From Cassie Howard, from ‘Euphoria’, to Carrie Bradshaw: What does it mean to dress for the world or for the same?
By Alba Correa
Euphoria fans are used to suffering.When we saw in the third episode Cassie Howard(Sydney Sweeney) wake up every day at four in the morning to shower, comb and make up, and create looks worthy of pageant of southern beauty, all to achieve the attention and validation of Nate Jacobs(Jacob Elordi), we anticipate the painful fall that was coming.In fact, this Cassie ritual so expensive(in energy and money) has led us again to a question in which we have been circling cyclically as if it were a roundabout: the dilemma of when you dress for yourself and when forThe others, to which there is adding the question where it begins and where freedom ends in fashion.
The answer to these questions is not simple.It implies both commercial and cultural factors, anchored in a heteropatriarchal society that has been shaping the norm of what is or not a body and a valid female dress.However, and attending us to Cassie's example in Euphoria, the brilliant director of Hoidi Bivens costumes already advanced a track in her interview for Vogue.com."Cassie has an idea of femininity within the traditional lines of what is understood as feminine," Bivens explained.“He leans towards archetypes that we have already seen before, be it Brigitte Bardot or Claudia Schiffer or any other that can find in a magazine and think that it is beautiful.(...) I think Cassie's garments are a costume.He is still trying to discover how to present himself to the world and I think much of what he does and how he dresses he reveals his desire to be loved ".
Pese a que la moda y la vestimenta actúan como herramientas de comunicación e integración en un entorno social, lo que dificulta el tan repetido mantra de vestirse para una misma(siempre nos vestimos sabiendo que seremos leídos o decodificados por terceros), la secuencia en la que Cassie parece tornar en enfermizo su ritual de belleza activó sensaciones conocidas para Noemí López Trujillo, periodista especializada en feminismos y temas LGTB+."I felt very questioned by Cassie's sequence," he acknowledges.“I do not think it is a problem to dress to like others or others, I understand that there may be there a component of excitation or fun when it does not become a demand.I will not judge her to get up at four in the morning, but I see that she does not feel good with that process and I think there is the key."
The journalist finds the way in which the adolescent seeks validation over allowing her own identity to emerge through garments.“This is very pernicious because as soon as her friends tell her in the bathroom that comes very rare dressed she feels fragile and insecure. Sabe que se produce para la validación ajena y se siente ridícula", opina la periodista.“It is a lack of lack of control about who you are and about your body.I felt identified because I have done it many times. Intentar acertar con lo que le gusta a otra persona es como crear una ficción sobre ti misma".
It is common for these coercive and macho applications for clothing and makeup to blame the woman who adopts them, and even demonic the elements themselves, before opening a critical reflection in terms of gender on the use that patriarchal capitalism lesgives fashion and beauty as tools of female domination. “La lectura no es ‘deja de maquillarte’, la pregunta que hay que hacer es ‘¿te sientes bien, te sientes identificada así?’", sugiere López Trujillo.“Female production is penalized, but at the same time the patriarchal society demands that you adjust to its standards."
In Cassie Howard's antipodes we could find another fictional character who also lives in a very intense way the relationship with her dressing room: the emblematic Carrie Bradshaw.The way in which fashion is for the writer a source of fun is one of the most characteristic features of her personality, and in and just like that, reboot of the original series that can also be seen in HBO Max that takes place whenThe protagonists are in the middle of the fifties, Bradshaw seems to feel freer than ever, reaching the hyperbole of their own style.
Alexandra Lores, la escritora que analiza la moda y otros fenómenos pop en su newsletter Love & Rockets, se sirve de las renovadas mezclas del armario de Carrie Bradshaw para reflexionar sobre moda, identidad y la voluntad de gustar a los demás. “Estamos en un momento en el que se reivindica una moda que deja mucha piel al descubierto [tendencia 2KY] y ante el regreso de unas exigencias de delgadez que podrían interesar más a la mirada masculina heteropatriarcal", explica Lores.“However there is a fashion space where this look does not have much validity.In its least mainstream fashion is art, design, playing with patterns, and it is less attractive to the male look that, in the end, is something simple about fashion.Someone who enjoys fashion tends to get away from that because he wants to try new patterns and forms, less pop aesthetics, more extravagant. Es una forma de apropiarse de la diversión, y es lo que hace Carrie, una señora que disfruta de la moda".
Neither Carrie is free to see his style influenced by the pressure of the validation of others someday, nor Cassie condemned to ever achieve the ability to express his identity through his closet.They are processes in which almost all have ever been involved.In and Just Like That there is a time when Carrie explains to Charlotte how her daughter Lily is experiencing and looking at the garments of her monumental dressing room.The gesture of dressing is one loaded with power and as Cassie as Carrie knows.It is better summarized by Alexandra Lores: “Fashion has the power to change things, to generate suspicion, to generate love, to change the status of things. Es una herramienta política y una manera de significarse en el mundo".
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