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Название: How to Watch Television, Second Edition

Автор: Группа авторов

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Культурология

Серия: User's Guides to Popular Culture

isbn: 9781479890668

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ In a 2013 interview, for instance, rapper and mogul Kanye West described his irritation at the fashion industry rebuffing one of his ideas, only to see them eventually adopt it later: “Brought—brought the leather jogging pants 6 years ago to Fendi, and they said no. How many motherfuckers you done seen with a leather jogging pant?” West’s anger not only stems from his frustration with not being taken seriously as a creative author of design but also is perhaps undergirded by the knowledge that the fashion industry has often co-opted elements of black, urban style (as well as that from other minority groups), while erasing their context and histories. For instance, in 2015 Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci adorned his models with slicked-down “baby hair”: the short, fluffy tendrils found along the hairline. The style, popular in black and brown urban communities for years, suddenly vaulted into the world of high fashion and celebrity, with a number of other white designers in various fashion weeks around the world following suit.13 West’s complaint treats the fashion industry as cultural appropriator, as an institution that has always capitalized on blackness while driving out black creative power.

      The Saks/Empire venture, then, fits into a much larger, complicated relationship among fashion, black people, and blackness as marketable commodity. On the one hand, Saks deliberately approximates its own high-end version of “ghetto fabulous” fashion for delivery to its predominantly white, middle- to upper-class customer. Lee Daniels essentially validated this marketing strategy—trading on a flattened-out image of black identity and style in the form of “ghetto fabulousness”—when he relayed his own history with Saks at the fashion premiere: “When I was a kid, I used to boost—boosting is stealing. My sister and I, who Cookie is based on, used to go to Saks and we’d boost.”14 By relaying this story and attending the launch event, Daniels reinscribed a certain measure of black cultural authenticity into the discussion of style.15 Yet at the same time, the entire marketing of the Empire/Saks collaboration, with pieces produced by high-end designers whose clothes would be financially inaccessible to many Empire viewers, erases the contributions of the real-life black people to this “ghetto fabulous” aesthetic.

      The eye-catching fashions on Empire carry rich meaning about the characters, their lives, and their world. As a show that takes care to maintain a multicultural address, Empire uses fashion to draw connections to black culture outside of the show itself. In this way, the style functions as narrative shorthand that provides viewers with a host of information that the official storylines omit. At the same time, however, this shorthand also stands in for much more complicated and multilayered issues surrounding race, racism, class, and capitalism. As the show continues to grow in popularity and its style becomes ever more recognizable and profitable, it is important to remember that the attempts to celebrate and commodify Empire’s fashion aesthetic can also erase the contributions of the real-life people that inspired it. For all of these reasons, we should keep in mind that fashion on Empire is never simple window dressing but rather a dense and complicated site of the show’s, and society’s, cultural politics.

      FURTHER READING

       Click, Melissa A., and Sarah Smith-Frigerio. “One Tough Cookie: Exploring Black Women’s Responses to Empire’s Cookie Lyon.” Communication, Culture and Critique 12, no. 2 (March 2019): 287–304.

       Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

       Zook, Kristal Brent. Color by FOX: The FOX Network and the Revolution in Black Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

      NOTES

      I would like to acknowledge and thank Jéan-Claude Quintyne for his research help on a previous version of this essay.

      1  1. The FOX network built its viewership in the early 1990s by targeting black audiences with a large slate of racially diverse programming yet largely abandoned this audience (and the shows) after successfully winning white viewers. See Kristal Brent Zook, Color by FOX: The FOX Network and the Revolution in Black Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

      2  2. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

      3  3. “15 Epic Facts about Empire,” E Online.com, www.eonline.com.

      4  4. Notably, Lucious only wears this hairstyle in the pilot. By the time the series gets to its second episode (filmed well after the pilot), Lucious sports a short, cropped natural hairstyle.

      5  5. Marjon Carlos, “Get That Cookie Look: Online Shopping with Empire’s Costume Designer,” Fusion.net, last updated March 4, 2015, http://fusion.net.

      6  6. Ibid.

      7  7. McGhee borrowed most of Cookie’s furs from her mother-in-law, Janet Bailey, ex-wife of legendary Earth, Wind, and Fire lead singer Philip Bailey, further highlighting furs as belonging to a past era of black glamor.

      8  8. Megan Daley, “Empire: Cookie’s Season 1 Fashion,” Ew.com, last updated September 10, 2015, http://ew.com.

      9  9. Urban Dictionary, s.v. “ghetto fabulous,” www.urbandictionary.com.

      10 10. Robert Rorke, “Would Cookie Lyon Really Shop at Saks?” New York Post, August 21, 2015, http://nypost.com.

      11 11. Ethan Sacks, “Oprah Winfrey’s Brush with Racism Sparks International Incident,” Daily News, last updated August 9, 2013, www.nydailynews.com.

      12 12. Kerry Burke, “Barneys Accused Me of Stealing Because I’m Black: Teen,” Daily News, last updated October 24, 2013, www.nydailynews.com.

      13 13. Caroline McGuire, “Is This the Style We’ll All Be Wearing This Summer? ‘Baby Hair’ Becomes the Latest Beauty Trend to Hit Catwalks and Is Featured on Everyone from Katy Perry to Rihanna,” Daily Mail, last updated March 16, 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk.

      14 14. Ericka Goodman, “Lee Daniels Used to Shoplift from Saks,” The Cut, September 13, 2015, www.thecut.com.

      15 15. Interestingly, though Daniels and the entire Empire cast attended the Saks premier in New York, Taraji P. Henson was noticeably absent from the event. Whatever the reason, whether scheduling conflict or otherwise, the absence of “Cookie”—Empire’s fashion icon and the Saks line’s muse—loomed large over the event. Devoid of her authenticating presence, the reality of the Saks Fifth Avenue collection became more apparent: a pastiche of the black aesthetics on Empire as filtered through the lens of established, recognizable, luxury fashion lines such as Jimmy Choo, Alexis Bittar, MCM, Helmut Lang, and Giuseppe Zanotti—brands that would already be familiar to the typical Saks customer.

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      House

      Narrative Complexity

      AMANDA D. LOTZ

      Abstract: СКАЧАТЬ