultivating their appearance, their own signature style.
Lines were out. A syringeful of a new substance, Botox—actually botulinum toxin—was being utilized by doctors-in-the-know to smooth out furrows and other unsightlies. (It would be approved by the FDA in 2002.) Part of the perverse appeal of Botox was that it injected actual poison into a person’s face. Curiously, this was less of a turn-off than the procedure’s secondary risk: bestowing upon its adopters a blank cyborgean mask.
Brows were sculpted. Through the popular process of “threading,” thin fiber cord would be tied to the stalks of a woman’s eyebrows, allowing individual hairs to be yanked out in succession. The result, as zoologist and sociobiologist Desmond Morris would explain in The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body, “Female eyebrows have been made super-female by artificially increasing their thinness and smallness.”
Hair was big. In the ’80s there had been a close-cropped fever. Many ambitious career women had sought “short, tight hair,” which, according to Morris, was “associated with discipline, self-control, efficiency, conformity and assertiveness.” But by the ’90s, fuller looks were coming back. In 1992, Mattel, sensing this transition, released Totally Hair Barbie, which would turn out to be the hottest-selling Barbie ever.8 Many women developed codependent relationships with their blow-dryers. They went to stylists to “get blown” (later called “blown out”). Sandra Ballentine, in W, would eventually write about what became her biweekly ’90s “addiction [to visiting] haute hairstylists.… Things got so bad that I avoided traveling to cities where I didn’t have a hair connection.”
Women also sought new or rediscovered styles. According to scholar Ingrid Banks, author of Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness, businesses in the ’90s were actually firing women—and schools were suspending girls—for hairdos (“zigzag parts,” for example) that were considered gang-related, too outré, or “too ethnic.… Oprah Winfrey dedicated an entire show to the ‘black hair question.’” As hard as it might be to imagine today, tennis star Venus Williams caused consternation among some mainstream observers by wearing beaded hair on center court. She was seen as “exotic to some and threatening to others,” according to Banks, because she “display[ed] a black esthetic that is linked to an authentic or radical blackness in the imagination of many whites.… [Her] expression of radicalized gender sent the message to a predominantly white professional women’s tennis circuit that mainstream constructions of womanhood are insufficient in understanding black women’s relationship to beauty culture.”
Hair extensions—sewn on, glued on, or clipped on—were everywhere. The Wall Street Journal reported that the market for “human-hair imports surged 72% to $78.5 million [in 1995 alone], according to the U.S. Commerce Department.” The bulk of the supplies would come from the scalps of women in China, India, and Southeast Asia, where hair collectors scrambled to meet the demand.9 This boom in extensions was attributable to various constituencies: from black women seeking bounce or braids or a relief from treatments, to women of all races who were simply tired of fussing, from working-class club kids to stylists pushing the new look on their clients.
Then again, bald was big too. Bare-cut Meshell Ndegeocello, as well as Sinéad O’Connor, burst onto the music scene. In 1992, Sigourney Weaver sheared it all off for Alien 3. So did Demi Moore for G.I. Jane, in which she snarled at her commanding officer, “Suck my dick.”
Women chose to shave their heads for any number of reasons. To subvert conventional notions of female beauty by rejecting the hair-equals-femininity equivalency. To confer a kick-ass vibe. To purify or purge themselves following the loss of a lover (or to show solidarity with a friend battling illness). To project “butch,” depending on the wearer or the beholder. Finally, as salon owner Dexter Fields told the Washington Post in 1999: to gain strength through vulnerability. “Once your security blanket is gone, you can be exposed,” said Fields, who specialized in relieving women of their hair.
Visits to salons—which had soared in the ’80s as more working women had more disposable income in the healthier economy—became an all-American ritual in the ’90s among all ages, races, and classes. Nail art became ever more elaborate. A mani-pedi became as essential and routine as a gas station fill-up.
My daughter, Molly, then eleven, was obsessed (along with her girlfriends) with Britney Spears, the decade’s reigning pop tart, and started wearing Spears-inspired belly shirts. Desmond Morris fixes the arrival of the garment to “late 1998 to be precise [when] low-slung jeans [were] combined with unusually short tops.” The result, in his estimation, was to redirect the gaze down toward a more focused erogenous zone. Molly, who would go on to become a schoolteacher, would look back as a twenty-seven-year-old: “My friends and I all saw Britney’s washboard abs and we had to have them. I did a hundred sit-ups a day.” Navel rings and chains and studs were soon to follow. (My friend Anne Kent recalls accompanying her daughter when she got her belly button pierced. She was alarmed when the guy in the tattoo parlor told her that navel rings dated back to slave days, when women were treated as chattel.)
Piercings, for years, had been a marginal adornment. In the ’90s they became signs of defiance and self-expression. Face metal was suddenly a badge, a rite of passage. Tongue studs, nipple rings, and bling for the clitoral hood (typically a ring or a tiny bar with twin studs on the end) added to erotic stimulation, for oneself or one’s partner. Tattoos of all stylings, sizes, and quantity, while not yet as ubiquitous as they are today, were pervasive, borrowing from an array of subcultures—gang, hip-hop, biker, and more. For many women, barbed-wire patterns showed up on biceps, and the “tramp stamp”—a horizontal and often ornate tattoo—cropped up at the base of the spine.
While we’re in the vicinity, the booty was huge. The designer jeans craze had kicked things off in the late ’70s, but the butt would really take center stage in the ’80s and ’90s. The columnist and commentator Erin Aubry made waves by writing about the ways commercial culture had previously relegated the female African American physique—the rear in particular—to second-class status. She called for a more expansive view of beauty in “The Butt,” her 1997 essay for L.A. Weekly. She made the case for the “stubborn, immutable [buttocks]… It can’t be hot-combed or straightened or bleached into submission. It does not assimilate; it never took a slave name.” In the article—for which Aubry posed in snug jeans—she insisted, according to feminist scholars Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, “that black women’s bodies, specifically their butts, have been seen only as sex machines and workhorses to such a profane degree that the simple act of trying to buy a pair of jeans becomes a metaphor for not fitting into the white patriarchy and its notions of feminine bodies.”10
The social activist and feminist scholar bell hooks has proposed that contemporary culture awakened to the sexualized bottom, specifically the black female bottom, in 1988 when the go-go band Experience Unlimited’s recording of “Da Butt”—a.k.a. “(Doin’) the Butt”—hit No. 1 in the Billboard R&B rankings. The track, she notes, “fostered the promotion of a hot new dance favoring those who could most protrude their buttocks with pride and glee.” Doin’ da butt and shakin’ dat thang took hold. The song, according to hooks, “challenged dominant ways of thinking about the body, which encourage us to ignore asses because they are associated with undesirable and unclean acts. Unmasked, the ‘butt’ could be once again worshipped as an erotic seat of pleasure and excitement.”
Soon, performers like Lil’ Kim and Missy Elliott were crooning about the merits of a fuller moon. “Booty rap” became a ’90s bumper crop. The group 2 Live Crew came out with “Face Down, Ass Up.” Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest sang the praises of “Bonita Applebum.” Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre coined the phrase “bootylicious” in 1992, around the time Wreckx-N-Effect released “Rump Shaker.” The next year, DJ Jubilee coined the term “twerk” (to booty bounce). Shakin’ in their wake came Juvenile’s “Back That Azz/Thang Up,” Mos Def’s “Ms. Fat Booty,” and a trail of others.
The top male booty rapper, however, may well have been Anthony Ray (a.k.a. Sir Mix-a-Lot). In 1992 he had the nation’s No. 1 hit with “Baby Got Back.” It was powered by a popular video (in which Mix stood atop a field of giant yellow heinies) with a propulsive beat and cheeky lyrics: “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” To move the freight, promoters placed a helium-filled derriere atop the Tower Records store in Los Angeles.
Sir Mix-a-Lot was branded a misogynist and a racist and a liberator. MTV, alarmed, would only air the video in nocturnal rotation. America, however, was hooked. The track would become, in the view of Vulture.com’s Rob Kemp, “our national anthem of ass.” Or as the A&R-man-producer-journalist Dan Charnas would say, Mix’s was “the loudest voice for this cultural overthrow of the Euro-centric beauty aesthetic.”11
Three other catalysts contributed. In 1996, designer Alexander McQueen unveiled a line of women’s pants that were slung so low that his runway show became a procession of butt cleavage. The “bumster look” caught on and copycats started turning out skimpier slacks. Next, in 1998, Puerto Rican American ingénue Jennifer Lopez appeared opposite George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight. To publicize the film, she agreed to a Vanity Fair photo session in which she looked coyly over a bare shoulder and flashed her most prized asset—in lace-up lingerie—at photographer Firooz Zahedi. In that one “revolutionary full-page photo,” Camille Paglia would write in the Hollywood Reporter, Lopez had sent a shot across the cultural bow. “She fetchingly turned her ample… buttocks to the camera. It was the first time that the traditional eroticization by Latin and black culture of that bulbous part of the anatomy had ever received mainstream recognition in the U.S.”
Third and foremost, the thong was rising.
Throughout the decade, as inhibitions and pubic hair diminished, so too did the amount of fabric devoted to skivvies. The thong—naughty, uncomfortable, meant to be noticed yet surreptitiously tucked away—became the default ’90s undie. Its whisper-thin frontal panty deftly hid a woman’s (or a man’s) privates; its strap or tie sides rode high on the hips; its stringy remainder nestled along the perineum and posterior folds, leaving the trunk entirely exposed.
Fans and foes alike would call it “butt floss.” Worn with low-ride slacks or shorts or skirts, it would stubbornly peep above the trouser line in what became known as a “whale tail.” The thong’s avowed purpose was a practical one: to do away with VPL—visible panty line. But its deeper mission was tied to its sex appeal. The thong, an item of respectable beachwear in places like Brazil, was in fact the cousin of the G-string, the stripper’s indispensable garment.
The thong was part of a pattern. Some have proposed that as global warming brought on more torrid summers, designers had responded. So, more open-toed sandals, see-through blouses, miniskirts, and short shorts. More and more women in urban centers were taking to the streets wearing less and less—to the point where George Gurley, writing in the New York Observer, would pen a much-discussed 1998 column about that annual rite of spring’s demise when men would go collectively gaga on “that first or second hot day… when that first woman in that first spaghetti-strap shirt of summer steps out of her building.” Thus, wrote Gurley, would women declare open season on onlookers’ “joy and agitation” until Labor Day.
Calvin Klein (with his topless and naked models), along with other giants in fashion and fragrance, pushed the nude look throughout the decade. More skin in advertisements meant more sales in the marketplace.
The evenings had their own swelter. Items of lingerie, which had only ever been conceived as bedtime clothes, were being worn to parties and clubs. For Vanity Fair’s first-ever Hollywood Issue, in 1995, most of the ten actresses depicted—including Angela Bassett, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Uma Thurman—donned slinky numbers that could have doubled as boudoir-wear. “The slip dress was an offshoot of grunge,” according to Bronwyn Cosgrave. “It was redolent of Courtney Love and her whole Kinderwhore thing and it culminated in her going to the 1995 Oscars with Amanda de Cadenet—with both of them, on Hollywood’s chicest evening, showing up in their slips.”12
Bras suddenly announced themselves. Women were wearing them with the straps deliberately exposed. Or in shades that could be easily displayed through light-colored tops or thin fabrics. Some women were making a sexually charged fashion statement. Others were picking up on the “nothing to hide” aesthetic of the punk, grunge, and Riot Grrrl scenes. Many were just being assertively blasé. They were telegraphing the fact that clothes were clothes and that this was how they worked on a person’s body. It was as if the boring hydraulics, hidden from polite company for centuries, were now being consciously exposed in both form and function, regardless of any stray erotic value.
Meanwhile, bras and panties became even more eroticized by the unapologetically suggestive Victoria’s Secret. The company, created in the ’70s to appeal to men who’d expressed discomfort shopping for unmentionables, would become by the mid-’90s the hottest intimate apparel brand in the United States. Its formula: liberate lingerie from the shadows (and antiseptic department stores) and make underclothes sexy again. Come 1995, Victoria’s Secret—worth $2 billion and boasting 670 retail outlets—was the Valvoline of women’s apparel, an indispensable lubricant in the lives of sensually aware women and their partners. Its catalog was more popular than most magazines—and a year-round stocking stuffer for adolescent boys. It helped turn the corset, championed by Gaultier and Versace, from a fetish item into a late-evening staple (albeit with a bit of sci-fi kink). Victoria’s Secret’s runway shows took off; its stores became anchor tenants at the nation’s malls; its models bloomed into megastars.
In the spring of 1994, Playtex rolled out the Wonderbra. Its secret, as Newsweek revealed: “Padding fills out the sides. Underwire scrunches the rest of the breasts up and in, creating cleavage.” And with it came the miraculous mirage of universal décolletage.
The Wonderbra was backed up by a robust marketing campaign. “Macy’s had a fashion show with twin models,” reported the New York Times, assessing the hoopla, “one natural and one Wonderbra-ed. At Lord & Taylor’s flagship Fifth Avenue store, the bra arrived in an armored truck. The most popular sizes quickly sold out.” Ad Age marveled, “Only last fall, the slight-chested look was in. Now, even waif queen Kate Moss confesses [that when she desires] some comely décolletage, she wears a Wonderbra.” Within a few weeks, one New York secretary told the Times, “I was at a party and I swear every woman there was pushed up.”
The new superbra—actually an American incarnation of popular versions sold in the U.K. and Canada—was not an obvious fit for the wholesome Sara Lee Corporation, the parent company of Playtex. But Sara Lee did know how to move the cupcakes. And by the end of year one, the $26 garments were selling at a clip of four pairs a minute, accounting for $120 million in annual revenue.
The Wonderbra (with spokesmodel Eva Herzigová peering down and proclaiming, “Hello Boys”) signaled a true loosening of consumer fashion. American women seemed to be saying that an added flash of flesh was no big deal, was natural, was not to be marveled at but, if at all, simply acknowledged. Women of all shapes and ages and temperaments began to leave a top button or two undone, to wear lower-cut outfits—to convey more openness and to feel more free. The trend became a prevailing style and in time rather standard.
Sports bras, too, saw record sales. The columnist David Brooks, upon seeing women at a local park in summertime “running around in their underwear in public,” sounds altogether fusty today. In the ’90s, however, he was astute, imagining that Gibbon, if privy to the same scene, would have begun “speculating about the decline of empires. But look at the bra joggers more closely. It’s not wanton hedonism you see on their faces.… [It is] grim determination.… The reason they are practically naked, they will tell you, is that this sort of clothing is most practical, most useful for strenuous exercise. What we see at the park is near nudity, but somehow it’s nudity in the service of achievement.”
Many were not so edified. “Shapewear” of all kinds had become the ’90s girdle. And then in 1998, according to Alexandra Jacobs in the New Yorker, a woman named Sara Blakely came upon the bright idea “to chop the feet off a pair of control-top panty hose so that she could get a svelte, seamless look under white slacks without stockings poking out of her sandals.” The resulting garment—Spanx—would instantly slenderize a nation. These so-called body smoothers were transformative. They were also fashion’s antidote to the fact that gravity, as retail expert Alan Millstein would tell BusinessWeek, was “taking its toll on the baby-boom generation.”
While pop culture reinforced these trends, no medium proved more influential than the printed page. Women sought beauty tips in such numbers that the fashion, beauty, and “women’s” magazine categories expanded. There were personality-centric titles such as Marie Claire (launched in the States in 1994), Jane (1997), and O: The Oprah Magazine (2000). There were a raft of edgier publications that straddled fashion, art, music, and street culture. There were girl-focused magazines like CosmoGirl (1999) that instilled a style sense in a younger audience (the better to turn them into grown-up Cosmo buyers).13
Among the most studied faces of all were those of the supermodels, a relatively new designation epitomized by the 1980s triumvirate of Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Naomi Campbell. (John Casablancas, the modeling agency chief, is often cited as having created the supermodel, aiding in the ascent of that trio—and many others, from Cindy to Claudia to Iman.) In 1990, Evangelista would notoriously remark of her rarefied and pampered breed, “We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”
It was not all sweetness and glam. The grunge look clambered in with Marc Jacobs’s 1992 show for Perry Ellis. Fashion writer Cathy Horyn would recall in New York magazine that Jacobs’s runway show—which would help define his career (and yet get him sacked by Ellis a couple of months later)—featured models “stomp[ing] out… in Doc Marten boots and Converse sneakers, with knitted caps and granny glasses and dingy plaid shirts… [making it appear] as if Jacobs had not designed any new clothes so much as raided every thrift shop from here to Seattle.”
Along came heroin chic. Its dazed and sallow-looking models, shot vérité in rec rooms and motels, emerged partly as an assault on the hyper-gloss of the era’s glamazons. But this new aesthetic was expressing something more grave. It was an outgrowth of the fashion houses and modeling agencies that venerated the slender, as if sanctioning anorexia and bulimia. Its tone was bleak, coming from an industry that had been decimated by disease in the 1980s. The harsh lighting, unvarnished settings, and runny mascara reflected the marginalized roots of many of the models depicted—“those,” in the words of Philippe Venzano for Mixte magazine, who had “suffered from Thatcherism” and were being revealed in ways that “push[ed] aside the codes of fashion and introduce[d] daily life, banal occurrences, imperfection.”
The look was espoused by taboo-busting designers, stylists, and especially photographers, including Corinne Day, Craig McDean, and Davide Sorrenti. (Sorrenti would overdose in 1997, at age twenty.) Day—whose style was of a piece with the stark 1980s documentary work of visual artists such as Nan Goldin—was the most assertive champion of this new aesthetic. For The Face, Day shot a notorious portfolio in the early 1990s that showed an unknown, reed-thin model named Kate Moss—only fifteen at the time—who was photographed seminude in some of the images. Another of Day’s shoots, for British Vogue, showed Moss chilling out in a bedroom. It would rankle readers and critics alike. “Because it was shot on a teenage girl, they said it was outrageous, pedophilia,” Moss would recall dismissively two decades later. “Ridiculous. I must have been 19. I’m standing in my underwear. Really controversial.”
For all its authentic grit, the aesthetic was inexorably grim. Were the images really approaching child-porn terrain? Condoning drug use? At one press conference, President Clinton would accuse fashion houses of “glamoriz[ing] addiction to sell clothes.” Some runway shows pushed into ever-darker territory, a fact made bracingly apparent when designer Alexander McQueen in 1995 “dedicated his fall collection to ‘the highland rape,’ a pointed statement about the ravaging of Scotland by England,” as Eric Wilson and Cathy Horyn would recount in McQueen’s obituary in the Times after his 2010 suicide. “The models appeared to be brutalized… their hair tangled and their eyes blanked out with opaque contact lenses.”
But McQueen, come 1997, even as he espoused his signature doom-and-gloom glam, would turn to a more traditionally sexy and full-bodied type when he anointed Gisele Bündchen as “The Body” and featured her prominently in his “Untitled/The Golden Shower” show, at which he introduced his 1998 spring/summer collection.14 (Gisele had been discovered at a McDonald’s in São Paulo in 1995, and her success would trip the switch on the “Brazilian model invasion.”)
With Gisele’s ascension, the swan and geek and waif parade was effectively declared so over. And its death spiral was everywhere apparent. Manhattan’s flashy Fashion Café—which had been started in 1995 by supermodels—was unceremoniously shuttered. Newsweek mourned the death of the supermodel. Vogue featured Gisele on its July 1999 cover, broadcasting “The Return of the Curve.”15
Fashion’s raison d’être, though, was retail sales. And the industry, along with other cultural drivers such as Sex and the City (which fetishized Fendi bags and pushed everything from Dolce & Gabbana to Absolut), celebrated and validated shopping as its own reward. Individual designers were opening flagship retail locations. The first New York tent shows sprouted in Bryant Park in 1993, drawing big-ticket sponsors, paparazzi—and consumer attention. Given shopping’s convenience, its illicit abandon, and its infinite choice, the act of browsing and purchasing—with friends or alone—became a kind of mass hypnosis. For many, shopping would replace sex, with the credit card serving as the ultimate stimulant.
More style-conscious women—and men. More easily seduced consumers. More body alterations. More fluid fashions. More body ink and face metal. More skin. At times, women wanted to break down gender stereotypes via the statements they made through their appearance. At other times, they simply wanted to be more classically feminine. “Of all the projects of second-wave feminism, the project to eliminate femininity in dress is one of the most absolute of failures,” Joan Williams would assert at the end of the decade in her book Unbending Gender. “If feminism did not kill domesticity, it has had even less effect on feminine norms of dress and carriage. Most feminists today embrace femininity and sexy dressing and offer a variety of rationales.”
The thrust of it all was that a woman’s physical comportment was becoming a more personal, customized statement, a reflection of her inner beliefs, desires, and moods. To convey her own style, she was mixing and matching the natural and the virtual in new ways that tested or catered to conventional concepts of beauty; shattered, downplayed, or exaggerated categories of gender; or emphasized or deemphasized her sexuality.
Such self-invention did not a political movement make. Some have argued that many women were assuming the stereotypes of consumer culture, albeit ironically. Many were. But women, one by one—by taking serious stock of their outward expression and by adopting looks that might very well be common to members of their peer group—were fortifying their sense of belonging, an act that in itself conferred strength in numbers and social agency.