Yahoo Lifestyle The Dreamy Fashion Logic of David Lynch
David Lynch said that “the more unknowable the mystery, the more beautiful it is.” His female characters are harrowingly unknowable and beautiful, complex, full of emotional intensity. Never mere victims of circumstance, they have a heavy hand in shaping their fates. They are often at once selfish and self-destructive. As Lynch pushes their dangerous desires and obsessions, he gestures to archetypes: the femme fatale, the girl-next-door, the damsel in distress. Then, in the upside-down ratiocination of dream logic, he topples them.
In the unsettling, multilayered Lynch-iverse, outward beauty and veneers of normalcy bely concealed decay. His work explores the dangers of intimacy, the intimacy of danger. The way he communicates not just character, but also story, through the medium of dress is the stuff of both filmic and fashion history.
Blue Velvet’s Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini) is a glamorous nightclub singer attracted to the glitter of darkness. Her casting made use of Rosselini’s personal history as Ingrid Bergman’s daughter, a luminous beauty of cinema’s Golden Age, best known for her tragic characters. Dorothy’s beauty conveys power, while also ensuring her objectification and exploitation. She is brutalized by the homicidal Frank Booth, who has kidnapped her whole family, and proceeds to act out his perverse desires on her body.
In this scene, her dress is made of crushed blue velvet, a soft, feminine, and eminently fragile material that has been manipulated; the outcome is a fabric that is more strikingly beautiful, more luminous, for having been distressed. Dorothy’s victimization is complicated by the fact that she derives pleasure from the deviance.
Onstage, whether she is a tool or the puppet master is ambiguous. Are her expressive, sex-soaked performances moments of liberation from Frank, in which she is fully in command, or are they another component in a cycle of violence? A clue to her ambiguous desires may lie in her red power-pumps, which recall another Dorothy, an innocent girl scooped up in a cyclone and carried off after dreaming of escaping her bleak reality for a magical land over the rainbow. Each of the Dorothies’ ruby-red slippers indicate the possibility that the power to control her destiny was hers from the beginning.
Twin Peaks’s Laura Palmer is the teenager next door who has a dark secret life. Her trademark oversized cardigan—a nostalgic 90s throwback to the 1950s, an ostensibly innocent time when family values glossed over racism, McCarthyism, and the shadow of nuclear war—begs the question of what lies beneath. Her body itself is full of unutterable impulses: towards drugs and abusive relationships with men. As it becomes clear that she is not the picture-perfect girl, her plaid and heavy knitwear give way to a tight, tiny black cocktail dress. There is no more padding. The girl of the past gives way to the woman of the moment. For the time she has remaining, anyway.
At one point, Laura appears in a nightmarish red room. The focal point of her ensemble is a colossal brooch, encrusted with jewels. The eccentric proportions, the sizeable ornament outweighing the thin dress, indicate the crucial asymmetry of her character. She is weighted down by doom, dressed for tragedy—one she has been drawn to. Jewelry is totemic in the show: another female character wears a horseshoe with the prongs facing down, draining their luck.
In Inland Empire, Nikki Grace is played by Laura Dern, herself Diane Ladd’s daughter, repeating the film’s disquieting doublings, entanglements of personas, and references to a bygone Hollywood. Fittingly, Dern plays Nikki, an actress who merges with the characters she plays. Echoing her tissue-thin self are the complex layers of narrative: scenic transitions are disorienting, the departures from reality into the land of dreams never telegraphed.
Beholding a particularly disturbing dream sequence, the dizzying pink and yellow stripes of Nikki’s tank top cut across the neckline, the rhythmic pattern fracturing before continuing, an indication of her disjointed personas, baffling the eye which vainly seeks continuity. In the promotional shots for the film, Nikki is in a pink bathrobe, in a state somewhere between dress and undress, intimately exposed, half-nude but not quite erotic, holding the reins to her sexuality. The film never offers a satisfying answer; she is at once a wealthy actress, a housewife, and an unhoused prostitute. Those female archetypes are indivisible, they are intertwined.
In Mulholland Drive, Lynch does his most thorough fracturing of female archetypes, taking two characters and exploding them into four. He plays blondes with pearls and button-down sweaters against dark-haired vamps wearing scarves that evoke urban legends of women whose heads are held on by a green ribbon. As the women further degrade and bifurcate and the blonde Betty self-annihilates, becoming “Diane,” her haircut evokes Princess Diana, who had died only a few years earlier. Once again, Lynch raises the stakes, taking his gamesmanship with illusion and reality, and with the tragedies of female roleplaying to the most rarefied level, that of royalty.
Film has always dealt in images of women. Like watching rolled-up strips of film stock whir and click, reel by reel, into a super-8 projector, we can see before us the progress from the silent Lillian Gish, the helpless victim on a piece of ice floating down the river about to tumble over a waterfall; to Garbo’s mysterious recluse, as distant and detached whether she’s a courtesan or a Soviet envoy, but for those deeply emotive eyes; to Marilyn’s sexual innocent in the fifties and sixties, glamorous and gold-digging; to Lynch’s explosion of all that came before.
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