Watching coverage of last summer’s MTV VMAs, it was depressing to see how many emerging stars showed up in outfits that ostensibly paid homage to pop icons, but said so little about themselves. We had Sabrina Carpenter referencing 1991 Madonna, GloRilla referencing Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes, Tate McRae wearing a Roberto Cavalli dress designed to look like Britney Spears’ D&G from 2001, but through the lens of the artist and their team, the original reference point felt like little more than costumes designed to garner clicks online. Twitter stans seemingly experience a sort of self-congratulatory excitement over recognising a pop culture reference, but to what end do they serve the artist wearing them? If style is another mode of expressing an artist’s creative identity, what are we meant to learn about them beyond who they hope to emulate? I can’t tell you anything I’ve learned about Tate McRae from her visual output. Only that she and/or her creative team have pored over Britney’s archives with academic rigour. As we stare down the barrel of another awards season, expect to see more of the same.
If we can’t put a full moratorium on referencing in time, my hope is that more stars will at least explore a more conceptually interesting approach. For instance, Timothée Chalamet’s cheeky Bob Dylan cosplay at the New York premiere of A Complete Unknown was a genuine comic delight that, as part of a decidedly unconventional and entertaining press run, subverted what we expect of an Important Biopic actor campaigning for an Oscar nom.
Last week at the Golden Globes, Ayo Edebiri exemplified perhaps the most tasteful version of what referencing can look like: her grey, gathered Loewe suit was a nod to her After the Hunt co-star Julia Roberts’ iconic oversized outfit from the 1990 Globes, as Edebiri and her stylist Danielle Goldberg have stated. But the custom-designed ensemble was a personalised interpretation of a theme – accessorising the boxy silhouette with a gilded feathery necktie, a red Artists4Ceasefire pin, and silver grills – an ultimately original look that reflected Edebiri’s own style, not a costume.
By contrast, Jenna Ortega sporting a near-exact recreation of co-star Winona Ryder’s Beetlejuice costume during the press tour for the film’s 2024 sequel is disappointingly literal, obvious, and given that the movie itself is an unnecessary reboot, thematically redundant.
It’s easier for an artist to appropriate another’s star power by wearing their clothes than it is to develop a comparable artistic output.
In the music world, some artists’ aesthetic references help place their work in a broader cultural context and artistic lineage, such as Victoria Monét’s tribute to Janet and Michael Jackson in the music video for “Alright,” or Hayley Williams of Paramore channeling Debbie Harry onstage. Coming from established artists with strong creative identities of their own, references like these are coherent homages that draw credible parallels. Compared to say, Sabrina Carpenter mimicking Madonna and Fran Drescher (benign but boring drag), or Kim Kardashian mining the estates of deceased icons for her Met Gala looks (macabre necromancy): these unimaginative reiterations have nothing additive to offer, and only leave you lusting over the potency of the originals.
In an image-dominant digital culture that discourages nuance, we all (not just celebrities) are increasingly inclined to use the most immediate and legible signifiers possible to articulate who we are, or who we want to be seen as, by way of our tastes. Just as one who’s uninitiated with interior design can buy a dupe of a designer sofa that, in an Instagram photo, might denote the same aesthetic sensibility as an aficionado who shelled out thousands for the real thing, it is much easier for an artist to appropriate the star power of Britney or Madonna by wearing their clothes than it is to develop a comparable artistic output.
Hand-wringing over artistic authenticity is by no means a new cultural preoccupation, of course. Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that the ‘aura’ of a work of art is degraded by its industrial replication, which strips the work of its original context. But this preoccupation feels like an increasingly troubling one, given the state of our pop culture and media landscape overall. Celebrities dressing up as each other may be silly and inconsequential in one sense, but it is symptomatic of an entertainment industry at large that overwhelmingly relies on lazy reproduction and expects us all to lap it up. Right now, we are saddled with too many films and TV shows endlessly recycling the same IP; too many pop songs that use samples to regurgitate old hits rather than interpolating them in a creative way; too much algorithmic interference with how we discover new art – lest we even get into the AI of it all.
In 2009, the late André Leon Talley famously lamented that the fashion landscape was in a “famine of beauty.” The state we face now – in fashion and beyond – is a famine of originality. Just because Hollywood execs want us to settle for reboot after reboot on screen, do we really have to settle for reboots on the red carpet too?