Cindy Sherman in a New Millennium: Fashion, Feminism, Art and Ageing

ABSTRACT

If feminism and the fashion industry were once seen as adversaries, given how the strictures of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) permeated so much of second wave feminism, a consideration of ‘fashion’ is now central to contemporary feminist scholarship. But just as the earlier critique of fashion seemed finally to have been supplanted, certain basic arguments around dress and makeup nevertheless resurfaced within contemporary feminism. The current neoliberal climate has led to the ever-increasing consumption of ‘fashionable’ goods, provoking unease and encouraging the contested ‘protectionist discourse’ within feminism to shield young women from just such excesses. Meanwhile, the fashion world itself, arguably more powerful than ever, has across the last twenty years continued a process of legitimising itself through its various modes of alliance with the art world; it has even hijacked elements of feminist practice in the pursuit of publicity. This article suggests that the fashion industry and contemporary feminism are nonetheless alike in one significant respect: neither have properly engaged with the needs of an ageing population. It is an omission that this article will seek to examine through a discussion of the recent ‘portraits‘ of Cindy Sherman, an artist of great interest to feminist scholars, in whose earlier work there was a discernible ‘anti-fashion’ element. Now ‘fashionable’ herself, a leading figure in the global art world, she has collaborated with the fashion industry in rather different ways. Her ‘portraits’ of 2012, in which she reconfigured herself as imaginary Manhattan socialites in or beyond middle age, and a later series, exhibited in 2016, where she appears as a series of ageing, anonymous ‘movie stars’, reveal more general ideological tensions surrounding the representation of women, the ageing process and the fashionable ideal. It is the dissection of these tensions that underpin this article, for while Sherman’s work has been the subject of academic debate across a forty year period, her use and critique of the ‘fashionable ‘ image has not been examined alongside an exploration of the expanding activities of the fashion industry itself; nor have her recent images of ageing women been examined within this more general context.

KEYWORDS:

• Fashion
• feminism
• ageing
• art
• celebrity
• Cindy Sherman

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Pamela Church Gibson is Reader in Historical and Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion. She has published extensively on film and fashion, gender, history and heritage. She is the author of Fashion and Celebrity Culture (2013) and has published essays in various journals, including Fashion Theory and the Journal of British Cinema and Television, while also contributing articles to various anthologies on fashion and on cinema. She has coedited several books, including Dirty Looks (1993) Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations, Analysis (2000), More Dirty Looks (2004) and Fashion Cultures Revisited (2012). She is the founder and Principal Editor of the journal Film, Fashion and Consumption. In 2012 she co-founded the European Popular Culture Association and was its first President. She is on the editorial board of several international journals and various book series; she is also the founding Editor, for Edinburgh University Press, of a new book series, Films, Fashion and Design.