Everyday People

Two weeks ago, an Italian court cleared Amanda Knox of all charges in the 2007 Meredith Kercher murder. Knox spent four years fighting the Italian legal system, living proof that no study abroad program sufficiently prepares you for the possibility of your roommate getting murdered in uncertain circumstances. As the case played itself out, the American, British, and Italian media doled out Knox in all-too-familiar female archetypes: naïve girl next door, manipulative femme fatale, Satan-worshipping she-devil.

The prosecution’s case rested on the sensationalism inspired by this last stereotype. Precious little evidence conclusively linked Knox, or her co-defendant and ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, to Kercher’s death. However, the time of the murder (the night after Halloween), combined with Knox’s calm demeanor following Kercher’s death, made Knox guilty enough for the police and court in Perugia.

Amanda Knox (Radar Online)

In the doubling back of cultural and gender stereotypes, one description of Knox during the whole process speaks the loudest. Nina Burliegh describes Knox as a “cipher” in her L.A. Times article. The handy dictionary on my computer - New Oxford American Dictionary - defines a ‘cipher’ as a code, implicitly waiting for a solution; it can also mean a “zero,” a person who “seems to have no will of their own.”  In both definitions, “cipher” reduces Knox’s agency, pointing the fact that legal defendants, particularly female defendants, become a mess of mixed images. Simple readings, intended to reconcile these conflicting interpretations, further complicate things as they coalesce - sometimes before the defendant receives a court date, much less takes the stand.

With this reading strategy in mind, I see traces of the Patty Hearst trial. Different era, different crime and radically different circumstances, Hearst and Knox nonetheless merge together for me. In their pictures walking to court, I feel like they could even be the same person.

Patrica Hearst and Amanda Knox led to their respective trials (Corbis, AP)

In 1974, the Sybionese Liberation Army (SLA), a leftist radical militant group, kidnapped Patricia Hearst (granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst) from her apartment in Berkeley. During the period she spent with the SLA, they released a series of audio tapes that wound up in the mailboxes of major media outlets. Each tape chronicled Hearst’s transformation from captive to participant in the group’s militant actions, each word she spoke leading her closer to her conviction in 1976.

"Foxy Knoxy" (Everything Oprah)

Hearst's parents attempted a counter-narrative: Patty as normal, healthy white girl with a normal, healthy upbringing. The Hearst's released a series of family photographs to strengthen this reading, hoping to rally public support behind Patty, rather than let Patty's statements on the SLA audio tapes "speak" for her. Similarly, Knox's family famously enlisted a PR agency to handle the publicity for Knox's defense, a move credited with keeping Knox's plight fresh in everyone's mind. A photograph of a younger Knox in her soccer uniform surfaced, attempting to clear the negative connotations associated with "Foxy Knoxy," a nickname from Knox's childhood soccer team that the British media employed in its portrayal of Knox as a hyper-sexualized and unstable femme fatale.

Hearst's first communion (PBS)

Taken side by side, these two photographs locate their subjects within prevailing notions of "normal" American girlhood. However, the very fact that these images were mobilized contradict their intended purpose; in attesting to these women's average-ness, don't they accomplish the exact opposite? Riffing on the title of Shana Alexander's book on the Hearst trial, Anyone's Daughter, legal historian Nancy Isenberg states, "Hearst also can be seen not to represent anyone's daughter at all because she had no discursive identity until she was kidnapped."("Not 'Anyone's Daughter': Patty Hearst and the Postmodern Legal Subject") Likewise, Knox isn't "anyone's daughter"; rather, her position at the center of a widely hyped trial with an attentive audience in three countries suggests otherwise.

Representing Hearst and Knox as "normal" reveals the enormous amount of work that race, gender, and class play in creating this label. The success of both Hearst's and Knox's public relations campaigns rely on the viewer's willingness to read these white, wealthy females as someone that anyone might know in their day to day life.

Whether or not these women started off normally, their experiences profoundly changed them. Representations that stress their normal-ness end up erasing this experience, reaching back to a moment that's reconstructed as familiar and commonplace. In the process, these women lose agency and dimension, becoming flat surfaces pasted over by images, like in a scrapbook.

Login User ID Password

I have two tumblrs, a twitter, and a blogspot, and I think that half the time I spend on these social media sites is devoted to figuring out the different ways they communicate online presence, and the form this impression takes.

Social media rolls consumer generated art and self-promotion into one package. Users pick fonts, templates, colors, profile pictures, write bios, decide on layout, and so on. These tools make the business of promotion and the business of expression synonymous - not to say that the two weren't intertwined in the first place. Some sites appear organic; others more calculated. All, however, bet the identity of their various users against one another in the larger web of interconnected profiles and links, mobilizing the internet traffic necessary to a site's success.

People create something using readily available tools, i.e. the boxes, buttons, and code that lie beneath the sheen of the interface. However, I can't help but think about the underlying structure, namely, the currency signs that make themselves known through certain tabs. Whether or not a site is monetized is a moot point; the internet is all uncharted territory waiting for someone to stake their claim.

(Image credits: Tumblr, Blogger, Yuiseki, Mark Napier's Shredder)

Retrofitting

When the S/S 11 collections came to a close, fashion writers, like any other season, tallied up the results. Ratings systems are devised, then inventoried, and finally distributed across print and digital publications. The glut of colors and silhouettes are consolidated into “must-have” sound bites that shoppers repeat with the reverence of an incantation.

For the casual observer, something gets lost in the mix. Only with studious attention can you begin comprehending what occurred in the long weeks between New York and Milan. Even then, the season is reduced to a blur of shapes that, in a number of years, reemerge as “staple” pieces that shift the content of our wardrobes, transforming the appearance of bodies as they move through space.

Appearance is tantamount to what fashion does to our bodies: it molds it into a shape that indicates status, cultural capital, and visual creativity. No film is more aware of this than Pretty and Pink, John Hughes’ 1986 film about a relationship that finds difficulty straddling the class divide in a wealthy suburb north of Chicago. The film’s main character, Andie (Molly Ringwald), is a lower class girl who constructs “volcanic ensembles” out of thrift store finds, much to the derision of her rich classmates.

The construction of a costume plays a key role in the montage near the end of the film where Andie makes her prom dress out of two poofy pink formal dresses. One of the film’s most iconic scenes, Andie rips, sews, and rearranges the fuschia lace and bright pink satins that make up the two dresses, judging them against the drawing she makes of her dream dress. Each shot in the sequence intersperses segments of Andie’s hands playing with the fabric alongside shots of Andie sitting in her room as she studies the styles of the two dresses, both of which embody the fairy princess prom dress.

Active construction is the piece that is missing from fashion week. The moving structures on the catwalk betray only the slightest hint of their creation. Each stitch is cemented, molded into space; there are no loose threads, at least not unintentionally. These clothes simply appear, much like different items appear and disappear if you visit a certain store over the course of several months. In other words, they don’t seem to leave a trace.

In designing her prom dress from two existing dresses, Andie literally retraces her steps, encompassing several decades’ worth of shape and form into a simple statement (which ironically, ends up rather shapeless and formless). This process emphasizes Valerie Steele’s observation that fashion is a palimpsest of past designs. Remembering the line of transmission from season to season doesn’t provide a hard and fast answer to fashion’s ‘meaning’ – I think that fashion’s 'meaning' is best summed up in The Social Network, when Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), notes, “fashion never stops.” It does, however, momentarily fix the idea in place, the second between creation and exhibition, before it darts away.