The Lula girl as ‘sublime and childlike’: nostalgic investments in contemporary fashion magazines

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the figure of the ‘girl’ has become one of the most prominent subject positions offered up in British fashion magazines (Jobling 1999). This way of constructing femininity harks back to the observation made by Roland Barthes, in 1967, that the rhetoric of fashion ‘reproduces, on the level of clothing, the mythic situation of Women in Western civilization, at once sublime and childlike’ (1990: 242). This article argues that both facets – the sublime and the childlike – continue to inform constructions of femininity in contemporary fashion magazines, with the niche publication, Lula, girl of my dreams, being a particularly marked example. Methods of textual and discourse analysis are employed to make sense of written and visual excerpts, drawing from issues of Lula spanning 2006 to 2012. Discourses on Romantic childhood and discourses on ‘high’ fashion – both of which construct their objects as ‘pure’ – are shown to intersect on the pages of Lula thus producing the Lula girl as otherworldly creature, while disavowing the less palatable aspects of the fashion industry that bring her into being. Inviting nostalgic recollection of childhood, the Lula girl is shown not to recall childhood in any objective sense but rather to reconstruct childhood through the mythic tropes of Romantic innocence. The possible appeal of this vision of womanhood for both magazine producers and consumers is theorized through the concept of ‘investment’ as well as recent debates on pleasure and politics in feminist media studies. Ultimately, the Lula girl is shown to facilitate imaginary solutions for real-life frustrations by dissolving the contradictions of normative femininity as well as encompassing elements excluded from contemporary definitions of adulthood

Between Image and Spectator: Reception Studies as Visual Methodology

“…For as Ros Coward states in relation to 1990s fashion photography: "it is no use trying to pretend that these child-like supermodels simply pander to male fantasies of resuming control and are being imposed on a resentful womanhood" (Coward as cited in Jobling 1999: 123). My analysis of niche fashion magazine Lula supports this claim (Laing 2014a). Lula is a publication brimming with images of the "woman-child" that nostalgically transport the reader back to her or his childhood.…”

“…In my own study I found that women had a range of different investments in the "woman-child": nostalgia for childhood (Laing 2014a); curiosity; intrigue; fascination; empowerment; comfort; aspiration; escape; identification with sadness; feminist critique; and so forth. Through reception studies I was able to "test out" theory on spectatorship -such as the idea of the "internalised male gaze" (Berger 2008(Berger [1972; Mulvey 2009Mulvey [1981) -much of which is speculative in nature.…”

Marcas de género en el diseño tipográfico de revistas de moda

“…En su trabajo reciente, Morna Laing asegura que desde la década de 1980, la figura de la "niña" se ha convertido en una de las más importantes posiciones de las revistas de moda. Y afirma, siguiendo a Roland Barthes (1967) que esta forma de construir la feminidad mítica propia de occidente, a partir de lo sublime y lo infantil, se reproduce en las revistas de moda contemporáneas (Laing, 2014;2012). Laing analiza la revista Lula Girl como máximo exponente de este fenómeno.…”

Rewriting Lolita in fashion photography: Candy, consumption, and dying flowers

“…Elsewhere (Laing, 2012(Laing, , 2014 I have theorised childlike femininity in fashion photography as nostalgia for an idealised window of perfection: a state of being on the cusp between girlhood and womanhood; a no-place; 16 a liminal utopia that does not exist outside of representation. Yet, in images such as 'Sunny and Sexy' (Figures 2 and 3) by Miles Aldridge, the connotations of childhood are not utopian or nostalgic; instead, the freezing of time seems to violently disturb the woman pictured.…”

“…Yet unlike fashion spreads that reference Romantic childhood (Laing, 2012(Laing, , 2014, there is nothing nostalgic about Aldridge's imagery. Ashley Smith is not play-acting a child having fun; her expression is petulant, glazed-over or, at worst, disassociated: a mood completely at odds with the title, 'Sunny and Sexy'.…”