Medicinal Make-up and Bad Hair days: reconsidering the place of the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ in the fashion image.

This paper explores performance artist Marina Abramovic and painter Chantal Joffe in relation to the fashion image. For Abramovic, who was photographed for the front cover of Elle magazine (Serbian Edition) in 2011, the fashion image became a means by which the private experience of the home, where she felt ‘fat, ugly, and unwanted’ (Elle, US on-line edition, 2010), could become ‘deprivatized and deindividualized’ (Arendt, 1958: p.50). But what did the image offer up to the spectator? Betty Friedan blamed women’s magazines for exacerbating the sense of malaise amongst housewives who were trying to conform to ‘the empty narrow image’ of ‘brainless, fluffy kittens’ (Friedan, 1963: p. 48). However, on the front cover of the latest 2010 edition of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (Penguin Modern Classics), there is a reproduction of Chantal Joffe’s painting ‘Bond Girl – Black Dress’ (2005) where the direct gaze of the model narrates a more ambivalent and nuanced perspective on the political potential of feminized performance. With reference to Abramovic and Joffe, this paper argues that the pleasure of fashion consumption can be understood as an expression of celebratory empathy - thus a call to action - for the way in which intimate politics are being (ad)dressed in public.