The ‘Girly’ Aesthetic
I’ve decided I want my art to be about the abstraction of ‘girly’ magic tropes that were aimed at many girls in childhood through marketing and media. Though it is true that strictly binary representations of gender are fed to us in our childhood, and a failure to swallow these tropes are often met with distaste and shame (even in childhood), the ‘girly’ is something that sits precariously in our culture. ‘Girly’ tropes have a negative stereotype attached to them, with many passing them off as lacking in substance or intellect of some kind, and being silly and frivolous. Young girls in our culture are in a catch-22, as they are encouraged to be girly in youth and later in adolescence when this mindset continues, ‘girly’ things are suddenly shamed and judged for their interests.
Music acts, certain films and shows aimed at girls, even so far as makeup and feminine ways of presenting are judged harsher by society, particularly in comparison to similar media types aimed at boys. Examples of subjects of this ridicule are the twilight movies, acts like Justin Bieber and One Direction , and negative connotations of makeup being ‘fake’ and phrases like ‘take a girl swimming on the first date’ that demonstrate these attitudes.
Therefore, I think it an empowering stance to celebrate the femininity that many people in our culture have related to from an early age. This media, because of the strict divide in binary, was often made in the absence of the male gaze and was more emotion driven . This ‘culture’ relates to films, shows, toys, website design, clothing and more, and something to notice is that much of it shares a particular aesthetic style.
The ‘Barbie’ movies were female led films driven by a female perspective. The movies, have light pastels, soft warm yellows and oranges and lilac in their overall aesthetic. The characters wore dresses that young girls would love to wear and didn’t cater to what a male audience would call ‘sexy’. In the design of the cartoon, there often featured elaborate swirls and tiny white stars or dots that would represent a ‘sparkle’. A soft, hazy fade is also employed to show the glow of light. Across the board, pink and purple are used heavily which makes sense when you consider these were the ‘girly’ colours in society at the time.
Here, in the Polly-pocket game website, (a toy marketed to girls but was expanded into an online game) we can see a very similar colour palette. A mixture of bright, sunny colours and pastels, with a heavier focus on pink and purple. It’s also worth noting that the protagonist, as with the barbie movies, is Caucasian, and presents as feminine, meeting all the beauty standards inflicted on girls at the time. Both Barbie and Polly Pocket have blonde hair and blue eyes, which caters to the standard of western beauty that has been popular since the golden age of Hollywood. Design of the room incorporates florals and bold pattern into it’s design and furniture is rounded and soft looking.
The Winx show was a main inspiration for my early pieces in this vein. The show had a heavy focus on fashion and individual style, features the same colour palette as aforementioned and heavily relied on the white dot ‘sparkle effect’ to animate their ideas of magic and fantasy. The ensemble of girls had different styles, ranging from hyper-feminine to tomboyish and sporty. In the cast it is also important to note that more diversity was present, there being a black, hispanic and East Asian members. However the protagonist of the show was style caucasian, and in the latest reboot of the show, two of the POC characters were actually white-washed and stripped of their cultural back-story.
Pixel Chix were popular toys around the time I grew up. The ever-present ‘girly’ colour palette still features. I think it is note-worthy that these toys were built in the shape of a home, and the character moved around this domestic sphere as part of the game. The games also encourages girls to nurture and mother the character in the toy, which can be seen as another way society inflicts this expectation of women to carry children on cis women.
Here is a good example of the sprawling swirls and shapes included in the girly aesthetic. The ocean wave curls under at the bottom, and is adorned with swirly shells and creatures. A chrome sheen is applied to the dolphins in this picture, showing a favouring of light reflection like sparkles, chrome shine and metallics in the girly aesthetic.
My intention in my practice is to further explore and emulate the girly aesthetic in order to celebrate the feminine culture aimed at children that was unabashedly feminine and did not cater to the male eye, as a way of reclaiming ‘girly’ culture from the society that shames it.
