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      FIGURE 2.2. Cookie’s meticulously crafted wardrobe has clear cultural reference points and offers narrative shorthand for her character development.

      How does Empire convey Cookie’s class status and character traits? Her wardrobe is a meticulously curated assemblage of items that have clear cultural reference points. Stylist Rita McGhee selects Cookie’s ensembles to suggest several things about Cookie’s inner self and how she presents herself to the world. Her clothes, McGhee asserts, are Cookie’s “armor” as she operates within a hostile environment.⁵ In the first few episodes, Cookie often appears in animal prints to suggest several key aspects of her personality. She wears a leopard-print dress and matching coat in the pilot, a leopard-print dress with matching leopard-print hat and purse in the second episode, and a leopard-print skirt in the third. In the sixth episode of that season, she wears a leopard-print cat suit by luxury fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg. Most obviously, the prints are a cheeky reference to her name: Cookie Lyon, and also suggest other qualities that we might associate with mothers in the animal kingdom: nurturing, yet ready to fiercely defend their offspring against any threat. The prints also suggest Cookie’s “wildness” and inability to be “domesticated,” in contrast to some of the other women characters, such as her romantic rival Anika. Cookie’s animal prints are rivaled only by her equally impressive fur coats. The coats span a range of styles and colors from a short beige jacket to an over-the-top neon purple shrug. On an immediate level, the fur coats are a metaphor that suggests the vulnerable side of Cookie that she keeps hidden from the outside world. They are, according to McGhee, a “soft, warming, secure, luxe blanket.”⁶

      Cookie’s clothes also convey important connections to black culture, past and present. This is particularly evident in the choice of furs that McGhee selects. Far from classic black minks, McGhee adorns Cookie in lavish designs that situate her in the contemporary hip-hop fashion aesthetic as embodied by performers like Lil’ Kim, P. Diddy, Kanye West, Cam’ron, and others. At the same time, Cookie’s furs visually reference the fashion of 1970s black culture, such as the opulent designs that Diana Ross sports in Berry Gordy’s 1975 film Mahogany or the fierce jacket that the statuesque Tamara Dobson dons in Cleopatra Jones (Jack Starrett, 1977).⁷ Yet the fur coats also reference the sartorial emblems of 1970s criminal underworld figures: pimps, drug dealers, and other hustlers. This is fitting given Cookie’s backstory as a drug dealer.

      Beyond narrative shorthand, Cookie’s fashions also signify particular meanings about race and class. As Lee Daniels explains, “We’re trendsetting—not just with music, but with costumes and hair design and ghetto fabulosity.”⁸ Daniels’s use of the term “ghetto fabulosity” is especially important, as “ghetto fabulous” signifies a particular kind of classed blackness along with assumptions about taste. According to Urban Dictionary, to be “ghetto fabulous” indicates “the style of nouveau riche people who have grown up in ghetto or urban areas … the combination of bad taste, an urban aesthetic and desire to wear one’s wealth. Basically, high priced but tacky clothing and accessories.”⁹ In many ways, the definition of “ghetto fabulous” accurately captures the dimensions of Cookie’s character: She grew up in a poor, inner-city community and now finds herself with sudden wealth as she circulates in the upper-class world of the music industry. While I take issue with Urban Dictionary’s definition of “ghetto fabulous” style as “tacky” (as “tacky” has very specific taste criteria that are based on white, middle-class norms), the second part of the definition does capture an essential idea about the relationship between Cookie’s working-class background and the upper-class world in which she now circulates. Cookie has not grown up with wealth; she does not know the codes of upper-class style. Instead, she has imported the fashion aesthetics of her own black, inner-city environment into the contemporary world of Empire. Her look, therefore, is a “hood aesthetic” done in an expensive way. And her style is in line with the “bling” aesthetic of hip-hop culture, with its emphasis on flashy displays of wealth on the body.

      The popularity of Empire’s fashions, spearheaded by Cookie’s wardrobe, quickly led to a collaboration with luxury department store Saks Fifth Avenue for New York Fashion Week in September 2015. The store debuted its Empire State of Mind collection a week before Empire’s season 2 premiere: a series of luxe pieces inspired by the opulence of the show. The collection drew inspiration from Empire’s characters and traded on the overall “feel” of the show’s black urbaneness and late-night soap opera glamor. While not the first clothing store to collaborate with a television show, the Saks/Empire collection is noteworthy because of the wide gulf between the demographic of the show and that of the department store.

      The African American viewer that thrust Empire into its vaunted position no doubt bore little resemblance to the typical Saks customer. NY Post writer Robert Rorke noted the disconnect: “When Saks Fifth Avenue announced its partnership with Fox on a promotional deal to feature the fabulous loud fashions of their hit Empire at the department store, I wondered: Would Cookie Lyon, the fierce ex-con played so entertainingly by Taraji P. Henson, even shop there? Could she step off the elevator at the flagship store in Rockefeller Center, walk up to a salesperson and say, ‘Get me a fake fur jacket, boo boo kitty, and I’d like it in grape’?”¹⁰

      In fact, African Americans, regardless of socioeconomic level, have historically run into problems at high-end stores like Saks Fifth Avenue. In 2013, billionaire Oprah Winfrey asked to see a $38,000 designer handbag at a posh Zurich boutique, only to be rebuffed by a salesperson who told Winfrey that the bag was too expensive for her to afford.¹¹ The same year, African American teenager Trayon Christian was arrested in New York after purchasing a $350 belt from luxury department store Barneys, after the store claimed that he must have been using a fake debit card to make the purchase.¹²

      These instances of “shopping while black” not only point to these stores’ СКАЧАТЬ