The Woman in White

 

On Saturday night, Kristen Stewart attended the 33rd Annual Producers Guild Awards in Los Angeles at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel wearing a dress from Brandon Maxwell. The strapless ivory bridal gown featured a sheer corset bodice with white ribbon boning sewn into the waist. The corset met a wide textured skirt that brushed the red carpet as Stewart posed.
 
The Spencer actress wore her hair up with curls in tendrils around her face. Her makeup was light, with pink eyeshadow for a touch of color and nude lips.
 
During the wards, Stewart presented the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures to the team behind the drama musical film CODA. The award was accepted by the production team including Daniel Durant, Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, Sian Heder, guest, Fabrice Gianfermi, Philippe Rousselet and Patrick Wachsberger. They were joined by stars Daniel Durant, Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur and Sian Heder.
 
The entire event was star-studded, including Serena Williams and Nick Jonas as other presenters. Other invitees on the list were Josh Brolin, Rachel Brosnahan, Daniel Durant, Alana Haim, Jude Hill, Chris Pine, Daniel Dae Kim, Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin, Ryan Murphy, Simon Rex and Kerry Washington, as well as previously announced presenters Meryl Streep, Casey Bloys, Jamie Dornan, Michelle Yeoh, Aunjanue Ellis, Jung Ho-yeon, Linda Lavin, David Alvarez, Jessica Chastain, Denis Villeneuve, Troy Kotsur, Andrew Garfield, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Steven Spielberg.

 
Stewart's dress seems like a glimpse into her future—the Twilight star is recently engaged to Dylan Meyer. Stewart said that Meyer was the one to pop the question while being interviewed by Howard Stern in early November.
 
“We're marrying, we're totally gonna do it,” Stewart said. “I wanted to be proposed to, so I think I very distinctly carved out what I wanted and she nailed it. We're marrying, it's happening.”
 
Kristen Stewart Wears Sheer Bridal White Corset Dress To Producers Guild Award. By Aimée Lutkin. Elle, March 20, 2022.  

In art, spirituality and protest, a woman wearing white is a powerful symbol. Is she a goddess, a ghost, a "fallen woman" – or something else entirely, asks Beverley D'Silva.
 
She was a vision in a white dress, as she stood, or half floated, before a white curtain. She was an "apparition", enthused the artist Gustave Courbet. No, there was nothing ghostly or unearthly about her, according to the art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary, she was "a woman after her wedding night," he said, leaving no doubt what her rosebud lips and dazzled stare evoked in him. She was "charming" felt the poet Charles Baudelaire. While art historian Paul Mantz wondered: "What does she want with her loose hair, her big eyes drowned in ecstasy, her languid attitude?"
 
The "she" invoking these notable reactions was the subject of The White Girl, a masterpiece created by artist James McNeill Whistler in 1861-2. The model, Joanna Hiffernan, was also a muse, companion and much more to the US-born artist, who was living between London and Paris when the pair met in 1860. At the time of their meeting, Hiffernan, an Irish-born Londoner, was 21. The artist was 26, smitten by her beauty, and her hair, which was "the most beautiful that you have ever seen!" he wrote. "A red not golden but copper – as Venetian as a dream!"
 
The painting, which he eventually titled Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, was rejected by the Royal Academy and the official Paris Salon, and accepted at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, a home – thanks to Napoleon III – for fine artists rejected elsewhere. It sealed Whistler's fate as a great international artist, and won him huge success in his own time.
 
From its first showing in a London gallery, under the title Woman in White, trading up on the popularity of Wilkie Collins's 1859 novel of that name, it caused a stir, was derided publicly and critically praised. Like the Mona Lisa centuries before her, Woman in White drew fascinated crowds, speculating about who and what she was.
 
Much conjecture focussed on the dress. A robe of such dazzling light-suffused whiteness was surely a garment worn by saints and the Virgin Mary, with further allusions to purity and innocence invoked by the white lily in her hand. But what of the flame-red hair, hanging loose, possibly indicative of her morals? And the wolfskin beneath her feet; with its links to wildness, sexuality, and the "beast" waiting to be unleashed inside her – or maybe those who gazed upon her.
 
Controversy raged around these stereotypes – goddess or "fallen" woman – and what all that whiteness could possibly symbolise: purity, virginity, morality, heaven, goodness, faith, perfection. Whistler was a "ruthlessly ambitious and hard-working artist" who was "determined to make his mark", according to Professor Margaret MacDonald, a co-curator of an exhibition at London's Royal Academy, Whistler's Woman in White, as well as co-author of the accompanying book, who is an expert on Whistler. The book examines the complex, enduring relationship between the artist and Hiffernan, and explores how the sensation around The White Girl, which stood on the threshold of modern art, secured Whistler's place in art history.
 
While relishing the publicity it attracted, the artist stayed out of the debate on its white-on-white theme, famously retorting that it "simply represents a girl dressed in white standing in front of a white curtain" – in line with the "art for art's sake" credo he subscribed to. Yet despite his apparent insouciance, he painted "Jo" – as he affectionately called her – in white at least five times, three in his symphonies series. MacDonald tells BBC Culture that, in her view,  Whistler's choice of a white dress was partly because it "contrasted splendidly with her hair", and the artist was excited by the technical challenge of painting white on white, a challenge the artist Auguste Renoir spoke later of sharing.
 
Whistler and Hiffernan's backgrounds couldn't have been more contrasting. He had a privileged childhood in New England, and grew up surrounded by wealth. Hiffernan came from a poor working-class family from Limerick in Ireland, who arrived penniless in London. She had considerable innate talents; she was (according to Whistler's biographers Elizabeth R Pennell and Joseph Pennell) of "next to no education, but of keen intelligence… [and] great charm of manner". MacDonald says that Jo and her sister Agnes (who were close) were "not quite on the streets… but it was very difficult for somebody with nothing to make a living in London. And they were beautiful, so modelling [for an artist] was certainly one option".
 

It was an option even if that modelling could be seen by "polite society" of her day as a fall from grace. And when Whistler first painted Hiffernan, he used vivid colours, and told his painter friend, Henri Fantin-Latour, she was like a "putain" (prostitute). Although they never married in the legal sense, their relationship would last 20 years – until her death – and she was vitally important to him.  She not only posed for his best portraits – exposing herself in the process to lead white paint that may well have contributed to her death from a lung disease at 44 – she also cared for his son from an affair for many years, and sometimes managed his estate.
 
Her part in his great fame might have mostly gone unsung. But 160 years later, a fascinating spotlight falls on Hiffernan, her personality and their life together, as revealed in the Royal Academy exhibition.
 
MacDonald and her team were thrilled to discover, using X-radiographs, images buried under layers of some of his paintings (which he'd painted over to save on canvas) depicting Hiffernan "her eyes looking devoutly upward, as if to heaven", in the guise of "a woman praying, saint or a nun" as MacDonald puts it. "All possible spiritual interpretations of the model's expression at this stage."
 
"Incandescent beings"
 
White in artworks carries "a wide spectrum of meanings," says Marina Warner, historian, art critic and author of books including Stranger Magic, and Monuments and Maidens. "If it's shining, as it is with the curtain in The White Girl, it brings a sense of being close to light, and ideas of purity and cleanliness," Warner tells BBC Culture However, "shining white is also associated with angels, which are incandescent beings – candidus is Latin for white, and light is the origin of things. If you read Dante's Commedia [later known as The Divine Comedy], as you rise to heaven, it gets brighter and brighter. So that connection of whiteness with goodness is very, very strong."

 
The dress in the painting is "not shiny" she points out "and in this she's less angelic than nubile. Also a strong symbolic meaning of whiteness is a threshold – if you're a candidate or a novice up to become a nun, you wear white, as you do for your first communion; and if you marry you wear white and pass across the threshold of maidenhead into the world of sexuality".
 
Warner notes the model's "red lips, and hair hanging loose, possibly a sign of availability. She looks apt to surrender without much of a struggle. A hint of dangerous sexuality in the wolfskin… even the flowers in the carpet are hinting at fruition or fertility". Indeed, the Woman in White curators believe Whistler's white-clad series may have been inspired by Jean-Baptiste Greuze's painting La Cruche Cassée (1771),"with its depiction of fair young flesh and a silky, disarrayed white dress," as MacDonald's book describes it. But as Warner says, white conveys a wide spectrum of connotations. She, like Courbet before her, finds the figure "rather spectral. I mean, in Victorian psychic photographs, ghosts are white, and there's something insubstantial, phantom-like about her. And of course, in many religions, whiteness is the colour of death".         
 
The painting's success influenced striking works of that time, such as Frederick Sandys' Gentle Spring (1865); Sir John Everett Millais' The Somnambulist (1871); The Woman in White (1871) by Frederick Walker; Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Hermine Gallia (1904); John Singer Sargent's intriguing Fumée d’Ambre Gris (1880);  and arresting portraits by Berthe Morisot, such as her The Artist's Sister at a Window (1869). MacDonald's co-author, Aileen Ribeiro, notes how Morisot "loved to depict these soft, floating, semi-transparent white morning gowns in private, informal, domestic settings". She references The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt (1853), which "announces the sexual relationship between the young man and his mistress by specificity of her bedroom attire, a looser, striped white bodice over a white cotton broderie-anglaise petticoat… White then is an ambiguous colour; it can encompass a variety of meanings, from innocence to the lack of it"

 
Writing on the symbolism of white in relation to fashion, Ribeiro observes: "It was Wittgenstein who said that white is 'that which does away with darkness', and for this reason is often linked to virtue, purity, cleanliness and humility". She lists the white toga virilis of ancient Rome, a symbol of the common good; white worn by monarchs at their coronations to underline their duty to the state and people; white associated with faith and religious rites, such as pilgrims to Mecca. There's the fact Popes have worn white since 1566, as a symbol of purity and sacrifice, and it's worn by priests and priestesses in the Shinto religion in Japan, where white has been an auspicious colour since ancient times.
 
Of course there are countless portrayals of white-clad figures in modern art, from Whistler via Klimt's women in dresses gauzy as butterfly wings, through to Picasso's Woman in White (1923) to the vivid self-portraits by Frida Kahlo. One of Kahlo's paintings in which white plays heavily with colour symbolism is The Two Fridas (1939).  She depicts herself in two guises – one Frida in Western clothes, the other in a formal white dress with traditional Tehuana trimming, her exposed heart bleeding on to its white skirt; it's been suggested the white Frida was the life she wished to have but eluded her (children, and happiness with Diego Rivera, from whom she had recently divorced). Kahlo said the picture expressed her desperation and loneliness. Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) is arguably her best-known work featuring herself: her white dress is like a crucifixion shroud, as a neckpiece of thorns, rather than a crown, pierces her skin.
 
White dresses as a tradition for weddings is not as long-held as we might think – in fact, it was Queen Victoria's choice of a white wedding dress finished in lace (to help the ailing lace industry), that inspired a public fashion for bridal white. Bridal fashion expert, Peta Hunt recently told wedding website hitched.co.uk that we will see "a lot more coloured wedding dresses – pinks, blues, blush" and a return of black wedding dresses "for high glamour and drama". Wearing white has figured as a protest tool for women since the early 1900s, notably the British and US Suffragettes. White is the colour "most associated with suffragists today," writes Erin Blakemore for National Geographic. "Long associated with youth, virginity and moral virtue, white suggested that women could be expected to vote for politicians and policies that would better society."
 
Wearing white, Emmeline Pankhurst strode out as leader of the Women's Social and Political Union, to promote votes for women at public marches, including the biggest demonstration of its time in the UK, in Hyde Park, June 1908. A long white dress, worn with purple (symbolising dignity, self-reverence and self-respect) or green (for hope and new life), became an easy-to-assemble uniform for Suffragists attending political rallies. White garments also stood out starkly against the crowds of men in dark suits – an early prototype of the clever photo op.    
 
Wearing white to highlight gender equality – and as an emblem of female empowerment – is still very much with us. In 2019, Donald Trump faced a sea of suffragette white at his State of the Union address, as female Democratic members of Congress stepped up in pristine white clothes: "We'll honour those who went before us and send a message of solidarity, we're not going back on our hard-earned rights," said Lois Frankel, of the House Democratic Women's Working Group. While Christine Holgate, former Australia Post CEO, wore a white jacket when appearing before a Senate inquiry – part of the Wear White 2 Unite campaign to encourage people to support her call for an end to workplace bullying.
 
If she were still alive today, what would Joanna Hiffernan, the original Woman in White, make of the idea of white worn by women as a political statement? She'd probably snort with laughter, and be right behind it, judging by her wry humour and pragmatism, as revealed in the book. And what if she could walk around the Royal Academy, and witness the more than 70 paintings, etchings and Japanese prints that inspired her great friend, to see that the most eagerly sought-out artworks were of herself? That her talents and contributions to Whistler's oeuvre had at last been appreciated, and that she had finally been given her moment in the sun, would be gratifying indeed.
 
Whistler's Woman in White is at the Royal Academy, London, from 26 February to 22 May 2022.
 
The Woman in White and the meanings hidden in a masterpiece. By  By Beverley D'Silva.
BBC, February 21,  2022

 

“Suffragette white” is proving to be a popular fashion choice for women who want to make a statement. Most recently, former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate donned a white jacket in her appearance before a Senate inquiry into her controversial departure from the organisation.

 
Her sartorial choice formed part of the “Wear White 2 Unite” campaign, which encouraged people to sport the colour in support of Holgate and call for an end to workplace bullying.
 
In doing this, Holgate, like Brittany Higgins last month at the Canberra March4Justice, is building on a trend in which women are wearing white clothing — and often referencing suffrage history — to draw attention to gender inequity today.

 
Deeds not words
 
The term “suffragette” is sometimes mistakenly used to refer to all those who campaigned for women’s voting rights. But it was actually a label applied to a specific group of women — initially in a derogatory sense.
 
The women’s suffrage movement in Britain took off during the 1860s. By the turn of the 20th century, women still did not have the vote.

 
This led Emmeline Pankhurst to establish the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. Her group of primarily white women believed militancy was the only way they could achieve change, living by the motto “deeds not words”.
 
The British press mockingly labelled these women “suffragettes”, adding the diminutive suffix “-ette” in an attempt to de-legitimise them. But Pankhurst’s group was not deterred. It reclaimed the term, eliminating the element of ridicule and rebranding it as “a name of highest honour”.
 
 
Her group’s dramatic actions – from disrupting meetings to damaging public property – cemented their place in the history of women’s suffrage.
 
Purity, dignity and hope
 
Early 20th century suffrage campaigns relied heavily on spectacle and pageantry, using striking visual imagery and mass gatherings to garner the attention of the press and the wider public.
 
Many suffrage organisations adopted colours to symbolise their agenda. In Britain, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies used red and white in their banners, later adding green. The WSPU chose white, purple and green: white for purity, purple for dignity and green for hope.
 
Suffragette white was first donned en masse in June 1908 on Women’s Sunday, the first “monster meeting” hosted by the WSPU in London’s Hyde Park. The 30,000 participants were encouraged to wear white, accessorised with touches of purple and green.
 
Ahead of the march, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s newspaper Votes for Women explained:
 
“the effect will be a magnificent moving colour scheme never before seen in London’s streets.”
 
White fabric was relatively affordable, which meant women of different backgrounds could participate. The colour’s association with purity also helped those involved present themselves as respectable, dignified women.

 
Suffragette white became a mainstay of the WSPU’s demonstrations. In 1911, women who had been imprisoned for militancy were among those who marched in white in the Women’s Coronation Procession.
 
The Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein, wearing a white dress, famously headed the Australian contingent.
 
Goldstein later brought the WSPU’s colours to Australia in her campaigns for a parliamentary seat.
 
Two years later in 1913, members of the WSPU wore white in a funeral procession for their colleague Emily Wilding Davison, who died under the hooves of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby.
 
American suffragists soon picked up this tactic, influenced by the British suffragettes as well as by the temperance movement’s use of white ribbons.
 
Cities like Washington D.C. witnessed similar scenes of women in white dresses marching through the streets, making striking material for photographers. Contemporary black women — who were excluded from the suffrage movement in many ways — used the colour in their protests against racial violence, too.

 
Feminist solidarity
 
The modern trend towards white has had particular traction in the US.
 
In 2019, Donald Trump faced a sea of suffragette white at his State of the Union address. Last year, Kamala Harris wore a white pantsuit to deliver her remarks as vice president-elect.
 
Closer to home, at the March4Justice rally in Canberra, Brittany Higgins made a surprise appearance in a white outfit, standing in contrast to the funereal black worn by attendees.

 
By wearing white, these women — either consciously or not — are building connections with their feminist forebears across the Anglosphere. At times this can flatten the complex history of women’s suffrage. It is important to remember it was primarily white, middle-class women who led these suffrage movements, often to the exclusion of women of colour and others.
 
In drawing on their feminist genealogy, women today need to acknowledge the limitations of feminisms past and present — and not simply celebrate and reproduce the attitudes of over a hundred years ago.
 
At the same time, wearing suffragette white is a powerful and highly symbolic gesture that reminds us just how long women have been fighting.
 
By establishing a sense of feminist solidarity across time and space, this move can also generate inspiration and energy and attract media attention. Women of colour’s choice to wear white can be read as a way of asserting their place within a movement from which they have historically been (and continue to be) excluded — and honouring women of colour who have come before them.

 
Like the suffragettes of the early 20th century, women today are showing the power of visual spectacle to grab the public’s attention. Whether this will, in turn, lead to real change remains to be seen.
 
What is suffragette white? The colour has a 110-year history as a protest tool. By Michelle Staff. The Conversation, April, 20, 2021.

“A wedding gown represents far more than just a dress. It is also the embodiment of a dream,” said Vera Wang.
 
For most American brides, that dream is realized in a beautiful white wedding gown. It’s a seemingly timeless tradition that is often the center point of little girls’ wedding fantasies. In 2018, about 83% of brides wore white dresses on their big day, according to a survey by Brides Magazine. Such an overwhelming statistic begs the question: Why do we associate white with wedding gowns? And how long has this tradition existed?
 
Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, a leading 19th century women’s publication, addressed this in an article on the “Etiquette of Trousseau” in their August 1849 issue. “Custom, from time immemorial, has decided on white as [a wedding gown’s] proper hue, emblematic of the freshness and purity of girlhood,” they wrote.
 
While this implies a long history of bridal white, it is not true. At the time, white had only been a popular wedding dress fashion for about nine years – strictly among the well-to-do.
So when and where did the white wedding dress originate? As a curator at The Ohio State University’s Historic Costumes and Textiles Collection, I have often been asked this question, and my research included the search for an answer.
 
The practice likely traces back more than 2,000 years, with roots in the Roman Republic (509 B.C. - 27 B.C.) when brides wore a white tunic. The color white represented purity, symbolizing both a woman’s chastity and her transition to a married Roman matron. It was also associated with Vesta, the virgin goddess of hearth, home and family who was served by temple priestesses garbed in distinctive white clothing.
 
After the fall of the Roman Empire, white marriage attire fell out of fashion. From the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century, most brides simply wore their best dress or purchased a new gown that could be worn again. White was simply not a practical choice in a world without running water – or where laundry was hand-washed.
 
A royal wedding sparked the modern trend in white bridal wear. Queen Victoria chose to forgo the royal tradition of wearing coronation robes when she married Prince Albert on Feb. 10, 1840. Instead, she wore a fashionable white gown that was featured in newspapers and magazines around the world.
 
The style and color of her gown was copied across continents as women aspired to look like the young, attractive queen – much like the public emulates celebrities today. Wearing a white wedding dress became a sign of wealth and status rather than virginity. Only wealthy brides could wear a white silk gown, since they were wed in clean, elegant places that were removed from the muck and grime of life during the mid-19th century Industrial Age.
 
These gowns were actually cream or ivory, which was more flattering to the complexion. The brilliant white wedding dress would not become popular in Europe and North America until the 1930s, and would not truly become rooted in the public consciousness until World War II.
 
With U.S. wartime rations of fabric and a surge of weddings as American soldiers returned from the front, the war sparked changes in the design of wedding dresses. In 1943, while the war was still raging, the federal Limitation Order 85 dictated that only one and three-quarters yards of fabric could be used to create a dress.
 
The American Association of Bridal Manufacturers lobbiedfor an exemption, arguing that it was important to the overall morale of citizens. They asserted, after conducting a study of 2,000 brides that, “American boys are going off to war and what are they fighting for except the privilege of getting married in a traditional way? They’re fighting for our way of life, and this is part of our way of life.”
 
They were ultimately successful, and the limitation order exempted wedding gowns. But silk was difficult to find; the war with Japan had disrupted trade routes. Nylon was also in short supply, as it was being used in place of silk to manufacture parachutes. Most wedding gowns from those years were made from acetate – except for those worn in “parachute weddings.” Some soldiers, like B-29 pilot Major Claude Hensinger, kept the parachutes that saved their lives during the war and later gave the material to their betrothed to make a gown.
 
Although the first records of brides garbed in white reach far back into the annals of history, it only became standard fashion over last 80 years. With the arrival of ready-to-wear clothing, brides could order affordable, mass-produced gowns based on sample sizes that were then fitted for them: a custom-made gown at a ready-to-wear price. A large, traditional wedding with the bride outfitted in a princess-style white wedding gown became a symbol of the American dream.
 
From WWII through the end of the 20th century, the white gown symbolized prosperity, virginity and a lifetime commitment to one person. For most people today, those meanings are gone.
 
White is now the overwhelming choice for most American brides, with 4 out of 5 choosing to walk down the aisle in a white gown, a sort of bridal uniform. It has become an iconic symbol of weddings, an expected part of the celebration, and despite knowing the relatively short history of the tradition of a white wedding, it was my choice as well.
 
Why do brides wear white? By Marlise Schoeny. The Conversation, September 4, 2020. 

I imagine Meghan Markle standing before her dress the night before her wedding, considering. Instead of a white column of lace or a dramatic froth of translucent charmeuse, she touches the sleeve of a russet red gown, trimmed with mink and gold-embroidered, the skirt heavy with heirloom jewels. This is the dress she'll wear down the aisle.

 While this seems like a shocking pick today, prior to the 20th century this would have been the norm for wealthy European brides. Pristine, white, fairy-tale wedding dresses, to be worn once and then tucked away, weren't the standard until relatively recently. Before then, colored dresses were the norm for brides of all classes.

 While a few historic women wore white gowns to the altar over the centuries -- including Mary Queen of Scots in 1558 -- it wasn't until Queen Victoria debuted a white silk-spun gown at her wedding to Prince Albert in 1840 that the look really took root. Side-stepping the usual fur, gold embroidery, and rich colors that were the norm among the aristocracy at the time, Victoria stepped out of her carriage wearing a simple white dress accented with Honiton lace, and traded her crown for a wreath of orange blossoms and myrtle.

 However, when the wedding march began and the guests turned around, they found it all very underwhelming -- where was the pomp and circumstance? Royal weddings were more about wealth and political contracts than love, so families typically took the opportunity to express their affluence through their brides: Margaret of York's wedding dress from 1468 was reportedly so heavy with heirloom jewels that she had to be carried into the church; Princess Charlotte, in 1816, wore a silver lamé gown embroidered with shells and flowers, which was said to have cost £10,000 (the equivalent of about $1.3 million, adjusting for inflation). By showing up in a simple white dress, it seemed that Victoria was throwing a frugal affair.

 That was partly the point. A young Lady Regent at 20, Queen Victoria wanted to show good sense and prudence on her wedding to show her people that she would run their country much in the same way.

 But why white? The reason is layered. Knowing that her dress would be reported on around the world, Queen Victoria chose to wear a dress trimmed with handmade Honiton lace from the small village of Beer, to support the declining lace trade and give the industry a boon. White, she reasoned, was the best way to show off the lace makers' artistry.

 That's not to say that her marriage to Prince Albert was purely a show of duty: there were just as many romantic elements involved. Part of the reason Queen Victoria eschewed the heirloom jewels, heavy fabrics and rich colors was that she didn't want to make her vows to her husband as a monarch, but rather as the woman he loved.

 As predicted, her dress was reported on for months on end. News of this charmingly simple frock spread far and wide, reaching across the Atlantic to the colonies, and was syndicated in just about every newspaper column and women's magazine for months on over. In 1849, Godey's Lady's Book, the Vogue of the Victorian world, decreed: "Custom has decided, from the earliest ages, that white is the most fitting hue, whatever may be the material. It is an emblem of the purity and innocence of girlhood, and the unsullied heart she now yields to the chosen one."

 However, the white dress didn't initially catch on because it symbolized an unsullied heart. It caught on because it looked like money. At the time, most women exchanged vows in dresses they already owned, and there was only one group of people who could afford to own anything white: the leisure class. There weren't dry cleaners and laundromats around in the late 19th-century, so it took money to maintain a white outfit.

 Buying a white dress was seen as extremely impractical, especially when one considered the festivities of a wedding. Between the drinking, the dancing, and the scooping of desserts, chances were the frock would be ruined and only be worn once. No working-class woman would be able to afford that kind of frivolousness.

 In 1873, Mary Sheehan Ronan, a 20-year old American bride, wrote in her journal: "I had dreams of a white dress with a train, a bridal veil, and wreath of orange blossoms, but when the time actually came I considered conventional things inharmonious with the simplicity and unconventionality of our way of living." Instead, she wore a pearl gray dress, one of the two she and her stepmother had recently made.

 But that was the norm for brides who didn't come from money. In 1911, when a newly engaged woman wrote into Washington's Tacoma Times newspaper seeking a recommendation for a "plain wedding dress," the columnist recommended buying a frock in white wool, which could easily be dyed for another occasion. But, she asked, "Why not be married in your traveling suit?" Perhaps it seemed a touch too extravagant to buy a new dress for the occasion.

 It took until after World War II for the middle-class to begin copying the look of the wealthy, thanks to the boon in prosperity after the war. With rations gone, it became a novel idea to buy a dress just to celebrate in for a day, and when Hollywood began marching brides in white across theater screens, the quaint, chapel-like look became part of the tradition.

 That's not to say that brides have only been wearing white since. Brigitte Bardot wore a pink gingham dress, complete with lace-trimmed sleeves and a tea-length skirt, in 1959, and Elizabeth Taylor only wore white to two of her eight weddings. More recently, Keira Knightley wore a pale gray Chanel dress for her 2013 nuptials, Sarah Jessica Parker wore a black ballgown in 1997, and Julianne Moore wore lavender Prada in 2003.

 Even today, many different cultures wear different colors. In China and India, for example, red dresses are worn as a symbol of good luck and success. Traditional Nigerian brides veer towards brightly colored, elaborately accessorized dresses, and wedding dresses in Ghana vary from couple to couple, with each family uses its own intricate cloth pattern. Traditional Hungarian dresses are white with colorful floral patterns embroidered down their lengths, and Malaysian gowns usually come in purple or violet.

 Sartorially, Meghan Markle has proven herself an nontraditional future-royal, wearing her hair in messy buns (Kate Middleton prefers hair nets), and choosing cross-body bags over dainty clutches so her arms free to hug and shake hands. And although she will almost certainly keep with tradition and don a white dress on wedding day, she will walk down the aisle representing the same refreshing and unexpected spirit the white dress embodied when Queen Victoria first popularized it 179 years ago.

 She's a woman that knows her own mind, and isn't afraid to side-step protocol to start her own traditions. And history will remember her for it.

 

Why so many brides wear white on their wedding day. By Marlen Komar. CNN, February 8, 2019

Sun stare, don't care with my head in my hands thinking of a simpler time
Like Sun Ra, feel small, but I had it under control every time
 
When I was a waitress wearing a white dress
Look how I do this, look how I got this
I was a waitress working the night shift
You were my man, felt like I got this
Down at the Men in Music Business Conference
Down in Orlando, I was only 19
Down at the Men in Music Business Conference
I only mention it 'cause it was such a scene
And I felt seen
Mmh, mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh, mhm
 
Summer, sizzling
Listening to jazz out on the lawn
Listening to White Stripes when they were white-hot
Listening to rock, all day long
 
When I was a waitress wearing a tight dress, handling the heat
I wasn't famous, just listening to Kings of Leon to the beat
Like, look at how I got this
Look how I got this, just singing in the street
Down at the Men in Music Business Conference
I felt free 'cause I was only 19
Such a scene
 
Summer, summer's almost gone
We were talking about life, we were sitting outside 'til dawn
But I would still go back
If I could do it all again, I'd fly
Because it made me feel, made me feel like a god
'Cause it made me feel, made me feel like a god
Somehow it made me feel, made me feel like a god
 
When I was a waitress wearing a white dress
Look how I do this, look how I got this
I was a waitress working the night shift
You were my man, felt like I got this
Down at the Men in Music Business Conference
Down in Orlando, I was only 19
Down at the Men in Music Business Conference
I only mention it 'cause it was such a scene
And I felt seen
Mmh, mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh, mhm
 
When I was a waitress wearing a tight dress
Like, look how I do it, look how I got this
I was a waitress wearing a tight dress
Like, look who would do this, look who would got this
 
It made me feel, made me feel like a god
It kinda makes me feel, like maybe I was better off
'Cause it made me feel, made me feel like a god
Kinda makes me feel like maybe I was better off
 
 
 
Lana del Rey   /  The White Dress

YouTube

Lana Del Rey : America's Messy Subconscious

As the summer comes to a close, a familiar creeping feeling comes over me. It’s a feeling characterised by sunsets and still being awake at sunrise; lying in bed on creased bed sheets, the weak evening light falling through the window; hot oven-like temperatures; warm beers; wasted days; listlessness; boredom; frustration. All in all, I’ve come to call this “Lana Del Rey Season”, and as the songstress prepares to release her long awaited fifth album this Friday, the seasonal feeling couldn’t be more aptly named. But what are the defining features of LDR Season, you might ask? Here, I outline the tell-tale signs that the season of sad girls, stagnant heat and reckless romance is upon us.

End of summer melancholia

As temperatures reach over 30 degrees here in Berlin, it might be hard to believe that autumn is on its way. While hot temps in early June spread happiness and a silly sense of possibility, by the end of August, too-warm weather can suck the life—and dreams—out of you. Most notably, Del Rey sang about this in her iconic 2013 track, “Summertime Sadness” characterising a whole season of doom and gloom that previously all of us seasonal summer sufferers were too embarrassed to admit to. Summer may be the most blissful time of year, but is it also is a time of crankiness and bitter vibes as you come to the realisation that holidays don’t last forever, and work and real life must resume.

Track: “Summertime Sadness”

Bonus: “Sad Girl” or “Summer Bummer“

Crazy crushes and desperate desire

Would it be even end-of-summer if we weren’t questioning all of our life choices, but most notably our romantic ones? Late summer is characterised by strange, wild-eyed recklessness almost as though love and romance are finite resources rapidly depleting with the onset of grounded autumn. It’s a time to consider people you might not have thought of as viable romantic partners before; to be driven crazy by running into your ex; over-the-top dates; sexy soirees; violent jealousies; ferocious insecurities and grandiose romantic gestures. Del Rey, of course, sings about all of this across her back catalogue. In “Young and Beautiful” she recounts those “Hot summer nights, mid July/When you and I were forever wild”, but a Lana-love story never lasts—inevitably the boyfriends are bad and the women are desperate and love is a terrible, terrible thing. In “Cruel World”, she croons “I shared my body and my mind with you/ That’s all over now.” Crazy summer romances burn out as quickly as they spark.

Track: “Born to Die”

Bonus: “Lust for life”

August ennui

Del Rey’s songs are heavy with the fog of boredom and frustration—”Lying on my bed it’s a bummer,” as she sings in “White Mustang”. Lana Del Rey Season— alternatively titled “Sad Girl Summer”—is a season dense with pointlessness, uncertainty and putting all your better life choices on hold until the weather cools down and you can think clearly again. Del Rey’s sonic scape is a hazy world of messy, sunlit bedrooms, stifling cars and lonely poolsides. It’s a cinematic scene defined by getting dressed up and having nowhere to go, of being sad and not knowing why, of driving to nowhere, the numbing sensation of sipping on an overpriced cocktail, chain smoking if you smoke, of uneasiness and chaotic melancholy all rolled into one.

Track: “Video Games”

Bonus: “High By The Beach”

Bad life choices

Part of the reason why the music of Del Rey is so relatable is because it describes those less than desirable sides of ourselves—the side that won’t go home from the party, who chases the wrong person, who acts selfishly, carelessly and without a thought for the consequences. As summer comes to a close, you might have noticed that you and all your friends are acting a little wired—have you snapped at someone recently for no reason, convinced a pal to stay out drinking with you, indulged in ludicrous social media stalking, or spent all your paycheck on the sort of slinky glamorous sheath only to be worn once to impress the abstract object of your affections? Then you might just be in the throes of Del Rey season, where bad life choices are the order of the day.

Track: “F**ked My Way Up To The Top”

Bonus: “Freak”

The pressing feeling that it’s time to get your life back together

As the nights steadily grow shorter and piles of fuzzy sweaters slowly replace crop tops on shop floors, it’s time to admit that you’ve got to get your life back on track. Those wild, crazy nights of crying and screaming at your friends and lovers can’t last forever, after all. The prosecco has stopped flowing, the party is officially over, it’s time to sleep, wipe your face clean of mascara crumbs, take out the empty beer bottles and face the music. You might feel sad about it—as Lana sings on her one of her newest tracks “The Greatest”: “I’m facing the greatest/the greatest loss of them all”—but really, enough is enough. Del Rey puts it best when she says,  “I had a ball/ I guess that I’m burned out after all.” September can’t come quick enough.

Track: “The Greatest”

Bonus: “13 Beaches”

Lana Del Rey Season is upon us, and here’s how to spot it. By Kathryn O'Regan.  Sleek Mag, August 29, 2019. 

The trash on the Venice boardwalk sparkles like Wet n Wild lip gloss. This is what people forget about Los Angeles beaches: They're part of the city, inundated with the city's grit. Half-melted Icees in Styrofoam cups, one flip-flop, taco foil, condoms, a dead vape pen. Needles. But also: a Swarovski crystal earring. A pinwheel unmoored from its handle. A streak of gooey glitter. Coins of many lands. A few miles up the Pacific Coast Highway, away from the skateboarders and homeless people, WASPs sun themselves at country clubs as employees sweep the sands. But their brooms can't clear the ocean.

"I'm mostly at the beach!" Lana Del Rey exclaimed in a recent interview, explaining her cultivated disconnect from the Hollywood pop machine. Reading this, I wonder where she goes and what she does after she unfolds her towel and sets up her umbrella. Does she drive past Malibu to El Matador, where the water is the cleanest but the one Porta-Potty often overflows? Down to Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, near the aquarium where schoolkids swarm? In her songs she dwells on Venice and Long Beach, two places where the red signs the city uses to warn of excess sewage in the water show up the most. I think she goes to the beach but she spends her time looking at that filthy, shiny sand.

Lana Del Rey is up to her elbows in water in the video for "F*** It I Love You," one of the singles that built excitement for Norman F****** Rockwell! (referred to hereafter as NFR!), her fifth album and the one that has cemented her status as a serious artist among critics who may or may not have thought her previous work problematic, or at very least, incomplete. In several shots, she holds onto a surfboard. Her hair is in in Dutch braids, similar to the styles cholas wore in the 1990s. See, there's the slippage, the step away from an authentic or even consistent narrative: Few Latinas from East L.A. would have made it the 15 miles west to the beach 20 years ago, or even at the height of the surfing craze in the 1960s, when as a kid the writer Jack Lopez almost got beaten up by a tough guy for walking down Western Avenue in board shorts, clutching a copy of Surfer magazine. "Cholo meets surfer," he wrote in his memoir. "Not a good thing." But Lopez was insistent in violating the boundaries of the acceptable; that wrongness, he wrote years later, endangered him but also helped him get free.

Music videos juxtapose disconnected images to induce a kind of dream state in the viewer: to approximate the effect of music itself. There's a subtle tension within many popular songs, however, between the unsettling effect of juxtaposing disparate elements — say, English folk melodies and Delta blues (that's Led Zeppelin) or Caribbean inflections and Nordic electronic beats (many Rihanna singles) — and the comfort of a unified narrative, the songwriter's art. The rise of the singer-songwriter in the 1960s reinforced the value of narrative pull and shored up other hierarchies: rock over disco, sitting and listening over dancing, lyrics over sound. (Exhibit A: The Poetry of Rock.) Hip-hop, a revolution in fragments, challenged this order, yet it still exerts itself in most discussions of what makes great songs.

For most of her career, Lana Del Rey has not participated in this discourse. Instead, she has made slippage the basis of her approach. It took her time to master this practice, and she's gone to extremes: Over the course of five albums, she's often repeated herself, mixed signals and followed her impulses over the edge of good taste. Critics have doubted her motives. But she has earned a following among listeners who value unmonitored reveries.

On NFR! Del Rey is at her most instantly compelling, a pro asserting her future spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as her closest peer and rival Stefani Germanotta did with her turn in A Star is Born. Words like "classic" and "greatest" adhere to her now; she writes songs that use them unironically. The possibly fictional shade whose fluttery alto flickered and beckoned on YouTube nearly a decade ago is a woman now — "a modern day woman with a weak constitution," she intones on the album's billowing final track, "hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have — but I have it." That's one of several moments in which Del Rey seems to open herself up; another is the melancholy "Mariners Apartment Complex," four and a half minutes of gospel-inflected transcendence in which her pastiche is so perfectly constructed that it becomes flesh, an utterly believable plea by a weary but steadfast soul to the lover whose tether she refuses to loose. It's a story about which most people can feel something.

Yet the sensitivity and compassion Del Rey expresses in these songs really resonates not in its straightforwardness, but because of all the pings it sets off in the listener's brain, each one hitting like a nearly-erased memory. In "Mariners," she deflects the Elton John comparison its piano part demands ("I ain't your candle in the wind"), only to build to a chorus that seemingly echoes the Oscar-winning theme from a classic 1970s disaster movie (Maureen McGovern's magisterial "The Morning After") and, in its warm but uncanny multi-tracked vocal hook, the synth-kissed love songs that brought Leonard Cohen back from obscurity in the 1980s. At least that's what one fan, namely me, hears. That's the gist of Lana Del Rey, and still her superpower as she floats toward more readable songcraft: Whether her music makes cultural connections that are obvious or obscure, they always feel deeply personal, individuated, like mementos.

In her early days, what she claimed — bouffanted femme-fatalism weirdly aligned with a tattered Fourth-of-July style patriotic nostalgia, Bettie Page reborn as an Instagram star — felt undeveloped and, because of that, cynical. Intimations that she'd had help in inventing herself clouded her status. But as she built her repertoire, Del Rey proved fully committed to the messy alignments of her art, and better able to articulate how they formed the stories by which she, or the characters she claimed as her own, lived. She would be a problem — a loyalist to outdated ideals like mad love and bad-boy machismo, a constant gardener of the weediest patches of the contemporary psyche. On NFR! she remains that artist, even as she asks herself if she might, with insight, better compartmentalize her impulses.

Lana Del Rey is all about wrong combinations: sunset dreams and dirty water, Mexican-American braids and a wetsuit, hip-hop flow and torch song feeling, conventional feminine submissiveness and post-feminist self-possession. Cognitive dissonance is the essence of her art, the way she builds her dream logic. Satin slips, Freudian slips: Throughout her tenure as a pop star, Lana has pursued revelations about how desire disassembles and recombines elements of a woman's personality. "Heaven is a place on earth with you," she whispered in her first hit, 2011's "Video Games." She sang it just the way you do a line from a song that pops into your head unbidden, wondering if you're quoting your favorite current pop star or the one your mom loved in the '80s or something some guy said back in the '60s to a girl trying to be his perfect date. The sentiment is soaked in banality, but also in the perfume of all those other girls. "Tell me all the things you want to do," Lana continues. "I hear that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?" And so a dream of romantic fulfillment slipped into self-negation, the way it has since time immemorial in the scripts that young women learn from those songs and from movies, their moms, other girls and the boys who benefit. The tone of her voice as she uttered these words was forever after labeled "sad," but was really something different. My mom would have called it "needy"; today, more common descriptions are "disempowered," "self-sabotaging," "unwoke." "Women hated me," Del Rey told writer Alex Frank in 2017. "I know why. It's because there were things I was saying that either they just couldn't connect to or were maybe worried that, if they were in the same situation, it would put them in a vulnerable place."

But we know this. Over the course of her five albums, as she has learned to be a more specific writer and a more adventurous vocalist and to make room in her echo-saturated arrangements for her words to resonate, Del Rey has continued to stand firmly against the ideal of self-empowerment. Instead, she has explored what happens when women call themselves children; when they stumble in high heels; when they put the love of a man before all. Mostly, critics have perceived this as an anti-feminist stance. Lindsay Zoladz sympathetically recontextualized it in a cogent 2017 essay, seeing Del Rey's embodiment of the weak woman as an antidote to "empowerment as the default aspiration of the pop star" – the tendency of chart toppers from Beyoncé to Taylor Swift to configure their careers as one long therapeutic, vaguely political pep talk. Del Rey herself simply said she found feminism uninteresting. She's modified that stance somewhat in the aftermath of the #metoo movement, citing Trump's infamous "grab 'em" remark as a sign that sexuality has been weaponized beyond even her tolerance levels. Yet even on NFR!, an album some writers have extolled as a (circuitous) form of protest, Del Rey remains much more invested in describing how people — mostly women — fall apart, how they take risks or otherwise work against their own best interests in the pursuit of pleasure, intimacy and what she still guilelessly calls "love."

To many of its champions, NFR! is Del Rey's revenge against those who would misinterpret her, a fully realized conventional singer-songwriter album offering a critique of 21st-century decadence rather than another chance to wallow in it, an "obituary for America" that still extends some hope that, with the proper perspective, its best qualities – its beauty, its small-d democratic impulses – can be redeemed. The album certainly boasts Del Rey's most artfully constructed narratives, extending the arc of apparent self-realization also evident in widely framed narratives that stood out on her previous album, Lust For Life. In songs like "Coachella – Woodstock In My Mind," in which she made a cosmic quilt of her experience watching her artistic soulmate Father John Misty perform for fourth-generation flower children at a festival built on the countercultural helium fumes of electronic dance music, Del Rey made a sonic and emotional argument for collapsing the boundaries that uphold authenticity as a cultural value. Referencing a Led Zeppelin lyric in an easy-listening arrangement, she shared her view of utopia: a place in which parents and children and their children's children dissolve into each other under the sway of art. Music's power to unite is an old fashioned idea, romantic, even mystical — and conservative, in that it argues for art as a conduit for personal transformation rather than an identity marker that fuels political or cultural debate. At first considered a nihilist, Lana Del Rey became a champion of the meaningful, even as she maintained her stance that meaning is best communicated through strange juxtapositions.

With NFR!, Del Rey further invests in meaningfulness. She seems to have become more interesting in standing alongside (or towering over) her peers; in league with producer and co-writer Jack Antonoff, she makes space for comparisons to Lorde and the aforementioned Gaga and even Taylor Swift. The album's dominant story line describes an affair with a fellow artist in which the power roles never solidify, a situation Del Rey depicts as unsustainable but clarifying. Addressing this bohemian deadbeat, she upends the gender roles she's so often fetishized, trading in her kitten heels for kicks that allow her to keep walking. She cusses at her "man child," demanding that he grow up; she describes herself as the more active breadwinner ("you write, I tour, we make it work"). At one point, in a sonic nod to Leonard Cohen, she simply announces, "I'm your man."

These are the most cleanly satisfying moments of the album, evoking what we expect from singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell or Tori Amos, both of whom are clear inspirations in Del Rey's pursuit of legible expressiveness. She and Antonoff don't try to imitate Mitchell's tricky musical fusions, but they do invoke the finely honed confidentiality of Amos' music, and similar moods cultivated by other women in the 1990s, when Mitchell served as a beacon lighting many different approaches to the singer-songwriter role. (Fiona Apple is another obvious source of inspiration.) These artists made spaces where women could share complicated thoughts and otherwise unspoken feelings, using tools traditionally associated with the feminine: piano, lyric poetry, a voice cultivated by singing hymns and lullabies. The most straightforward songs on NFR! have that morning-light quality: a woman sitting at a keyboard, singing what she needs to say.

But as winning as those moments are, they aren't what makes Lana Del Rey an interesting artist. The power of NFR! emanates from another source: her compulsion to collapse logic, to violate boundaries musically, through imagery and within her storytelling. This is not only about Del Rey's persona as a bad girl to whom bad things are done; her supposed confessions would be nothing more than reality-show fodder if not for the way she and her collaborators construct them. On their own, taken song by song, her lyrics – even in the full flower NFR! represents – often read as unremarkable and derivative. What hooks the listener is the way she enacts her dramas just as the mind replays formative memories, especially painful ones. She repeats herself. She veers into cliché. Her touchstones fall into each other across time. Many people have called NFR! a 1970s throwback, but its songs barely dip into that era's experimental sounds, instead touching down in the baroque-pop 1960s, the cyborg 1980s and the G-Funk 1990s without distinguishing between its reference points. And its lyrics, as always with Del Rey, similarly recombine references, not to make them fresh, exactly — no shout-out to Sylvia Plath can feel new, not since about 1981 – but to put them in our faces as old friends, old adversaries.

Take "Cinnamon Girl," one of the new album's deep cuts. The title's a mildly clever cop from a Neil Young classic, and the first line, "cinnamon in my teeth from your kiss," takes you somewhere. But then? There's a line about different colored pills, alluding to her sweetheart's addiction, and one about her frustration becoming like fire. B-plus poetics. There's some moaning about how no one has "held me without hurting me," and half-formed thoughts about words she cannot speak. Compare this vague non-story to four lines randomly pulled from Mitchell's 1972 song about her then-lover James Taylor's heroin habit, "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire," written when she was five years younger than Del Rey is now: Concrete concentration camp / Bashing in veins for peace / Cold blue steel and sweet fire / Fall into Lady Release.

Mitchell's lyric reads as poetic and incisive. Next to it, Del Rey's feels uncooked. Musically, "Cold Blue Steel" also strikes the listener as much more sophisticated, with its subtle arrangement and a melody that sinuously moves from folk to jazz.

Yet let Del Rey's song sink in, and it offers its own revelations — sensual and emotional, like Mitchell's, but less clearly mediated. The simplicity and directness of "Cinnamon Girl" hits as its leaden rhythm seems to grow more elastic. A syn-drum keeps the narcotized time as a string section puddles around it. Del Rey moans her lyrics in a small voice, almost pleading but also self-soothing. Sometimes she makes a trilling leap that sounds like the squiggle of one of the vintage synths Antonoff employs — a sign of her indebtedness to West Coast hip-hop, whose smudged arrangements and stoned cadences she often assimilates. Sometimes all the song's effects fall away, only to push forward again; there doesn't seem to be much order to the dynamics. The whole effect is slippery, unattached to the process of telling a story. The song feels more like you're in a story, in someone's head at a particularly unsure moment. A great songwriter, as we tend to understand that role, would offer a more coherent view. But for Del Rey, the mash-up of affects and references is the point. It is emotion's actuality.

The principles that direct Del Rey's artistic practice are embedded within a particular cultural lineage — though perhaps it's more accurate to call it a tendency. We can think of this inheritance as one aspect of the American Dream, though not in the usual sense of that phrase. It's more like America's dream life, its psychic swamp, its nocturnal emissions. The 20th century saw the development of a scientific language designed to shed light on this realm, one that is unique to each person but also shared, culturally shaped and individually rearranged. Artists responded, differently every decade, forming a timeline that connects European Surrealism to American horror and noir, free-associative jazz improvisation to the transgressions of post-punk. Lana Del Rey took this lineage to heart as a teen named Lizzy Grant and created a character through which she could explore it. At first, she followed her impulses and landed on clichés: She was a bad, bad, girl, "born to die." But even then, there was power in her commitment. Over time she has developed the ability to step back from her compulsions, and though she still finds power in them — NFR!, like all of her albums, remains a repository of masochistic out-breaths and bad-girl flexes — she has become curious about how this language formed and why it speaks to her.

As virtually everyone who's commented on her work has noted, Del Rey accesses the twin realms of Surrealism and the psychoanalytic most often through their cinematic manifestations, particularly film noir and its latter-day revival, especially within the work of David Lynch. To adopt a noir style is not original, but Del Rey has outdone her rivals in this arena by going deeper into its essence — that phenomenon of slippage that also defines her music. Noir is Surrealism unleashed in the city, amidst its noise and grime and electric-lamp shadows. Like that art movement, it privileges psychic interiority over other aspects of experience. In a film like Edward G. Ulmer's 1945 noir Detour, in which a man kills a woman because she is blackmailing him, but also because he can no longer stand to hear the sound of her voice, the crisis leading up to the murder is depicted as a visceral assault on his senses, the pressure of his situation magnifying everything and eventually leading to disaster. That's just one example. The most powerful scenes in Lynch's films often build to a similar level of disorientation, with characters morphing into monsters for a moment, or being absorbed into rips in the time-space continuum. These baffling scenes affect the viewer because they express the ways stress and a trauma can reconstitute a person's internal life.

It's easy to read the Del Rey's map of the noir landscape, but just as enlightening to consider how her musical precedents set the stage for the work she's doing. West Coast rappers and producers have tread similar ground for decades: A playlist of songs that lay deeply embedded within the Lana Del Rey aesthetic would include Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill A Man," with its insights into the mood of murder, and Warren G's "Regulate," a drifter's tale as redolent of menace and magic as any of Lynch's scenes. Those sources linger like friendly ghosts on NFR!, as do Kim Gordon's explorations of the abject in Sonic Youth – the tenderness she brought to Karen Carpenter's story in "Tunic" prefigured Del Rey's faded warmth in "How To Disappear." If this album signals the peak of Del Rey's singer-songwriter period, it's worth remembering that her first debts were to hip-hop and post-punk, and noticing how crucial those sources remain even as she nods more noticeably toward Laurel Canyon.

"Beloved imagination," Andre Breton wrote in the manifesto that, in 1924, announced Surrealism's intent, "what I like most in you is your unsparing quality." We live in a time when the interpretation of dreams has given way to psychopharmaceutical rebalancing, and when the neatening effects of self-actualization are generally considered more rewarding than the dwelling on the psyche's dark expanse. Recently, though, in the music of young artists like Billie Eilish and Logic, in the podcast-driven true crime craze and the work of women auteurs like Joanna Hogg and writers like Elena Ferrante, that expanse has again come into view. Lana Del Rey began her inquiries there. She is a creature born of trauma, possibly literally, if you take Lizzy Grant's teenage experiences with addiction into account; but certainly aesthetically. At its best, her music absorbs and disorients. It calls for interpretation, but in the most personal sense of the word – it wants to be crazily loved or angrily hated. It wants to trigger you.

NFR! still allows for that seductive uneasiness. It surfaces in the long outro to "Venice Bitch," a psychotropic soak that buries the chorus of the bubblegum drug trip "Crimson and Clover" in reverb, guitar noodling and Del Rey's voice murmuring a line that smudges the line between tenderness and obsession: If you weren't mine, I'd be jealous of your love. Even as she learns the comforts of coherence and closure, Del Rey still knows there's something to learn from the weird and the wrong.

Lana Del Rey Lives In America's Messy Subconscious. By  Ann Powers. NPR, September 4, 2019.

Lana Del Rey has enjoyed a healthy relationship with most music critics since last week’s release of her latest album, “Norman F— Rockwell,” which many hailed unconditionally as her most sophisticated work yet.

Except NPR writer (and former L.A. Times critic) Ann Powers, whose in-depth review sparked outrage from the beloved pop star and her fans on social media.

Del Rey did not mince words on Twitter Wednesday night when she replied to Powers’ post sharing her provocative article, which called Del Rey’s lyrics “uncooked” in comparison to those of artists such as Joni Mitchell and analyzed Del Rey’s reliance on a “persona as a bad girl to whom bad things are done.”

“Here’s a little sidenote on your piece,” the “Venice Bitch” singer wrote. “I don’t even relate to one observation you made about the music. There’s nothing uncooked about me. To write about me is nothing like it is to be with me. Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never will.”

Here’s a little sidenote on your piece – I don’t even relate to one observation you made about the music. There’s nothing uncooked about me. To write about me is nothing like it is to be with me. Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never will.

— Lana Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) September 5, 2019

“So don’t call yourself a fan like you did in the article and don’t count your editor one either,” Del Rey added in another tweet. “I may never have made bold political or cultural statements before — because my gift is the warmth I live my life with and the self reflection I share generously.”

In a statement to The Times Thursday, Powers defended her thoughts on the album and said she felt no ill will toward Del Rey, wishing her continued success.

“It is a critic’s responsibility to be thoughtful and honest to herself in responding to artists’ work, and an artist’s prerogative to disagree with that response,” Powers said. “I respect Lana Del Rey and hope that her music continues to receive the passionate appreciation it has received for years.”

Powers’ deep dive lauded the album as containing “Del Rey’s most artfully constructed narratives, extending the arc of apparent self-realization also evident in widely framed narratives that stood out on her previous album.” But among the praise, Powers also noted the music’s “needy,” “disempowered,” “self-sabotaging” and “unwoke” tones.

Revered as a pioneering critic, Powers has weathered plenty of controversy sparked by her scintillating criticism, particularly during her stint at The Times. The tweet sharing her Del Rey analysis was flooded with support from fellow critics, along with dismissive notes from Del Rey’s admirers. Critic Jessica Hopper noted Powers’ long history of championing female artists and leading the charge to take their work seriously.

Powers responded to the brewing backlash in a follow-up post Thursday morning, writing: “I really appreciate all the support today. I still think NFR is a deeply compelling, crucial album and hope everyone spends time listening to it (and goes back to Ultraviolence and Lust For Life too).”

Lana Del Rey hated NPR’s album review. But critic Ann Powers stands her ground. By Christie Carras.  Los Angeles Times , September 5, 2019.

In 2012, the same summer that Lana Del Rey released her debut album Born To Die, my best friend fell in love with a terrible man. “Doesn’t he look just like my guy?” she asked enthusiastically as we watched a tattooed hand clasp around Del Rey’s neck in the music video for the album’s title track. After several weeks of hearing this friend complain about her man’s shitty stick-and-poke tattoos, his stupid hair, his love, his abuse – her hollow promises that she’d leave him after each violent fight – I felt repulsed by my friend’s eager identification. As a friend, I resented whatever drove these women back into the etiolated arms of their awful, spirit-sapping men. As a lesbian, who has the utmost privilege of neither loving nor desiring men, I was exasperated. My anger began to concentrate itself on my friend (for goodness sake, just dump him) rather than the man who kept convincing her to return. As she withdrew into her vitiating relationship, myself and the rest of her friends grew weary and distant. At the end of the summer, all she had left was Lana Del Rey.

Del Rey’s early critics accused her of pornographising, glamourising, romanticising – all adjectives that were popular on Tumblr at the time – female subjugation and abuse. The pop star’s sexual self-presentation outright disturbed many listeners in a year when female empowerment, resilience and self-celebration seemed to be one of pop’s central concerns. Nicki Minaj likened herself to a starship who was “made to fly”, Rihanna told us to “shine bright like a diamond”, Kelly Clarkson advised “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. As a result, Del Rey’s accounts of late heterosexuality in a late capitalist world were especially abhorred. “You’re no good for me, but baby I want you,” she tersely expressed, relaying an all too common heterosexual experience, while her peers sang about overcoming nonsensical desire, and converting their bad experiences into resilience. In pop, you don’t often hear women’s pain – you hear how they overcame it. 

It’s part of (and here’s a couple of eyerolls coming your way) neoliberal postfeminism, the kind that was birthed in the 1990s by conservative feminism, most priniciply by Naomi Wolf’s 1993 work Fire With Fire which argued that women needed to embrace their “power feminism”. It meant that women’s liberation was their own problem – and it came down to their lifestyle choices, the views they espouse, the way they presented themselves to the world – an idea that’s been internalised by pop music today. We need our female pop stars to be autonomous, self-surveilling; we need them to take a stand. The onus is on them to change the world.

“Even when Del Rey offers something that could be read as a critique (‘This is what makes us girls / We don’t stick together ‘cause we put our love first’), she asks that we make no effort to change, escape, or transcend the way things are (‘Don’t cry about it / Don’t cry about it’),” Pitchfork wrote disparagingly in their review of her debut album.

Today, many of us still wait in anticipation for Del Rey’s satisfying ‘I don’t need a man’ moment. Personally, I hope it never comes. Unlike any other popstar, Lana Del Rey explains heterosexuality to me, at a time when loving men and being straight has never been more unfashionable. We want Del Rey to be empowered; to unlove men, because expressions of post-heterosexual empowerment deny the struggles and circumstances of patriarchally constructed heterosexuality. Instead of asking why our friends don’t leave their men, we should question what makes heterosexuality so sexy – or, rather, why it causes a morbid dependence. “Male dominance is sexual. Meaning: men in particular, if not men alone, sexualise hierarchy,” Catherine MacKinnon wrote in 1989’s Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. To accuse Del Rey of “glamourising subservience” puts the blame on Del Rey rather than the men who have forged their own dominance. “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” is another Gender Theory 101 slogan that comes to mind as I watch Del Rey pinned to a pinball machine by an older man in the music video for 2012’s “Ride”.

Nowadays, Del Rey is no longer oblivious to the pressure to cohere to an empowerment narrative. For instance, she no longer sings the lyric “he hit me and it felt like a kiss” from Ultraviolence’s title track, as borrowed from the Crystals. On her latest, Norman Fucking Rockwell, she renegotiates the terms of her own subjugation. “God damn, man-child,” she sings on the opening track, ridiculing her man while loving him and sticking by him. It taps into the leading question of straight women’s lives today: men are stupid and embarrassing, so why do I love them?

Elsewhere on Norman Fucking Rockwell, in what is quite frankly a genius move, Del Rey’s cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” could be read as a gender reversal of many of her songs, most notably “Blue Jeans”. As she waited for her liquor-breathed man all day on the 2012 single, on “Doin’ Time” she repeats late Sublime frontman Bradley Nowell’s similar anguishes: “Me and my girl we got this relationship / I love her so bad but she treats me like shit / Locked down like a penitentiary.” She further explores the male position on “Mariner’s Apartment Complex”, as she imagines herself tending to a feminised, enervated lover; assuring him “I’m your man”. Many listeners consider this Del Rey’s most emboldened moment – but in her world, she’s only free to roam within the confines of heterosexuality. The closest she gets to empowerment is trying her hand at male nurturance. It’s an image that many heterosexual women love: their man becoming small and soft and dependent in their arms. “Dominance eroticised defines the imperatives of its masculinity, submission eroticised defines its femininity,” says Mackinnon.

None of this is to say that what Del Rey is doing is truly radical. It isn’t. Hemingway, Nabokov, and Bukowski fill her bookshelves, not Mackinnon, Dworkin, and Butler. Still, I wonder if critics would still refer to her as ‘dull’ and a ‘one-trick pony’ if her music veered away from an addiction to heterosexuality (what alternative are straight women really presented with today?). What critics miss about Del Rey is that her music is simply a way to survive. She turns everything around her into a carnivalesque surface as a coping mechanism. The beach becomes an object. She loves the pier because of its rust and tack. She loves kitsch because it exposes an object’s own objecthood, the way heterosexual men and women turn one another into symbols of sexual difference in order to keep themselves turned on.

It’s why even when your friend assures you over and over that she’ll leave him, she will almost always return. Here’s the rub: you can’t bend desire. Unfortunately, empowerment and unshackling from men only really exists in a Lizzo song. In real life, we mustn’t ignore the realities which Del Rey exposes.

Lana Del Rey explains heterosexuality to me. By Emma Madden. Dazed , September 6, 2019. 

Where is Lana Del Rey from? What a boring question. It’s been asked more than answered; her various origin stories crosshatch the sky – like chemtrails. When she wears an oversized LOCALS ONLY jacket on a Long Beach port terminal in the recent video for her elegiac single ‘The Greatest’ from her latest album, Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019), the phrase shimmers over her. When she sings that she’s ‘well qualified to represent the LBC’ in her cover of Sublime’s ‘Doin’ Time’ (1997), she only emphasizes her lack of qualifications to represent anywhere. (After all, she was 12 when the song came out.) She is American, surely. But the America she lives in seems different than ours. Over six albums, she has skimmed across Hollywood, New York, Brooklyn, Las Vegas, Miami, Hyannis, the desert, the prairie, all of the states and the Garden of Eden. She swipes through landscapes as if they were boys online, horny and bored. No one would describe her as grounded. In most of her live performances, her body swirls, soft steps along invisible fault lines, rotating on a different axis, never quite on beat. Her inability to look comfortable in her body makes for an ambivalent eroticism, a desire dizzy with intoxicating self-consciousness. All she wanted was to keep wanting.

Del Rey pledged allegiance to wide roads, fast cars, open borders, dead presidents. But now, like so many who were born nowhere, she’s moved to LA, just before fire season. Many people are saying her new album is about the end of America, but I think it’s about living in a place that has already ended, living in its memory and the carcass, which is to say: America’s been dead a long time. The apocalypse happened hundreds of years ago. How does it feel to live in a place that is also an idea of a place that is also the emptiness the place left behind? That psychedelic mix of physical decentralization and filmic over-representation makes LA feel like a ghost town full of people. What’s funny is, when you write about how it feels to live in LA, you are also writing about how it feels to be a girl.

Like LA, Lana Del Rey, the stage name of Elizabeth Grant, is a project of quotation. I don’t think there’s a single song on the new record that doesn’t borrow phrases or riffs from someone else. Her lyric cosmology includes The Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, The Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, countless girl groups, and so on, and so on. It’s beyond pastiche; it’s library-like, almost career-as-archive. Del Rey remembers and memorializes while simultaneously erasing authorship and context: ‘I heard the war was over, if you really choose,’ she intones in ‘California’, converting John Lennon’s anti-war slogan into a woozy rumour. ‘But sometimes, girls just want to have fun/ The poetry inside me is warm like a gun,’ she lilts in ‘Bartender’, merging Cyndi Lauper and George Harrison in such an unexpected combination that both become almost unrecognizable. There’s that disembodiment again. Even when she’s singing original lyrics, they seem to reverberate with familiarity, as if they had been lifted from some collective cadence and content. Some have called this cliché or inauthentic. But, to me, she offers a more profound, compassionate definition of cliché: a thing we all know has happened many times but can’t tell you where or how or by whom. Cliché against private property! If anonymous was a woman, cliché might be her sister. This ambivalence about authorship, the inability to claim an original self, and yet the need to speak one’s subjectivity anyway – to speak through collage – also has its own precedent. Camp has always venerated the soap opera and other mass-produced narratives as the intimate material of side-lined lives.

Now Del Rey has accumulated enough material to start repeating herself, endlessly recycling fragments of her own mythology. She doesn’t just reference past albums to demonstrate narrative development. The media insists that she has grown in this album, matured into a more serious, genuine, joyful, empowered or articulate artist. To me, this has always seemed conservative. Don’t we stan a queen of inertia, stasis, horizontality? She’s never promised action: ‘We go so fast, we don’t move,’ Del Rey croons in ‘Love Song’. She emerged like this, empty and whole. Unlike most celebrities, singers and actors, her messaging has not dramatically changed since Donald Trump became president, except for a few minor tweaks. (She stopped performing in front of the American flag in 2017.) Instead, we have to sit with what hasn’t changed under the current president – what the US was before him, and what it will remain after; all that Trump merely hears, repeats and bellows back to us.

In Norman Fucking Rockwell!, she repeatedly refers to the titles of her songs within other songs. (She quotes ‘Venice Bitch’ in ‘Mariner’s Apartment Complex’, ‘Norman Rockwell’ in ‘Venice Bitch’.) Musical phrases recur across the album itself, a shiver of déjà vu. This repetitive tendency is sometimes somnolent, mantra-like and narcotic (‘Dream a little dream of me,’ she sings in ‘Fuck It I Love You’, quoting Ella Fitzgerald; ‘Dream a dream, here’s a scene,’ she sings in ‘Love Song’, a few minutes later). Sometimes, it feels lazy in the best way, lazy like the morning after sex, lazy like LA when you could still afford rent with a three-day work week. When I saw her in concert this summer, she sang the entirety of her 2014 anthem ‘Pretty When You Cry’ while lying completely flat on the floor. It looked like the stage was empty; a live stream broadcast her recline on huge screens around us. We stared at nothing, while she took a rest. I wept with exultant identification.

Sometimes her repetitions glitch and stutter, like in the video for her psych rock magnum opus ‘Venice Bitch’, which replays found freeway footage until you almost feel like you might be going somewhere. In Sigmund Freud’s 1914 essay ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’, the psychoanalyst described ‘a compulsion to repeat’ which takes the place of memory. Instead of remembering the past, a patient unconsciously re-creates its conditions. By doing the same thing again and again, we both stave off threatening new experiences and try to drive in reverse, so to speak, moving against the current towards what the death drive ultimately craves: a return to the selfless, pre-birth state. This echoes Del Rey’s once very public wish to be ‘dead already’, which is not the same thing as wanting to die.

In Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, the protagonist, Maria, sleeps or circles the LA freeways all day. She isn’t going anywhere. ‘Venice Bitch’ – all nine minutes and 47 seconds of it – is a song destined for these drives, quoting Tommy James and the Shondells’ 1968 song ‘Crimson and Clover’: ‘Over and over, over and over, over and over’. The most famous line of Didion’s novel – ‘I know what nothing means and keep on playing’ – is a precursor to what will be the most famous line of Norman Fucking Rockwell!: ‘I miss doing nothing the most of all.’ Nothingness is something we do, something we know, day after day.

In the album’s transcendent closer, ‘hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it’, Del Rey puts her sadness back in context. It can only be communicated in the negative: ‘Don’t ask if I’m happy, you know that I’m not / But at best, I can say I’m not sad.’ She is not more than anything else. This ‘24/7 Sylvia Plath’ blinks, sputters, glows. In a way, Del Rey has always been operating at an apocalyptic register because she has always been writing about heartbreak, all the ends of the world we keep in our bedrooms. She has been called girlish because young girls are known for intercepting the highest frequency of feeling, for recognizing the mythological implications of supposedly banal personal dramas. Maybe that’s what she’s always cared about, and all that Americana is only a means to The End – Hollywood style.

The Myth of Lana Del Rey Becomes Real. By Audrey Wollen. Frieze, September 9, 2019.

Who has Elizabeth Grant become in the near-decade since rechristening herself as the singer Lana Del Rey? Internet phenomenon turned Saturday Night Live laughing stock, her sustained popularity has perplexed those who would prefer to see brilliant women fail. She has defied critics and graduated summa cum laude from the pop pantheon into the hall of legends; based on her new album, she deserves comparison to the heavyweights of American mythology like Joni Mitchell and Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway and Bob Dylan, Silvia Plath and Carole King.

Norman Fucking Rockwell! slaps in all the right places. Del Rey’s latest album is a culmination of the artist’s last four records, a singularity that allows her various personae to converge into higher form. A Lolita wannabe, a saturnine seductress, a beach bum, an Americana poet, an avatar of angst — Del Rey amalgamates these versions of herself into a higher form, becoming one of Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon.

In 2012, Del Rey’s debut album, Born to Die, delivered a complex satire of American neediness far ahead of its time, which combined babylike vocals with crushing instrumentals and lyrics rife with literary references to everything from Walt Whitman to Vladimir Nabokov. The net effect was like listening to a toddler recite passages from The Bell Jar: mesmerizing and depressing. Over the years, Del Rey has introduced more of her own voice, which is naturally lower and velvety — something like a counterpart to Johnny Cash’s gravely bass. In albums like Ultraviolence (2014) and Honeymoon (2015), she toyed with the concept of a torch song, producing subversive anti-anthems about romance’s entanglement with death. Lust for Life (2017) extended these motifs into an exploration of patriotism. That same year, Del Rey stopped performing in front of the American flag, viewing it as “inappropriate” for the Trump era. She changed her backdrop to a screen of static instead, a multifaceted commentary on the “white noise” of American politics and the dissociative phenomenon of living in the world’s wealthiest country, which also happens to jail children.

Del Rey’s most recent album, produced by Jack Antonoff, takes its name from one of America’s greatest propagandists, Norman Rockwell, who spent 50 years advocating presidential policies from his pulpit as an illustrator for the weekly Saturday Evening Post. Although his paintings became monolithic postwar signifiers of what the American Dream should look like, it’s important to recognize that Rockwell also advocated for progressive ideals like social welfare and civil rights. But subsequent generations of artist have not been particularly kind to the artist, parodying his work as a critique of an America that never quite lived up to the dream it was selling. The fucking between Norman and Rockwell is a symbol of Del Rey wedging herself into that lineage. And instead of adopting one of the artist’s paintings for her album cover, she references Roy Lichtenstein’s work. Del Rey poses on a boat with one hand around Duke Nicholson (grandson of the actor Jack Nicholson) and the other outstretched to the viewer. An American flag waves in the background just below the initials NFR!, which are illustrated inside a comic book action bubble.

The mixing of artistic references is confusing if also apropos for the album. Lichtenstein was Rockwell’s contemporary, and he often painted damsels in distress — some in the midst of drowning beneath the ocean waves. Likewise, Del Rey’s music indulges in melodramatic archetypes of women by amplifying concepts of femininity and futility to the point of high camp. “Fuck it I love you,” exemplifies the form, spilling into a delirious chorus of expletive-riddled adorations after imploring listeners to “dream a little dream of me, make me into something sweet.”

Here, Del Rey also manages to balance delirium with an eloquent critique of romance. “The poetry inside of me is warm like a gun,” she sings on the ambitious “Bartender” track, referencing The Beatles. “But that cherry coke you serve is fine, and our love’s sweet enough on the vine.” Elsewhere, she’s gloriously despondent. “Fresh out of fucks forever,” she sings on the prodigious “Venice Bitch” song. “Ice cream, ice queen, I dream in jeans and leather.”

Del Rey’s lyrics combine narratorial precision with a masterful turn-of-phrase comparable to that of country singer Kacey Musgraves. “You took my sadness out of context at the mariner’s apartment complex,” she sings on the album’s second track, “I ain’t no candle in the wind.”

She is rejecting more than the male gaze; she is refuting the myth of male exceptionalism. “God damn, man child,” she asserts on the album’s eponymous first song. “Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news.” “You act like a kid even though you stand six-foot-two,” she later remarks, “You talk to the walls when the party gets bored of you.”

When Born to Die debuted seven years ago, Lana del Rey refined the vainglorious qualities of American culture into music. She appeared on that album’s cover looking like the California cousin of a vampire from True Blood: powerful, seductive, cruel. The music followed suit. By comparison, Norman Fucking Rockwell! is entirely human and painful in its complex depictions of romantic fatigue and emotional gaslighting. The new album ends with the song “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have — but I have it” wherein Del Rey calls herself a “modern-day woman with a weak constitution” witnessing “a new revolution” that’s “born of confusion and quiet collusion.” But by the end of the song, she breaks through the refrain, whispering in falsetto: “I have it, I have.” And yes, she does.

Lana Del Rey and the Gaslighting of American Culture. By Zachary Small. Hyperallergic ,  September 10, 2019.