I wanna keep talking about Kiki Layne’s Met Gala look & *why* it’s so brilliant….
*sigh*
This silhouette is not only a bunch of checkmarks for all the gilded age girl fashion staples: the color pink, the corset buttons, the opera gloves, the close to the neck -necklace, the heavy halo of hair framing her face…
But what it subverts given Kiki’s immaculate face card (honestly the best face there, argue with your momma) and her being emphatically black, not just by being a black woman, by how she is styled especially the fro!!!…
See, there was this “feminine ideal” in the gilded age called The Gibson Girl:
As drawn by Charles Gibson in the 1890’s which lasted up until WWI, this was the feminine ideal of the era… Pure, beautiful, etheral, the right class, perfect.
…and WHITE.
One big signature is the huge pile of hair that formed a heavy halo on the head.
Anne, in the 1985 Anne of Green Gables, reached for this look in the concert scene here (note the pink sash, flower in her big red hair, neck hugging pearls, frilly detailing empasizing the clavicle and shoulders, and opera gloves):
and other “Gibson” girls taking the hair to pretty big halos:
even the middle-class Booker T. black women of the era adhered to this:
I mentioned the fros were *also* of the era… the exoticifed ideal of the Circassian woman:
These women were exhibited in traveling shows and given exotified backstories of having been kidnapped and sold into white slavery… from the Caucasus Mountians region, in the country of Georgia and regions south of Russia in Europe.
They were exotified as “perfection” in beauty and known for their afro-textured hair…. but again WHITE.
Now, the stylist for Miss Layne said she specifically chose the Afro as a purposeful nod to blackness within the opulence of the gilded styling… but KNOWING ALL OF THE ABOVE, her look goes well beyond just that into the startlingly subversive.
Again… Kiki is soft, she’s princess pretty, she’s pure, ethereal, she’s feminine, delicate, all of those things usually ascribed to whiteness…. while checking off the gilded style reference points AND being a black woman.
And as we know, when it comes to the rareity of black women being seen as soft…
*every.*
* thing.* from the delicate way she is holding herself in this style, -she’s wearing it, it’s *not* wearing her (posture immaculate, hands delicately crossed) to again… Just her BEAUTY and her BLACK beauty in that Halo of Afro hair…
She just stomped all over that Gibson aesthetic and proved she can best that ideal with emphatic blackness….soft fro, perfect face card, and all… all while hitting the assignment pitch perfect.
