Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  The beaten, bound, or body-bagged woman became a staple of late-’80s fashion ads and editorial photo layouts. In the windows of major department stores, female mannequins were suddenly being displayed as the battered conquests of leather-clad men and as corpses stuffed in trash cans. In Vogue, a fashion layout entitled “Hidden Delights” featured one model in a blindfold being pulled along by her corset ties, another woman with trussed legs, and still another with her arms and nude torso restrained in straps. Other mainsteam fashion magazines offered fashion spreads with women in straitjackets, yanked by the neck with choke collars, and packed, nude, into a plastic trash bag. Fashion ads in the same vein proliferated: a woman lying on an ironing board while a man applied an iron to her crotch (Esprit); a woman in a strait-jacket (Seruchi); a woman dangling by her legs, chicken-style, from a man’s fist (Cotler’s—“For the Right Stance,” the ad read); a woman knocked to the floor, her shirt ripped open (Foxy Lady); and a woman in a coffin (Michael Mann).

  The girl with her rear end turned to the camera, as if ready for a spanking, was a particular favorite—just as it had been a century earlier, in late Victorian cartoons and popular art. By the late ’80s, backside ads were so prevalent that they attracted editorial comment; one columnist even wondered if 1987 should be called “The Year of the Rear.” In dozens of fashion ads, from Gitano dresses to Famolare shoes to Driver jeans, the female butt was center stage. In a Jordache Basics ad, a young woman faced a graffiti-covered wall, her hands up against the concrete and her derriere in the air. The man in the picture planted a proprietary hand on her leg. The ad copy read, “He lets me be the one thing I have to be, me.”

  In the summer of 1987 in dozens of national magazines, American readers met yet another backside, this one attached to a girl in a bodysuit, crouched before an older man’s trousered legs. Her gaze focused reverentially on his fly. On the following pages, this same male figure loomed over other cowering girls, his lips curled in a condescending sneer. The ads’ creator: Guess jeans.

  Six years earlier, with the economy slipping into recession and the jeans market in its worst decline on record, Marseilles entrepreneur Georges Marciano had arrived in Bloomingdale’s with a stack of skintight, stone-washed jeans. According to company lore, the buyer laughed at him and said, “Nobody will wear these. They’re uncomfortable and they look used.” They were also $60, nearly double the price of an average pair of jeans. But soon Guess would make, in the words of Women’s Wear Daily, “one of the biggest splashes in denim history.”

  Georges and his brothers, Armand, Maurice, and Paul, were chain store merchants who set up shop in Los Angeles with an investment of only $101,000 and repackaged themselves as high-class jeans “designers;” their elite pants would be sold only in upscale shops, they decided. Soon after they went into business, their small investment was yielding $250 million in annual revenues.

  While Lacroix and his High Femininity succeeded only in littering the remainder racks with bubble skirts and poufs, Guess found a way to use the backlash to sell clothes. Jeans, unlike party gowns, are affordable mass-market products, even at their overpriced extremes. And jeans are mostly bought by teenage girls, who are more vulnerable to fashion dictates than either the society women Lacroix initially targeted or the working women the industry hoped to sell on Lacroix’s ideas.

  Guess jeans weren’t all that different from other designer jeans that flooded the ’80s market—except for the company’s advertising. The Marciano brothers promoted their pants with a $10 million annual campaign that never showed the product. The ads marketed instead what the company called “The Guess Mystique”: grainy shots of an American West peopled with tall cowboys on horseback and timorous women in wheat fields; a small-town ’50s America where the men cruise dusty country roads and girls wait passively at the diner, sipping milk shakes and swinging bobby-socked feet. The Guess ads generated media and public disapproval because some of the shots featured “raunchy” sexuality; they lacked “taste.” But in homing in on the question of sexual prurience, the company’s critics missed the point; they overlooked the company’s sexual politics.

  • • •

  “YOU SHOULD hear the things people say about the ads; it’s hysterical,” says Lisa Hickey, Paul Marciano’s personal assistant. The thin young woman in a pouf skirt leads the way into the front office of Guess’s Los Angeles headquarters, a barbed-wire compound surrounded by a ghetto. “What they don’t understand is that Paul is very romantic. He looks at these things as love stories.” Hickey, a journalism major, says she had been planning to get a master’s degree, but Paul Marciano talked her out of it. “Paul said, ‘Oh Lisa, you don’t want to do that.’ He doesn’t like it when we go to school.”

  Paul saunters into the office just then, casual in a striped T-shirt, cotton pants, and slippers. Although the four brothers run the company as a team, Paul’s post is the most crucial; he’s in charge of advertising. Paul settles into a chair and dispatches Hickey to round up the portfolios of the company’s past ad campaigns. “When I came here, I fell in love with the American West,” the thirty-six-year-old Marciano says. “I set the ads in the West because you will not see any change there. That seduced me tremendously.” Most appealing to him about this region is its women, who he believes remain untouched by feminist influence. In the American West, as Guess’s coffee table photobook on Texas observes, “Women are treated with great respect, but it is assumed they know their place, which is supportive, and their function, which is often decorative.”

  Aside from the West, Marciano says, he has another soft spot—for ’50s America—and for the same reason: “I’m attracted to the femininity of the women in that era,” he says. “The femininity like you find in Vargas drawings. That’s what we want to bring back—everything that has been lost.” This isn’t just what he wants, Marciano is quick to add. “Women want to look the way they did in the 1950s,” he says. They feel cheated by liberation. “The majority aren’t getting married. . . . Their independence took over their private life, and their private life was tremendously damaged. They’ve passed thirty and they’re still not married and they feel like they haven’t accomplished what they wanted to as women.”

  Hickey returns with the ad portfolios. Marciano opens one, the “Louisiana Campaign,” and leafs slowly through the black-and-white stills. “You see, each one is like a little theme film,” he says. The Louisiana campaign, for example, is based on one of his favorite American movies, Baby Doll—Elia Kazan’s 1956 tale of a thumb-sucking child bride who sleeps in a crib. Marciano provides the soundtrack as he flips the pages: “This one girl is spying on the other one, who’s with the man, and she’s feeling a little bit envious”—he points to a photo of a fearful young woman hiding behind a tree—“and now here she gets in a little bit of trouble with him”—the man grabs the woman’s jaw and twists it—“and here she’s feeling a little sad . . .”—an anguished girl hides her face in her hands, her hair in knots and her clothes tattered.

  He drops the portfolio and picks up another: the notorious “Rome campaign” featuring the bodysuited butt. This one, he explains, is based on Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. “Some people objected to this campaign because he is so much older than her,” Marciano sighs, gesturing toward the leering gentleman. “I guess he looks like he’s in his fifties. But he could have just been the girl’s father.” Marciano doesn’t explain, then, why daughter is bouncing shirtless on dad’s knee.

  Marciano says he is proud that his ads use real men—real cowboys, ranchers, truck drivers, and an actual matador. “My field is day-to-day street life,” he says. “I don’t want to create fake pictures.” Women, however, are another matter: “We always use models. It’s difficult to find real women who fit what we’re trying to say. Real women, they aren’t as cooperative as real men.” Marciano also favors relatively unknown models, with “no identity”: “This way, we can make the Guess girl exactly who we want her to be.”

  To capture h
er identity on film, Marciano hired fashion photographer Wayne Maser, who had shot the fashion photos with a quasi-bondage theme in Vogue. Maser also participated in selling another artifact of the backlash; he designed the promotional posters for Fatal Attraction. The film’s director, Adrian Lyne, was a former colleague of Maser’s in commercial photography. In 1988, Maser completed the circle, turning the former adman’s movie back into advertising. Over four days that May, Maser shot the Guess version of Fatal Attraction in two white-picket-fence houses in Bedford, New York, the same homes Lyne had used for his set.

  • • •

  “SO WHAT do you think of this coat?” Maser keeps asking, while his assistants unpack the camera equipment on the first day of the shoot. He is wearing a bulky overcoat with big shoulders. “Paul Smith . . . Fucking great coat.” The members of his crew agree that it is. Admiring allusions to Maser’s virility are rife. Unlike “those other photographers,” the members of his (all-male) photo crew keep reminding a visitor, Maser is “a man’s man” and “severely heterosexual.”

  For the Fatal Attraction shoot, Maser has broken a Guess rule and hired a prominent model, Rosemary McGrotha. She was reluctant to work with Maser. “I had heard terrible things about him,” she says. She wasn’t the only one. “A lot of the big models won’t work for him,” Maser’s assistant photographer, Jeffrey Thurnher, says. “They reach for their ulcer medicine when his name is mentioned.” Thurnher explains why: “I’ve seen Wayne take a model who isn’t cooperating, just standing there not showing any emotion, and push her face against the wall. Or he’ll tell her, ‘Get undressed’—in front of him—and if she doesn’t, he’ll say, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ He plays with their minds.”

  For the role of “the other woman” in this ad’s minimovie script, Maser has cast a twenty-five-year-old French model, a Nastassia Kinski look-alike with pouty lips. Claudia, who is so uncomfortable with the way this ad campaign is shaping up that she asks that her last name not be used, keeps her distance from the crew—sitting by herself during breaks reading Anna Karenina. “The only way I can do this,” she says, “is because I have other aspects to my life.” She paints, raises her two-year-old child, and works in a graphic design studio in Paris.

  As the shoot progresses, Maser keeps scaling down the temptress’s age and occupation—much the way TV producer Aaron Spelling shrank the status of his angels in subsequent rewrites. “Let’s put Claudia in a waitress uniform,” Maser proposes. “No wait. Let’s make her an au pair. You know, the little au pair seducing the husband? Brilliant, huh? Fucking brilliant.” Everyone agrees it is, and Maser instructs Claudia to change into a French maid’s outfit. He orders the stylist to pin the skirt tighter. Then he positions Claudia in front of the kitchen stove, tells her to pretend she’s cooking breakfast, and instructs, “Arch your ass real good.”

  “This is very cool,” Maser says, his Polaroid snapping. “We need this dress tighter . . . it’s got to look sexy.” Claudia complains, “It’s hurting me.” Maser ignores her and keeps shooting.

  Around noon, a moving van pulls into the driveway. The couple who owns the house is in the midst of a divorce—and the wife had planned to pack her belongings today. Her estranged husband had scheduled the Guess photo shoot without telling her, so she is alarmed to find her home strewn with camera equipment, littered with empty beer cans, and overrun with strangers, some of whom are sprawled in her den, eating pizza and watching videos on her VCR. As she hurries through the kitchen and up the stairs, Maser’s eyes follow her. “Now there’s an angry career woman,” he mutters. “She’s probably a feminist.”

  The angry feminists seem much on Maser’s mind; he returns to the subject later that evening. “The trouble with advertising today,” he says over a beer, “is everyone’s afraid to take a stand on women. Everything’s done to please the feminists because the feminists dominate these advertising positions. They’ve made women bland.” He envisions his photographs as a challenge to the feminist cabal. “My work is a reaction against feminist blandness,” he says. But, he wants to make clear, he isn’t trying to restrict women, just endorse their new options. “It’s a postfeminist period,” he explains. “Women can be women again. All my girls have a choice.”

  • • •

  LATER, THE Marciano brothers would set aside the Fatal Attraction ads—not because they were too demeaning or violent to women or too hostile to feminist “blandness,” but because they were too sexually graphic for mainstream presentation. Portraits of humiliated or battered young women passed muster with the Marciano censors, but depictions of adultery might disturb the sanctity of the family. Instead, that season, Guess substituted an ad campaign with cowgirls sucking on their fingers. They gazed into the camera with startled and vulnerable doe eyes, Bambis before the hunters. It was the same message, really, as Maser’s Fatal Attraction campaign, just more discreetly delivered—and ultimately more effective. In the ’80s, fashion advertising often seemed to be one big woman-hunt. And by successfully camouflaging male anger, the Marciano brothers discovered, they could fire their best shots.

  8

  Beauty and the Backlash

  WITH THE AID of a metal rod, the first woman of “the New Generation” stands in Robert Filoso’s Los Angeles workshop, her feet dangling a few inches off the floor. Her clay arms are bandaged in gauze strips and her face hooded in a plastic bag, knotted at the neck to keep out dust motes. A single speck could cause a blemish.

  “There are no imperfections in my models,” the thirty-eight-year-old mannequin sculptor explains. “They all have to be taken out.” The dank environment inside the bag, however, has bred its own facial flaws. Between the woman’s parted lips, a green mold is growing.

  On this April morning in 1988, Filoso is at work on the model that will set the standard for the following year. Ever since he brought “the new realism” to female mannequins—chiseling detailed vertebrae, toes, and nipples—Filoso has led the $1.2 billion dummy industry, serving all the better retailers. This year, he is making some major changes. His New Generation woman has shrunk in height, gained almost three inches on her breasts, shed an inch from her waist, and developed three sets of eyelashes. The new vital statistics, 34-23-36, are voluptuous by mannequin standards, but the Lacroix era of strapless gowns and bone-tight bodices requires bigger busts and wasp waists. “Fashion,” Filoso says, “determines the shape of my girls.”

  The sculptor gingerly unwinds the cloth strips and hands them to his assistant and model, Laurie Rothey. “It seems like so many of the girls are getting breast implants,” Rothey is saying as they work, and she isn’t referring to the mannequins. “It’s the only way you can get jobs because big breasts are all the [modeling] agencies are hiring now. . . .”

  Filoso interrupts her with a curse. The clay hasn’t dried yet and the mannequin’s arm has flopped off its metal bone. The sculptor tries to reattach the limb but now one arm is shorter than the other. “Look at her now, she’s a disaster,” Filoso cries, throwing his towel on the floor and departing in a huff.

  Later that day, his composure regained, Filoso describes his vision for the New Generation. He pictures an in-shape upscale Marilyn Monroe, a “curvy but thin” society lady who can “afford to go to Bergdorf Goodman’s and buy anything.” Their poses, too, he says, will be “more feminine, more contained. . . . In the 1970s, mannequins were always out there, reaching for something. Now they are pulling into themselves.” That’s the way it is for real women in the ’80s, too, he says: “Now you can be yourself, you can be a lady. You don’t have to be a powerhouse.”

  In Filoso’s opinion, these developments are a big improvement over the ’70s, when women “didn’t care” about their appearance. “The stores didn’t want beautiful mannequins, because they were afraid women customers would look at them and say, ‘God, I could never look like that in a million years.’” That era, Filoso is happy to report, has passed. “Now, mannequins are really coming to life. They are g
oing to start getting prettier again—more like the fashion photography you’d see in old magazines from the 1950s.” And what of female customers who might say, as he put it, “God, I could never look like that in a million years”? But that’s the good news, Filoso says. “Today, women can look at a beautiful mannequin in a store and say, ‘I want to look like her,’ and they actually can! They can go to their doctor and say, ‘Doc, I want these cheekbones.’ ‘Doc, I want these breasts.’”

  He sighs. “If I were smart, I would have become a plastic surgeon.”

  • • •

  DURING THE ’80s, mannequins set the beauty trends—and real women were expected to follow. The dummies were “coming to life,” while the ladies were breathing anesthesia and going under the knife. The beauty industry promoted a “return to femininity” as if it were a revival of natural womanhood—a flowering of all those innate female qualities supposedly suppressed in the feminist ’70s. Yet the “feminine” traits the industry celebrated most were grossly unnatural—and achieved with increasingly harsh, unhealthy, and punitive measures.

  The beauty industry, of course, has never been an advocate of feminist aspirations. This is not to say that its promoters have a conscious political program against women’s rights, just a commercial mandate to improve on the bottom line. And the formula the industry has counted on for many years—aggravating women’s low self-esteem and high anxiety about a “feminine” appearance—has always served them well. (American women, according to surveys by the Kinsey Institute, have more negative feelings about their bodies than women in any other culture studied.) The beauty makers’ motives aren’t particularly thought out or deep. Their overwrought and incessant instructions to women are more mindless than programmatic; their frenetic noise generators create more static than substance. But even so, in the ’80s the beauty industry belonged to the cultural loop that produced backlash feedback. Inevitably, publicists for the beauty companies would pick up on the warning signals circulating about the toll of women’s equality, too—and amplify them for their own purposes.