Has the pandemic kill off the “revenge dress”? This week, Kacey Musgraves teased her new album and short film Star-Crossed. The releases come after her divorce and there are deep echoes of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Billed as a “tragedy told in three acts”, the film uses fashion to tell her breakup story, but there is no “revenge dress” look.
Instead, we saw Musgraves in a number of outfits that seemingly semaphore a mix of tragedy and catharsis. There’s a wedding dress that is worn subversively with some extra high heels and bejewelled eyebrows. There’s a smattering of red tulle, a balaclava and some angel wings. A closeup image of a corset with a tiny sword through it was posted to her Instagram page after the teaser dropped.
“The corset could be a reference to the confinements of what she perceives marriage to be,” says Dr Dawnn Karen, author of Dress Your Best Life. In one scene, Musgraves is seemingly fitted with a silver breastplate (echoing the one sported by Cardi B in Lizzo’s Rumors video). “Perhaps she’s being stitched together, so she can go out into the world again,” says Dr Karen.
The term “revenge dress” was coined in 1994, in reference to the shoulder-exposing black silk Christina Stambolian dress worn by Princess Diana at a public appearance, as Prince Charles went on television to admit to infidelity in the marriage.
“It’s a deeply conservative idea,” says Dr Angela McRobbie, a professor of communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She believes the Mills and Boon-ish term plugs into the pre-feminist narratives of Jackie magazine. “Within this claustrophobic world, the young woman who has been cheated on can think of no further way to punish her untrustworthy lover than by extravagant displays of fashion and the body.”
There was another layer to Diana’s visual messaging though. “While Charles was publicly admitting his adultery with Camilla on the BBC, Diana rocked up with a dress that utterly undermined his power,” says Professor Andrew Groves, of the University of Westminster. “In this dress, Diana is a woman with newfound agency and authority, astute as ever at grasping the importance of imagery over soundbite in a mediated society.”
In the film poster for Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, we see her burying her face in the nest of what appears to be a wedding dress. For Groves, it marks a sartorial turning point. “What strikes me about this image is that Diana is drowning in this dress; it is swamping her,” he says. “But its voluminous quality is also what allows her to hide. This dress embodies the fairytale role that the palace, the nation, and, to some extent, she wished to play. It depicts a point in time when she realised that, rather than playing the role she was expected to play, she could take control of her own narrative, and that how she dressed could be a potent weapon in making this a reality.”
During the Star-Crossed clip, Musgraves asks: “What if our greatest tragedies became our biggest triumphs?” What if, like Diana, the clothes worn in our darkest moments became part of what helped us through them? But there’s a catch. “As we later discovered with Princess Diana, there was someone incredibly unhappy and tortured beneath her expertly constructed self-presentation,” says Groves.
Years later, it was Beyoncé who evolved the idea of the “revenge dress”.
In her 2016 audio-visual infidelity tour de force, Lemonade, Beyoncé upended the visual language around revenge wear. Through the lens of black feminism, the singer incorporated elements of athleisure and prairie dressing into the videos for songs like Sorry, 6 Inch and Pray You Catch Me. But it was the canary-yellow dress by Roberto Cavalli that became linked to the story of Jay-Z’s alleged affair with “Beckie with the good hair”. But the meaning of that is more complicated than we think.
“I don’t feel that the Cavalli dress completely overlaps with that term more than telling a specific narrative wrapped in an art historical blanket,” says fashion historian Darnell Jamal Lisby, who has done extensive research into the style behind Lemonade. “The Cavalli dress could be considered a ‘revenge dress’ from a theoretical perspective because it fits within this story she was using to communicate her frustration.”
He says the yellow dress is a specific reference to the Nigerian goddess Oshun and speaks to bigger themes beyond revenge. “In conjunction with the lyrics and the scene of Beyoncé walking, skipping down the street and smashing cars, the dress, through its west African inclinations, emphasises the rebirth she experienced as a woman not blinded by the facade of her partner, while enduring anger after discovering infidelity in her relationship.”
The conceptual idea of “revenge wear” still exists, but it has evolved beyond the singular. “Acts of revenge dressing and shopping have always existed but used to be individualistic – people expressed themselves depending on their unique personal circumstance,” says Professor Ashwani Monga from Rutgers Business School. “However, the pandemic is something that all of us are going through collectively. Hence we are going through similar sets of emotions and reacting in similar kinds of ways.”
This includes “revenge shopping” (originating in China, the idea was that people would be making a post-lockdown rush to purchase luxury items) and “revenge dressing” (linked to dressing in bold patterns and colours during the boom time of the roaring 20s). “Revenge shopping is fashion as retail therapy writ large,” says Professor Groves. “Clothes have enormous power to affect how we feel about ourselves and how others feel about us. Like Princess Diana, there comes a point in life when you’re tired of being told what to do and want to indulge yourself, regardless of the repercussions.”
Professor Monga explains the thinking behind it: “If I do revenge shopping, I’m harming my ‘virtue self’ that reigned supreme through the pandemic, restraining me from spending money on frivolous, shallow, consumption. Enough of this goody-two-shoes self,” he says. “At the same time, revenge shopping helps me reward my ‘vice self’ that wants to finally let go, indulge and have fun after a long period filled with misery.”
He says the pandemic has influenced the thought processes behind our purchasing habits in different ways. “Some people have become more nihilistic, thinking that life is so unpredictable and meaningless that there’s no point planning, so no point exerting self-control for a better future,” he says. “It is better to do what one feels like doing in the moment, including revenge shopping. For them, nihilism offers a good excuse to not worry about the future but cater to the present.”
Monga thinks that the concept of the “revenge dress” has changed. “It’s no longer about a stance against other people. Rather, it is about a stance against one’s own ‘virtue self’ which acted as a restraint on extravagant consumption through the pandemic.”
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