It’s been over a month and I cannot stop thinking about Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh’s Oscar gown shoulder strap gaps. Academy Awards fashion this year favored silhouettes so highly structured they were nearly architectural. Cases in point: Sandra Hüller’s winged Schiaparelli, Ariana Grande’s blown bubble Giambattista Valli, or Kirsten Wiig’s lasagna edged Valentino. It was Pugh’s silver Del Core and Blunt’s Schiaparelli that captivated me, though, largely because of the intellectual uncertainty evoked by the gowns.
The Oscars are in many ways peak aesthetic simulation, a matrix of glamour; the night when people who professionally pretend to be other people pretend to be the character of “themselves.” So I found it fascinating that Pugh and Blunt selected gowns that pointed so directly to the artifice of the event and of their own invented personas.
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The day after the Awards, Vanity Fair ran a piece titled “Emily Blunt’s Stylist Explains Her Dress’s Floating Shoulders at the Oscars 2024” in which Emily Blunt’s stylist certainly does not explain the floating shoulders of Blunt’s dress. “At the end of the day, she looked beautiful. It’s such a beautiful dress,” Jessica Paster “explains.” Um. Okay. When asked if perhaps Pugh and Blunt’s gowns were intended to evoke themes (something vaguely atomic, I guess) from Oppenheimer, Paster doubled down:
“People are overthinking it.”
So was Elsa Schiaparelli, namesake of the fashion house from which Blunt’s gown was designed. I’ve written before about Schiaparelli’s collaborations with Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau and her subversive, surreal designs. She studied philosophy at the University of Rome and scandalized her family by publishing a collection of (kind of) erotic poetry. Schiaparelli was all about fashion as an intellectual pursuit, a way to think through the world.
“In difficult times,” the designer stated, “fashion is always outrageous.”
I think it’s fair, then, to think through the shoulder strap gap and what it means to conjure uncertainty — to wear a gown in a mainstream award ceremony that evokes in viewers the questions of a “cursed images.” Art Land Magazine explains,
“Consensus has come to define a cursed image as any image that can incite the five Ws in a viewer’s curiosity: who, what, when, where and why. When the clarity of information like these key details are lacking from an image, it is inevitable, there are more questions than answers.”
This is the exact opposite of current monocultural trends toward things like Stanley cups and Carhartt accessories. These are the familiar items of the blue-collar laborer. Stanley, after all, is a steel company.
Personally, I’ve known Carhartt since the eighties, back when it wasn’t popular but my dad wore it because we lived in Iowa and that’s what you wore if you had a job that required physical labor in the winter. My dad was a manager for Jiffy Lube, which meant he went in the bays if somebody didn’t show up to work. The earliest smell I can remember smelling is automotive oil. Like Stanley and Carhartt, it is familiar, homelike. The inverse of the unhomelike, or, rather, unheimlich Schiaparelli floating shoulder.
The term “the uncanny” was coined by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny, although it is certainly Sigmund Freud 1919 essay The Uncanny which is the most complete consideration of the topic. I love this essay because it discusses the uncanny as an aesthetic category, not simply a psychological phenomenon.
“Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet which dance by themselves.”
These are all items on Freud’s list of things that illicit an emotional response based in fear or revulsion. While traditional discussions of aesthetics had overwhelmingly considered beauty as the primary driver of emotional response, Freud points to the undeniability of what Julia Kristeva will later call “the powers of horror.”
In short, Freud defines the uncanny as that which “applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open.” While the canny/homelike/Heimlich (Stanley) is out in the open and familiar, the uncanny/unhomelike/unheimlich (floating shoulder straps) is out in the open but unfamiliar. It is something we remember, but we cannot place why we remember it. It points to a memory that has been “hidden away” and now cannot cohere with one’s schema of reality.
Uncanniness was the first thing I thought of when I read
’s post this week, which included the following excerpt from Humanity Erased: Are Veneers Ruining Hollywood by Haaniyah Angus:“In a study examining 100 years of plastic surgery on the silver screen, researchers concluded peaks of plastic surgery were most noticed during the 1930s, 1960s, and 2000s. These coincided with the start of new cinematic eras—Golden Age, New Hollywood, and Contemporary. It might be too early to declare a new cinematic era, but film and television have been inundated over the past twenty years with new technologies. HD cameras, in particular, are unforgiving of heavy make-up, dust, or skin textures that can be picked up on screen. This created a challenge for actors and makeup artists alike to keep up with the facade of perfection. In 2010, New York Magazine reported on how the increase in botox impacted actors’ craft and led to stilted performances. Today, the latest culprits are veneers and fillers, which can create an almost uncanny valley feeling. Ironically, this has become a trend at the same time as AI and its smoothly polished attempts at recreating art and films, not to mention deepfakes. Nothing looks quite right anymore, and nobody can trust the media we’re looking at.”
Later in this piece, Angus makes an observation that seems a lot closer to the manner in which Oppenheimer might have influenced Blunt and Pugh’s Oscar aesthetics,
“It’s clear that audiences experience temporal distortion when watching period pieces with actors who have lip fillers and stiff foreheads.”
Temporal distortion and a sense that irreality is now embedded within the texture of reality itself are hallmarks of our current moment on multiple levels. We can no longer rely on our senses to deduce visual truth, nor can the veracity of traditional outlets of authority such as newspapers or politicians be trusted.
It makes a lot of sense to me that as our reality becomes less real, familiar and cozy items like the Stanley cup become popular. Stanley and Carhartt are not just familiar, but trusted. That shit is still around because it works. I think my dad might still be wearing his Carhartt from 1989. And on the other end of the spectrum: a shoulder strap that isn’t holding anything up at all.
Another hallmark of the uncanny experience is that it has little utility beyond its function as that which points to the return of the repressed. Uncanniness is a warning — a tear in the metatextual fabric of the universe — that reminds us all is not remembered and all in not right. I’ve been thinking about what it means when fashion does this since Viktor & Rolf’s spring 2023 Paris fashion week show, in which models were sent down the runway in gowns that were upside down, entirely obscuring the face Samara-from-The Ring style. Other gowns hovered perceptibly off the body, reminiscent of
’s master class short story “Real Women Have Bodies” in which a mysterious disease causes women to fade away, later to be discovered as intangible bodies sewn into prom or quinceañera gowns.Unlike Blunt’s stylist, Rolf Snoeren (half the titular avant-garde design duo) knew exactly why his gowns were so creepy, “There is a disconnect between what we see, and the physicality of the product,” said Snoeren. “The information that comes at us, going from making banana cake to so many people being killed in Ukraine.”
It is easy to argue that fashion doesn’t matter, but in a banana cake world where everybody just wants to hydrate with their Stanley and Be Okay, I admire fashion that’s using the medium to be the message. Yesterday,
posted an excerpt from A Year with Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno to her Instagram account,"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit—all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."
At the end of The Sandman (the E.T.A. Hoffmann short story Freud uses to illustrate his points in The Uncanny), all the men in town are paranoid that their sweethearts might actually be automata sent to trick them into inauthentic love.
“A pernicious mistrust of human figures in general had begun to creep in,” Hoffman writes. “Many lovers, to be quite convinced that they were not enamored of wooden dolls, would request their mistresses to sing and dance a little out of time.”
In the end, it is the “sound of failure,” the veracity of “sing[ing] and danc[ing] out of time” that comforts a town terrified by an overwhelming sense that nothing can be trusted. In the end, the reality is the glitch.
My Camp rec of the week is Viktor & Rolf’s 2013 book, Fairy Tales. “We always play with scale and proportion, creating conceptual and surreal glamour,” the designer/authors explain. “The surreal element, the sense of escapism can also be found in the enchanting world of our fairy tales.” Also, this book has a disco hedgehog.