Queering Fashion’s Pathologies in Killing Eve¹

Abstract

The rise of fashion as a star attraction in recent television serials points to the complex critical languages of fashion in fleshing out character and in shifting generic expectations. It also discloses the relation between fashion as commodity and fashion as an extension of self in a way that signals the queer potential of fashion on several fronts. Here I examine how fashion in Killing Eve (Waller-Bridge, 2018–2022) drives a form of queer attachment that speaks to the complicated terrain of a post-queer, post postfeminist critical moment. Throughout the series fashion is as a vehicle for the protagonist’s mercurial moods, from fun and playful to terrifying and anarchic, whilst also driving the audience’s visual pleasure and scopophiliac thrill. But the series is less interested in moral opprobrium of the protagonist’s excesses, either killing or shopping, than revealing “desire’s unruly attentiveness” (Berlant 2002, 72) through Eve's impossibly queer obsession with Villanelle: “I think about what you’re wearing and what you’re doing… I just want to know everything” (Thomas 2018). In queering our fantasmatic relation to fashion, from pleasure and ambivalence to novelty and disgust, Killing Eve dwells on the treacherous flux of our desires, alongside the underlying queerness of the commodity.

Keywords:

• Killing Eve
• queer fashion
• female anti-hero
• Lauren Berlant
• queer desire

Introduction

The rise of fashion as a star attraction in recent streaming serials points to the complex critical language of fashion and clothing in fleshing out character and in shifting the traditional expectations of genre. On the back of several successful fashion-driven television series in the late 1990s and across the 2000s, including Sex and the City (Star 1998–2004) and Ugly Betty (Horta and Gaitán 2006–2010), both costumed by Patricia Field, as well as the retro-inspired Mad Men (Weiner 2007–2015), fashion has increasingly become its own star attraction (Bruzzi and Church Gibson 2004; Warner 2014). With the release of the British spy thriller, Killing Eve (Waller-Bridge 2018–2022), fashion on streaming television may have entered a new moment in terms of attracting unprecedented levels of media and audience interest. Set against the backdrop of the chaos of the current geopolitical order and with a designer fashion wardrobe that registers the preeminence of fashion as a global visual and cultural language, Killing Eve departs from previous fashion-driven television shows in so far as it takes pleasure in flaunting fashion’s purported pathologies (primarily excess consumption) against the backdrop of a world where the self-determination of the nation state is deeply entangled in and compromised by unknown global forces and untraceable financial flows of capital. If this is the geopolitical backdrop of Killing Eve, how is fashion implicated, at the level of the commodity but also in the way that it informs the queer relationship between its two protagonists, the spy and the assassin? This essay sets out to provide a close critical analysis of the queer potential of fashion in Killing Eve as a way in which to theorize the relationship between fashion and desire against the backdrop a post-queer, post postfeminist cultural moment whilst acknowledging a longer historical arc of the queer potential of fashion.

It was Karl Marx who early on drew our attention to the underlying queerness of commodity culture: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing…” ([1867] 1970, 72).² Appearing in the first volume of Capital, in the section titled, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Marx’s identification of the queerness of the commodity is a cautionary tale against any straightforward understanding of the commodity as simply a material thing, pointing instead to the underlying structures of social and economic exploitation that adhere to forms of commodity production as well as the magical (and sometimes, for Marx, the grotesque) properties imbued in the commodity form itself.³ In other words, as a “queer thing” Marx acknowledges that the commodity is neither fully knowable nor fully predictable in its unfolding relations with the world. If the commodity is a queer thing, how might fashion as both a commodity and an extension of the self or character, become doubly queer? In Killing Eve, the queer potential of fashion resides in the moods and energies it arouses, at the level of the esthetic and the social, but also importantly in terms of the libidinal and unconscious drives that inform the intimacy between bodies and their desires.

In striking ways Killing Eve shows how fashion, far from being mere spectacle or commodity, drives forms of queer attachment between its protagonists, as well as between its protagonists and its audience. While fashion in the series is pleasurable and perverse, fascinating and deadly, it moves beyond a more traditional axis of commodity fetishism by reveling in the pathological potential of fashion, not in order to unmask the gendered subject and her hyper-interpellated status as “fashion victim,” nor in terms of the duplicity of female masquerade, but to distort the systems of representation and the structures of social power that inform heteropatriarchy as well as certain modalities of feminist or postfeminist critique. It is the perversity of fashion as it adheres to queer desire that I am interested in exploring in Killing Eve. In celebrating fashion’s pathologies as a form of queer attachment, my reading of Killing Eve is informed by Eve Sedgwick’s own mode of reading, which, as Lauren Berlant suggests, works to “deshame fantasmatic attachment so as to encounter its operations as knowledge” (2002, 72). In her essay, “Two Girls: Fat and Thin,” originally written for a festschrift honoring Sedgwick, Berlant provides a reading of Mary Gaitskill’s novel of the same name, weaving an analysis of the history and trauma that adheres to the relationship between the two girls (Dorothy/Justine) in Gaitskill’s novel with a hermeneutical dialogue with Sedgwick (Lauren/Eve). At the center of Berlant’s reading of Dorothy and Justine (if not Eve and Lauren), is the quiet resignation that as much as history and trauma might inform the subject’s desire, desire’s complex relationality is never simply knowable or straightforward. Or to put it another way, we can be utterly transformed by somebody without ever fully knowing them or understanding what drives our attachment. This, I argue lies at the center of the relationship between Eve and Villanelle with fashion mediating the queer indeterminacy of both subject and object.

Created by the British writer and actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge (the Creator and Head Writer for Season One), and loosely based on the novella series Codename Villanelle, by Luke Jennings, Killing Eve explores the tangled relationship between Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), an MI6 agent, and Villanelle (Jody Comer), an assassin working for a multinational criminal organization, identified as The Twelve. As a spy drama, the series is at once darkly comic and violently gruesome. But beyond what at first appears to be a feminist and/or queer makeover of the spy thriller (and the fraught relationship between spy and assassin), it is Villanelle’s wardrobe that has attracted unprecedented fascination and discussion, by audiences and critics as well as news and fashion media, with critics picking up on the subversive elegance of Pheobe de Gaye’s costuming in Season One, but also the seductive depravity of the audience’s fascination with Villanelle’s assassination of mostly powerful men all the while wearing spectacular designer outfits (Johnson 2020).⁴ No other television series has so consistently drawn the attention of the fashion press, from mainstream fashion outlets such as Marie Claire, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue to more independent avant-garde fashion publications such as W Magazine (Eckardt 2019) and Design Scene (Doric 2020). Indeed, fans and critics alike have followed the series with anticipation as much for Villanelle’s spectacular outfits and the series’ showcasing of designers, as for the unfolding relationship between spy and assassin. The media discussion of the designers and labels chosen to curate Villanelle’s wardrobe alongside interviews with the show’s three costume designers signaled a new level of interest in television costuming from the perspective of fashion curation and consumption. If, as Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (1990) long ago argued, women have been traditionally punished for their love of consumption, particularly fashion, Villanelle and her excessive fashion wardrobe defies the moral opprobrium and cultural taboo associated with excessive fashion consumption, even luxury fashion. Serving as a vehicle for the protagonist’s mercurial moods, from fun and playful to terrifying and anarchic, Villanelle’s spectacular outfits are designed to indulge our visual pleasure and fashion connoisseurship in ways, I would argue, that signal fashion as potentially socially and politically disruptive.

What is most striking about this series is the way Eve’s obsession with Villanelle, indeed her fascination with female killers, is played out against the backdrop of fashion itself as a kind of queer attentiveness, which encourages, for the viewer, as for Eve and Villanelle, a form of fashion connoisseurship. Moreover, in satirizing the historically pervasive ideology of fashion as a form of compensatory female power (Simmel [1904] 1957, 551), the show brazenly unwinds the dominant logic of the male gaze since what it stages is an erotic encounter between Eve and Villanelle and between this queer coupling and the show’s predominantly female or queer audience. Notably, in Killing Eve, fashion’s well-worn gendered pathologies (extravagance, compulsiveness, masquerade, kleptomania) are spectacularly and unashamedly on display, in ways that suggest the series is less interested in moral opprobrium of the protagonist’s excesses (either shopping or killing), than revealing what Berlant refers to as “desire’s unruly attentiveness” (2002, 72). Through Eve’s impossibly queer obsession with Villanelle, indeed the audience’s obsession with Villanelle, what the series gives us (among other things) is an extended meditation on the anomalousness and subversive power of this attachment, which is staged through the erotic textures, anarchic moods and visual spectacle of Villanelle’s fashion wardrobe. In queering our fantasmatic relation to clothes, from pleasure and ambivalence to novelty and disgust, Killing Eve charts the flux of our desires, identifications, and emotions in ways that register the fashion commodity (and our attachment to it) as sometimes deeply queer.

Part I

Wardrobe choices: Eve and Villanelle

From the beginning of season one, the relationship between Villanelle and Eve is established via their starkly opposite wardrobe choices. If Villanelle’s love of shopping and clothes defines her flamboyant and psychotic chameleon-like demeanor, Eve is a walking advertisement for Uniqlo. Dressed in functional normcore, with sludgy greens and non-descript grays and sensible blues, unironed linen, elasticized pants, beenies, parkas, and a raincoat that is a throwback to the crumpled mac warn by Peter Falk in the 1970s TV crime drama, Columbo. In other words, Eve’s clothes exude “functional bureaucrat” and “I have more important things to do” attitude to dressing (Figure 1). But Eve’s fascination with Villanelle is also a fascination with what she wears, culminating in her confession to Villanelle: “I think about you all the time. I think about what you’re wearing and what you’re doing… I just want to know everything” (Thomas 2018).

Figure 1 Eve’s normcore style. Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh).

Photo Credit: BBC America/Sid Gentle Films.

It is not merely Eve’s object choice (another woman) that makes her relationship with Villanelle queer, but the attentive knowledge that adheres to her obsession with Villanelle, an attentiveness that hinges on the two things in which Villanelle excels: killing and sartorial style. To understand that attachment is to see a love of clothes as more than the sum of its parts. Clothes are integral to the darkness of the show, including the violent bodily actions and toxic intimacies that shape Villanelle as a ruthless albeit fascinating and even likeable killing-machine. While Eve’s wardrobe choices initially mask her obsessive, even pathological, nature, allowing her to pass as the drab bureaucrat, Villanelle’s clothes, from feminine and romantic to masculine, suited and sharp (and everything in between) accentuate her psychotic demeanor which is by turns fun and playful and terrifying and chaotic. Clothes, including spectacular designer and vintage outfits accentuate Villanelle’s chameleon-like behavior, with her eclectic taste in clothing matching the promiscuity of her sexual exploits, from lesbian encounters with older women, a three way with various genders, an earnest attempt at hetero dating with the hapless neighbor, Sebastian, and a string of casual flings along the way. Like her polyamorous sexual exploits, Villanelle’s fashion choices are eclectic, loyal to no single designer or fashion brand or indeed fashion style. While on one level, fashion becomes the language of sex (a nice frock will get you off as readily as another body), clothes also mediate the relations of power and desire for many of the female characters in the show, including Carolyn Marten’s (Fiona Shaw) quiet luxury, which belies her kinky penchant for seducing the enemy or indeed the possibility that she is a founding member of The Twelve despite heading the Russian desk of MI6. This is fashion as assertive power not fashion as a compensation for a lack thereof. Neither does fashion throughout the series point to fashion masquerade as phallic mask simply because of the absence of any real masculine phallic power throughout the series.

Beyond defining and accentuating character, fashion is key to the moods and places that shape the narrative arc of the series and the various competing archetypes that inform Villanelle’s life as an itinerant assassin. As such they work to offer audiences a satirical smorgasbord of female archetypes, some decidedly queer, others straight, even as they unravel gendered stereotypes about fashion and violence. Villanelle’s parade of outfits throughout the series is decisively linked to either a scene of seduction or the context of a kill: Villanelle hunts down a mafia boss wearing ripped denim shorts, combat boots and a feminine Chloe blouse, changing into a long floating aristocratic pale blue Burberry dress (stolen from the wardrobe of the Mafia boss’s wife) to pass as one of the guests at a party on his Tuscan estate, before luring him into his bedroom and stabbing him in the eye with a poisoned hairpin. She slits the throat of the controlling psychopath and tech startup entrepreneur Aaron Peel in a tomato-red Lavin pantsuit, accessorized with a Dionysus Gucci belt (Figure 2). She accidentally kills her neighbor, Sebastian, after their first date, wearing a sweet-sixteen cherry-red Miu Miu dress. She kills Bill (Eve’s favorite MI5 colleague) on a crowded dancefloor in a Berlin nightclub wearing a Dries Van Noten blue and red brocade tailored suit, worn with a green zebra scarf she had stolen earlier from Eve’s suitcase (which was a gift from Bill and tellingly the only stylish item in Eve’s possession) (Figure 3). She fronts up to her handlers to undergo psychometric evaluation in a candy pink Molly Goddard tulle dress (Figure 4). She stalks and threatens Eve’s husband while he is on a school trip to Oxford University wearing a preppy ensemble of beige chinos and a cream cable knit jumper casually draped across her shoulders (Figure 5). She opportunistically steels a Power Rangers onsie, after ending the life of a terminally ill boy, to escape hospital, after being stabbed by Eve, although cringes at the thought of also having to wear crocs (Figure 6). For her power dressing moments, she chooses a Chloe animal printed blazer morphing easily into the archetypal Diana, the Huntress. She wears a Charlotte Knowles shaggy green jacket to kill her Russian mentor, Dasha in the Scottish Highlands, after Héléne (Camille Cottin), a high-ranking agent working for The Twelve, calls Villanelle “a beautiful monster” (Thomas 2020) (Figure 7). And on and on the fashion-parade goes from the beginning of the series to its finale. Tellingly, there is no core identity or authentic self being conveyed through Villanelle’s fashion choices, rather her clothes are driven by her moods, her surroundings, the scene of seduction or the drama of the kill. As Luke Jennings suggests: “clothes reflect her status and independence. She doesn’t have to conform or please anyone’s gaze” (Bloom 2019). Instead fashion in the show frequently parodies the boundaries of expected decorum, even as it works to mask the transgressions of those boundaries. Villanelle’s maximalist fashion style is both attentive and unruly, accentuating fashion’s queer pathologies via her insatiable appetite: for killing, sex, and extravagant clothes.

Figure 2 Tomato-red Lavin Pantsuit. Jodie Comer as Villanelle – Killing Eve – Season 2, Episode 8.

Photo Credit: Gareth Gatrell/BBC America.

Figure 3 Dries Van Noten Suit. Villanelle (Jodie Comer)

Photo Credit: BBC America/Sid Gentle Films.

Figure 4 Molly Goddard Gown. Villanelle (Jodie Comer)

Photo Credit: BBC America.

Figure 5 Preppy Ensemble. Jodie Cromer as Villanelle, Owen McDonald as Niko Polastri – Killing Eve_ Season 2, Episode 5.

Photo Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh/BBC America.

Figure 6 Power Ranges Onsie. Jodie Comer as Villanelle – Killing Eve _ Season 2, Episode 2.

Photo Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh/BBC America.

Figure 7 Villanelle as the “beautiful monster” in a Charlotte Knowles Jacket and Dasha in athleisure wear. Jodie Comer as Villanelle, Harriet Walter as Dasha – Killing Eve _ Season 3, Episode 7.

Photo Credit: Laura Radford/BBC America/Sid Gentle Films.

In Gaitskill’s novel, fat and thin refer not simply to Dorothy and Justine’s bodily appetites but to the fantasmatic attachments that sustain those appetites. As Berlant’s reading of Two Girls, Fat and Thin makes clear, these antinomies are far from stable since for both girls eating affords a pleasure in and of itself: “eating is a way of admitting desire without having to “know” that its sensual enactment stands for anything but itself” (87). If Eve’s “thinness” (contained, dutiful, and sartorially anaemic) stands in contrast to Villanelle’s “fatness” (voracious, defiant, and sartorially extravagant), this is upended as both spy and assassin eventually demonstrate an unruly appetite for clothes and killing. While the first season establishes Eve’s normcore, low-fi style as a stark contrast to Villanelle’s maniacal sartorial drama, their queer courtship ritual hinges on killing the drab, dutiful Eve. It is no coincidence that the first seduction scene hinges on Villanelle’s dressing of Eve in a skin-tight Roland Mouret dress (which she leaves in Eve’s luggage, having replaced her old “boring” clothes with a set of new designer outfits in her correct size). In this sense, the killing of Eve of the show’s title is also the seduction of Eve, a seduction that takes place via dressing, rather than undressing, establishing the first scene of seduction as an expression of queer attentiveness. Delighting in turning Eve away from her life as a safe and obedient bureaucrat, Villanelle looks at Eve looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, instructing Eve to see herself anew, telling her she has “a really nice body” (East 2018). Earlier Eve has clocked Villanelle’s attentiveness, describing the outfits left in her suitcase as “expensive clothes, amazing clothes. All my size” (East 2018). While the characters are initially established as opposites via their clothing choices, it is Villanelle who perceives early on just how close they may be, telling Eve: “I think, if you went high enough, you’d find we work for the same people” (East 2018). As the series unfolds, we soon learn that the MI6 spy (Eve) may be as pathological and dangerous as the amoral assassin (Villanelle) and that the head of the outlaw organization, The Twelve might possibly be the MI6 agent, Carolyn Martens. In a world where nothing is as it appears to be, fashion invariably functions as a power move, whether to seduce or to destroy.

Part II: fashioning the female anti-hero

While Villanelle’s fashion choices are anything but subtle, her killing spree is described as “without trace or pattern” as Eve concedes that “she is outsmarting the smartest of us” (Bradbeer 2018). It is Carolyn, the head of the Russian desk at MI6 that first draws attention to Villanelle’s professional evasiveness coupled with her flamboyant killing style: “she’s been operating for two years across ten countries. She’s highly skilled, and, as yet, untraceable, and… frankly, she’s starting to show off” (Bradbeer 2018). According to Tania Modleski, “Killing Eve has received a great deal of critical attention in part because it upends so much of the received wisdom about female serial killers” (2019). As Modleski argues, “Common wisdom… holds that men and women kill for different reasons. Women supposedly tend to be motivated by partner abuse or by profit and kill in “quiet” ways, preferring poison or pills and favoring domestic type settings… In contrast to the quiet female killer, the peripatetic male serial killer is often understood to be sexually motivated, theatrical, and bloody” (2019). Eve’s backstory reveals her obsession with female serial killers, stemming from her university days where she hosted a weekly radio show talking about women who kill. If Eve’s desire is fueled by her fascination with female killers as well as her fascination with what Villanelle wears, the series quite explicitly aligns the pathologies of killing with the pathologies of fashion whilst disrupting conventional wisdom about both. If, as Modleski argues, “the distinction between the quiet female killer and the bolder male killer is mocked in Killing Eve” (2019), we could also say that the show similarly mocks the conventional idea of “the fashion victim” or indeed female masquerade given the shows assiduous attempts to obliterate a masculine ego ideal (Doan 1982, 87).

The mocking of the stereotype of the “quiet” female killer, if not the “fashion victim,” is most palpable in the scene in Season One whereby Villanelle undergoes workplace psychometric testing, after her handler, Konstantin, begins to doubt her allegiance to The Twelve. Upon witnessing Villanelle’s growing attachment to Eve, including her failure to kill Eve upon instruction from her handlers, Villanelle is called in for psychological assessment, choosing as her outfit a saccharine pink Molly Goddard tulle dress and Balenciaga black combat boots. Fearing she has become too attached, even sentimental, Villanelle is asked a series of questions designed to test her emotional resolve as a calculated killer. Initially Villanelle’s answers are girlish and placating, telling her psychologist that she has had trouble with “her period” which has made her feel a little out of sorts. But as the evaluation proceeds, and Villanelle is grilled about her reactions to a photograph depicting a dead child, she abruptly reveals her lack of empathy (or feminine sentimentality) by mocking this socially sacrosanct scene of death. The humor of the scene is orchestrated via the excessive femininity and frou frou charm of the Molly Goddard dress, which amps up the satirical drama of Villanelle’s masterful handling of her male handlers. It was the striking “big dress energy” of Villanelle’s pink tulle gown that became one of the most iconic costumes of the series and propelled the designer, Molly Goddard, to global fame (Cartner-Morley 2019). Goddard herself credited the television series for shifting perceptions about her designs: “now, I think people have figured out it’s a bit more than…just pink princess dresses for people to feel pretty in. Maybe some of that is down to Killing Eve” (Stylist n.d.). Although the popular singer, Rihanna had earlier brought attention to Goddard’s designs in the United States, it was Jodie Comer’s appearance in the pink frock in Killing Eve that shifted the perception of Goddard’s designs from conventionally feminine to edgy and subversive, even theatrically camp.

Whether killing or dressing, Villanelle has a penchant for “showing off” in ways that accentuate her lack of allegiance, hence her employment by The Twelve, the multi-nation organization that exceeds the power of the nation state and its secret service agencies. The Twelve represent the lawlessness of current geopolitics, enhanced by the refusal of simplified binaries in the identities or indeed professional allegiances of its protagonists. Few of the characters are who they first appear to be and the show delights in ambiguity, with its constant “reversals in tone and rhythm” (Tolentino 2018). According to Audrey Jane Black one of the most fascinating aspects of the series is the indeterminacy of its racial politics. While Eve is a Korean-American now living in London, Villanelle hails from the Ural Mountains, located in continental Asia, but who now lives in a decadent apartment in Paris: “As neither Villanelle nor Eve know for whom they really work, and Eve seems fascinated by Villanelle’s “wild East” Russian origin, who is whose Eastern “Other” collapses almost entirely” (2022, 811). The indeterminacy of the “Other” in the Villanelle/Eve relationship, alongside the taboo of desiring the older woman (we eventually learn that Villanelle has always had a penchant for older women with long curly black or brown hair) brings something new to the genre beyond splashy female killing. As Berlant contends, “the social potential of queerness” resides in “the persistence of sexually anomalous attachment figures” (73).

In striking ways Killing Eve conforms to the rise of a new female antihero that has emerged in the wake of the ubiquity of what critics have derisively labeled postfeminist lifestyle television. As Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman argue, the female antihero in recent tv dramas is invariably self-centered, conniving and even murderous, while in comedies she is self-centered, self-sabotaging and anti-aspirational. In both genres there is a rejection of social responsibility in ways that register “a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism” (2022, 9) For Hagelin and Silverman, the rise of the female antihero is (in part at least) an industry-driven phenomenon: “the movement from mass audiences to niche viewers—enabled by cable networks, streaming services, and online platforms (a phenomenon known as “narrowcasting”) –– has allowed for less traditional women to occupy the center stage” (9). But they also contend that “[a]s significant as industry imperatives remain… they alone cannot account for the rise of the female antihero” (9). While for Haeglin and Silverman, this new female antihero is invariably “smart, resourceful, and often unconventional in their romantic and professional pursuits, they are also deeply selfish, occasionally consumerist, largely white, and relentlessly heterosexual” even as they remain “complex and fascinating in ways not acknowledged by postfeminist critique” (20). Haeglin and Silverman’s model of the new female anti-hero is largely drawn from Carrie Mathesson in Homeland (Gordon and Gansa 2011–2020) and Elizabeth Jennings in The Americans (Weisberg 2013–2018).

Killing Eve upends this formula of the new female antihero in surprising ways, even as it also conforms to the broader context of narrowcasting and what we might call a post postfeminism that has seen the emergence of less familiar feminist roles on television. If Villanelle is the “can do girl” on steroids, ruthless in her pursuit of the thrill of the kill and the designer frock, Eve is her self-sabotaging, unhinged comic sidekick. But within the show’s narrative arc, Villanelle’s endless array of sartorial outfits, and the overtly scopophiliac thrill they deliver, often serve to thwart erotic resolution (there is always another outfit) in ways that speak to queer desire as without closure or certainty. As such Killing Eve is neither postfeminist TV luxuriating in girl power nor postfeminist critique, mourning the loss of a once radical salvation feminism corrupted by the makeover ethos of neoliberalism. As feminist or queer television Killing Eve, I would argue, complicates the stereotypes of postfeminism formulated by critics such as Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (2007) who risk providing a totalizing optic in their account of the loss of serious feminism in the wake of the rise of a postfeminist lifestyle media culture. As Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor have argued, a heuristic model of reading a text on its own terms, rather than to fit a model of postfeminist critical paranoia, avoids “conceptualizing postfeminism primarily as a way in which feminism is merely ‘taken into account’ so that it can be disavowed…” (2020, 3). While Hagelin and Silverman contend that the new female antihero might represent “a post-postfeminism… that is actively in dialogue with an earlier, more depoliticized moment,” what remains salient to this figure for them is her desire to “flip the script” so that women become “the chaotic forces of social upheaval” (xiii). Modleski also contends that the popularity of Killing Eve with predominantly female audiences was in in part linked to its appearance during the #MeToo movement (2019), suggesting a connection with how exasperated women had become, and which ignited a renewed desire for justice, if not vicarious fantasies of revenge.

And yet Killing Eve is certainly not sisterhood feminism nor are the fantasies of revenge necessarily always feminist. As Black shrewdly notes, “While Villanelle is hard to understand as a feminist, she certainly exists in the service of a story that explores female agency with feminist concern” (807). The show is full of female treachery and has no time for millennial soul searching as witnessed by Carolyn Marten’s hilarious (but also excruciating) takedown of her own daughter, Geraldine, who is the show’s caricature of the whingey overly dependent millennial kidult, an emotionally available open book, without style, agentic substance or guile. It is also Carolyn that orders the hit on Villanelle in the season finale, either because she wants Eve back on her side, or she fears the alliance between Eve and Villanelle will unmask her own treacherous past. Nor does Killing Eve simply “re-code the imbrication of women and monstrosity” (Miller, Atherton, and Hetherington 2021, 4) but rather contests the logic of female monstrosity that underwrites that formulation through the parody of the “beautiful monster” via the Charlotte Knowles green plaid feathered jacket worn by Villanelle to kill her (rather annoying) Russian mentor, Dasha, who is dressed in this scene in basic athleisure wear – again alluding to the primary work of fashion/costume in building the tonal depth of the mis-en-scène (Thomas 2020) (Figure 7). All of which reveals the unrelenting subversive humor that cuts through the entire series, often aimed at feminist critical tropes, from the “monstrous feminine” and “fashion victim” to the feminist shibboleth, “sisterhood is powerful.” If this is the terrain of post postfeminism, it is intrepid and indeterminate rather than clear cut and defined. Fashion’s role here is not necessarily to mask or unmask but to dwell on desire’s ambiguity and unknowability. Like food for Dorothy and Justine in Gaitskill’s novel, fashion is its own complicated love language (McFarland 2018), shared between spy and assassin as well as between the protagonists and the audience.

While critics have noted the show’s powerful feminist themes (strong, independent women in charge of major organizations, often outsmarting their male bosses or handlers) with men relegated to background roles, invariably ridiculed, or killed off, rather graphically in quick succession, audiences nevertheless accused the show’s writers of queerbaiting, and castigated the finale for capitulating to heteronormative plot logics, with the death of Villanelle, soon after Eve and Villanelle have their first long meaningful kiss. Villanelle’s assassination was felt as a deep betrayal with many fans protesting that the show had succumbed to the “Bury your gays” trope despite the predominately queer ethos established throughout the show. The level of fan outrage resulted in a GoFundMe page and website titled “Villaneve deserved better, #BuryTheTrope,” to raise money for a series of billboards protesting the continued prevalence and harm caused by the “Bury Your Gays” plot device. The first of the billboards was installed in June 2022 in Aldgate High Street, London, with the words, “Let the Trope Sink to the Bottom of the Thames,” a reference to Villanelle’s demise in a watery grave in the river. But how might Villanelle’s demise reflect a post-queer moment that complicates the relationship between narrowcasting and a cultural era of same-sex marriage whereby the rights of sexual minorities are seen to have been secured despite the resurgence of conservative and far-Right discourses that threaten these sometimes limited gains. The death of Villanelle is very much in keeping with the post postfeminist and post-queer ethos of Killing Eve, and a deliberate refusal to grant this unlikely queer couple a happy ending precisely because in a spy thriller the world is darker and more complex than the “love is love” marriage equality slogan portends. In other words, this is not the terrain of what Kate McNicholas Smith has identified as the trope of “the lesbian normal” in television shows such as The L Word, Skins, Coronation Street, Glee and The Fosters, within a broader post-queer cultural moment (2021, 8–14). The refusal of a conventional romance plot in Killing Eve thwarts any semblance of homonormative belonging and is in keeping with the show’s creation of female characters that are self-driven and anarchic, less concerned with the pleasures of a settled domestic life than the revolving machinations of power governing a post-Cold War geopolitical landscape. As Waller Bridge argues, the bond between Eve and Villanelle is “sexual…intellectual…and aspirational” and therefore “more complex than a romantic relationship” (quoted in Berman 2018).

In queering fashion’s well-worn pathologies, if not the twee pathologies of the female serial killer, the new female antihero in Killing Eve responds, rather sardonically, to monolithic critiques of postfeminist television as a moribund cultural form, which work to furnish evidence of “a self-confirming scene of disappointment” (Berlant, 72) or what Sedgwick famously labeled as paranoid reading. If the spy and the assassin are figures habituated to hypervigilance, for Eve and Villanelle this hypervigilance manifests as a queer attentiveness (to fashion and to each other but also importantly to the power moves governing the new world order). Addressing Villanelle, Eve discloses the depth of her obsessive fascination:

I think about you all the time. I think about what you’re wearing, and what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it with. I think about the friends you have, I think about what you eat before you go to work, and what shampoo you have, and what happened in your family. I think about your eyes and your mouth, and what you feel when you kill someone, I think about what you have for breakfast. I just want to know everything. (Thomas 2018, “God, I’m Tired”)

Like any good detective/spy, Eve is obsessed with the minutiae of the mundane, and it is this meticulous curiosity that propels the action of the show as a spy thriller, but also importantly the queer relationship between Eve and Villanelle. For Berlant, what is most prescient about Sedgwick’s queer hermeneutics is that “what counts is not one’s ‘object choice’ as such but rather one’s sustaining attachments” (73).

Conclusion

If Killing Eve is only one of the more recent, albeit spectacular, examples of a longer historical arc of fashion as a star attraction on television, how might it reflect a more enduring queer esthetic in fashion costuming or indeed the relationship between fashion and queer attachment? In the recent documentary, Happy Clothes: A Film About Patricia Field (Selditch 2023), we witness a comparable curiosity, meticulous and obsessive, driving Field’s work as a costume designer, museum curator and boutique owner. Captured through extended interviews, shopping trips for costume outfits and archival footage of Field’s store in the Bowery, which she operated for more than fifty years, Happy Clothes documents Field’s queer esthetic archive that spans the 1970s and 1980s club scene in lower Manhattan alongside her television costuming over many decades. As the costume designer for Sex and the City, Ugly Betty and more recently Emily in Paris (Star 2020-) and Run the World (Davenport 2021–2023) as well as the film, The Devil Wears Prada (Frankel 2006), Field’s costume design has been noted for its meticulous, if not fanatical, approach to the assemblage of an outfit for a show’s character. Tied to this costume design work for film and television is an esthetic approach to fashion that Field herself labels, “happy clothes,” a designation that registers a particular kind of queer ethos built around Field’s self-described sartorial notoriety as an “exaggeration queen,” combining clashing print patterns, exaggerated accessories and vintage and retro references. Initially influenced by the milieu of 1980s queer club culture and the 1950s Betty Page BDSM vibe, Field’s approach celebrates the queer excess of fashion, whether as part of her work for popular television formats or the underground New York queer scene. The footage of Field’s fashion store in the Bowery captures the way that clothes fuel a kind of queer attachment and belonging for the largely queer and trans community that frequented Field’s store, and where trans superstar, Laverne Cox was once employed as a shop assistant, and where budding artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring sold their merchandise. We also get a glimpse of Carrie Bradshaw’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) infamous white tulle tutu, the garment that became the iconic opening sequence for Sex in the City. In reflecting on her legacy across the different fashion and style domains of her career, Field rather somberly compares her own fearless excess to what she sees as a “flatness” in contemporary fashion culture, a turn to what she derisively calls “depression wear” (Selditch 2023). While it might seem odd to describe Villanelle’s wardrobe esthetic as the embodiment of “happy clothes,” the excess and volatility of her sartorial drama share something of Field’s exaggerated queer esthetic. The styling of Villanelle draws on both familiar and more obscure high fashion labels, as well as vintage pieces, not for the prestige of the labels themselves but to signal an eclectic connoisseurship built around the character’s mood and aspiration, frequently blurring the distinction between costume, style, and fashion for the largely female and queer audience. As Helen Warner suggests, fashion garments on television are increasingly “invested with meaning that exists both within and outside of the diegetic context” and thus stretch the meaning of fashion, and indeed the relationship between fashion and costume in complex ways (2014, 3). Like television narrowcasting itself, fashion in Killing Eve is at once particular and niche, capacious and mutable. But it also presents a canny understanding of the way fashion, often derided as the feminized commodity par excellence, produces a sophisticated insight into our relations with the world writ large, not least because of the way that fashion moves across symbolic, material, affective, and psychic domains. In other words, costume as fashion is not the gilded decoration adding color to the geopolitical backstory in Killing Eve or the queer relationship between the protagonists, but rather fashion is a mediating language that underscores the complex and entangled relationship between the local and the global, the personal and the political, and between pleasure and power.

In reflecting on Sedgwick’s legacy, Berlant maintains that whatever else Sedgwick gives us, “in the pleasure/knowledge economy of her work, the force of attachment has more righteousness than anything intelligibly or objectively ‘true’” (72). For Berlant, attachment “describes the psychic process by which fantasy recalibrates what we encounter so that we imagine that something or someone can fulfill our desire” (72). For much of the series, Eve and Villanelle are driven by a desire to “know everything” about the other even as they come to realize the impossibility of such knowledge. In queering fashion’s pathologies through Villanelle’s extravagant wardrobe choices, Killing Eve is less invested in a clear-cut moral order or righteous forms of critique (“good” feminist or queer objects) than exploring the force of our attachments (sexual, esthetic, political, or intellectual) as a way to understand why we might choose to desire the things we aren’t supposed to desire: like fashion, like revenge, like the older woman. Eve and Villanelle may not be “good” feminist or queer role models, but we feel they are, in some palpable way, good for us. Fantasmatic identification is always politically strange. The excessive and eclectic use of designer fashion throughout the series, including often clashing combinations and out-of-place fashion moments, is a testimony to the underlying queerness of the commodity: as a “bad object” fashion narrates the meticulous curiosity that underwrites desire even as it exposes an excess (of consumption, of feeling, of attachment) that is sometimes indefensible but also feels necessary. That might be the essence of queer attachment as it unfolds across the horizon of cruel optimism.

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Natalya Lusty

Natalya Lusty is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2018–2024). She is a founding member of the Critical Fashion Studies research group and the co-editor of a special issue on Fashion Futures and Critical Fashion Studies for Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (2021) and co-author with Harriette Richards of “Modern Slavery Legislation and the Limits of Ethical Fashion” in Cultural Studies (2022). She is the author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2017) and numerous co-edited volumes, as well as the editor of Surrealism (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She sits on the editorial board of Australian Feminist Studies and International Journal of Surrealism.

Notes

1 An early version of this essay was presented at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) “Bodies in Flux” conference in Perth in 2021. I am grateful for the feedback I received.

2 The full quote reads as follows: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”.

3 Here Marx is drawing on the German word, quer, which translates as crosswise, oblique or perverse, or in other words not straightforward. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to the German derivation.

4 Pheobe de Gaye was the costume designer for Season One, while Charlotte Mitchell was the costume designer for Season Two and Sam Perry for Seasons Three and Four.