Hello, Sunshine!: August 2010

The Dirty Girl. She’s still out there, but she’s on the wane, according to the New York Observer. In Twilight of the Dirty Girl, Irina Aleksander defines this soiled ingenue as “youthful, thrifty, indifferent to grooming-and in possession of an undeniable and confounding sex appeal.”

Or as Christwire contributor Stephenson Billings sums it in the weighted-with-irony title, The Dirty Girl Trend: Is There Anything Less Attractive Than a Young, Promiscuous Coke Addict Who Doesn’t Bathe?:

“...she is unemployed and unsuccessful. She will mimic the deadbeat celebrities she sees on programs such as Entertainment Tonight and Entourage, mocking hardworking people behind her gold sunglasses as she high heels her way out of bed, woken by the itch of pubic lice and bedbugs, spending the few remaining sunlight hours flirting without completion on Facebook and then dining on a cigarette for dinner, followed by a nap and then a night at the clubs and bars. She will wear as little as possible, having already gone several days without underwear or a shower.”

Billings’ description is so vivid you can practically smell the panties — satire is so much more compelling with a scratch ’n sniff card — and it made me start to wonder if the Dirty Girl really exists (is this a non-story worthy of being included in Jack Schafer’s Bogus Trend Stories of the Week for Slate?); she must be a real girl with bad habits, because Aleksander has anecdotal evidence from Elle’s fashion director Anne Slowey, who says that she saw a presumed Dirty Girl (Paz de la Heurta) pick her nose in a restaurant.

But back to Billings:

“After a bit of a blackout, we may see her again sitting in the laps of older men in after-hours black brick basements, hoping they buy her an expensive cocktail or a bag of street drugs. In return, these men yearn for the variety of unsafe and anonymous sexual positions she offers, positions that their future wives will never agree to willfully.”

Both writers cite Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen as models of this trend, despite their previous successes and current investments.

“The Dirty Girl trend could be described as an offshoot of the ‘hipster style’ that is popular among white, upper middle class children today... the difference, however, is that the Dirty Girl does not embrace the irony and sarcasm of the hipsters.”

That poor Dirty Girl and her limited sense of humor.

Aleksander presents a coherent social matrix:

“The Dirty Girls of New York have some well-known ambassadors, commonly found in the front rows of certain fashion shows and the pages of Nylon magazine and (with their nipples showing) on Purple magazine founder Olivier Zahm's blog. They are well educated in the art of heavy eyeliner, like that smudged and smeared around Becka Diamond's eyes; of concealing your actual, sizable wealth with vintage T-shirts, like Peaches and Pixie Geldof; and of uncombed hair, like that framing the disinterested, remote look of Cory Kennedy’s eyes.”

Aleksander didn’t have much to say about who plays the sullied Adam to the Dirty Girl’s Eve, except to suggest that this would be a man who’d hit it, given the chance. But we can thank Billings for a more graphic portrait of the young men who vie to be Kinky Ken to Bad Barbie:

“They suffer from a violent urge to deface decency and righteousness and for them this means throwing a young women down on a grease-stained couch for acts as offensive as sodomy in the ghetto apartments of America as loud rap music gives them a beat to which they can thrust their sweaty hips.”

Billings’ writing is unsettling, as if he were vicariously experiencing the imagined lives of 20-somethings in salacious detail, and then taking prurient pleasure in their condemnation.

Toward the end of his muck-laden tour de force of turgid purple prose, Billings suggests that there is Hope after all, that this Girl can be Saved. By contrast, Aleksander makes it sound like the Dirty Girl is already well on her way. One example: the Olsens have started cleaning up their act, and Mary-Kate will be appearing on the cover of Marie-Claire with picture-perfect locks and pristine, sophisticated attire.

Meanwhile, if cleanliness really is next to godliness, perhaps most of us could benefit from a bar of Blue Q’s Dirty Girl soap.

Afterthought: If you have your own penchant for watching downfalls and redemptions, I recommend Diary of a Lost Girl, starring Louise Brooks, as Thymian, who is raped by creepy shop assistant Meinert —played by Fritz Rasp, blamed for her misfortune, sent to a home for wayward girls, forced to do calisthenics by a stout matron, separated from her child, becomes a prostitute and, well, let’s not spoil the ending.

Just ended — American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which spanned the 1890s, with sporty Gibson girls taking style cues from Europe, through the 1930s, with screen sirens emerging as the western emblem of beauty.
According to Andrew Bolton, who curated the Metropolitan’s show with selections from the Brooklyn Museum’s costume collection, the exhibition represented more than a sartorial revolution from corsets to kimonos. As NPR summed it up in an interview with Bolton that aired last week, it depicted an evolution in attitude. “By 1940, she (the American woman) had come to represent something that would intrigue the world from then on — a physically and sexually liberated, confident human being.”
American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, May 5–August 15, 2010
Images from the American Woman installation on flicker
NPR: The Feminine Mystique, Expressed in Silks and Satins
High Style: Masterworks from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Jan Reeder