The Handmaid’s red robes have become ubiquitous – but Kylie Jenner should lay off them

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/shortcuts/2019/sep/02/the-handmaids-red-robes-have-become-ubiquitous-but-kylie-jenner-should-lay-off-them

Version 0 of 1.

“Handmaid’s costumes,” Vox informed its readers recently, “have always been both protest costumes and pop culture ephemera.” It’s such a strong word, isn’t it, “always”? You couldn’t say these red robes, symbols of dystopian female disempowerment – so intense and redolent that the mere sight of a woman in red now gives you the heebie-jeebies – have been around for an “always” amount of time; the show only started in 2017. But it’s almost the novelty of the imagery that makes it contested, as it unfolds its journey from terrifying allegory to Instagram joke.

Recently, the show’s costume designer made a handmaid’s outfit for a cat belonging to the show’s star, Elisabeth Moss. Ask not whether the cute cat undermines the seriousness of the symbolism. Wonder only how the cat got to be so dinky.

But that was all about the messenger: it had come from the show, therefore it was a playful gesture. Had it come as a meme from a Twitter user with “Maga” in their handle, it would have been a provocative act to undermine female empowerment as a principle, subliminally dressing us all up as cats. See what Moss did, there? She got inside the enemy’s OODA (observe, orientate, decide, act) cycle, subverted them before they subverted her. Hats off. Or bonnets. Or whatever.

Kylie Jenner’s party last September, however, in which the waiters were dressed as Marthas (the show’s domestic servants) and the drinks were Under His Eye tequila and Praise Be vodka, was more of a misfire. This was something like when Madonna dressed as Che Guevara, or when the great rhetoric of Martin Luther King was used in an ad for trainers, callow appropriation of social dignity in the service of performative consumption. It’s not that Jenner was making a statement about the women dressing as handmaids in defence of their reproductive rights – as protesters did at Brett Kavanaugh’s supreme court confirmation hearings and in states with alarming new abortion laws. Rather, she was just sucking the power out of the image.

Mischievous acts of bonnet-photoshopping – on to Melania’s red Christmas trees, on to Theresa May, chillingly, as she tapered after Donald Trump – are different. A joke that is apropos reinforces the seriousness of the protests. Look, I don’t make the rules.