Picturing the Woman-child: Fashion, Feminism and the Female Gaze
- Written byEmma Louise Rixhon
- Published date 08 September 2023
Share story
On Friday 24 February, Dr Morna Laing, Assistant Professor at Parson’s Paris, presented her book, Picturing the Woman-child: Fashion, Feminism and the Female Gaze at LCF. It is a re-working of her PhD, which she completed here. It was engrossing for me, a current LCF PhD student, to hear someone explain and explore their research, now a beautiful book, in the building from where it all sprang.
She began by contextualising her research concerns, situating her focus on images of women in the early 2010’s by showing an American Apparel campaign of the time, advertising tights with the model’s face showing corporal pleasure. Her research is based on fashion photographs of young women between 1990-2015, a very key moment right before the #metoo movement. Hence, it encapsulates a specific conversation around portrayals of femininity before consent was centred in photography. This moment may be referred to as a post-feminist one, where both women and men were interested in reclaiming the objectification and infantilisation of women. Dr Laing made it clear that many of the images that she and her research participants discussed were commissioned, produced, or photographed by women. Therefore, this is not a binary conversation on gender power dynamics, but rather on how women were creating a specific womanhood in a fashion context, as well as exploring how women received and perceived these images.
Dr Laing presented her research questions for the book, an invaluable resource for any student wanting to see how research questions consolidate the exploring you’re setting out for yourself. These laid out how her questions combined feminist theory, such as the idea that the ‘woman-child’ can be re-signified as a more progressive idea when shedding Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘second sex’ connotations, as well as interviews with women looking into how these infantilised portrayals of women have appeal after multiple waves of feminism.
She also laid out the contents of Picturing the Woman-child, showing how the first part lays down the groundwork for her research, exploring gender in fashion photography, feminist critique, and reception studies as visual methodology. The second part is her in-depth dissection of the four woman-child representations present in fashion imagery, the Romantic Woman-Child, the Femme-Enfant-Fatale, the Lolita, and the Kinderwhore.
Dr Laing presented all of this with a selection of fascinating images from the hundreds of photo shoots that she had perused during her PhD, as well as including portions of texts she read, such as those by Angela McRobbie or Simone de Beauvoir. She also showed us images of Miu Miu’s Spring 2022 show, one endlessly talked about it seems, of schoolgirl garments on the runway. She discussed how unlike the imagery she researched, which typifies and idealises a white middle class cis-het girl, this Miu Miu show presented beauty as a range of genders and ethnicities. However, it still maintained an androgynous, adolescent body type that is inaccessible to most men, women, and non-binary people.
The talk ended with a range of interesting questions, and I left having learned new ways of approaching and presenting research. This was a clear demonstration of how a PhD becomes an accessible form of academia in a beautifully published book. Not to mention, I compiled a whole new list of books to read, including this one! Considering the range of academics and industry professionals that come to discuss their work at our university, it is always captivating to attend a talk and learn about the multitude of aspects of this large creative world we’ve chosen to be a part of.
- Find out more about Research at LCF
- Visit the UAL Graduate Showcase
- What’s on at LCF: open days and events