Expediente urbano

150 _{On funky hairstyles: Leanne, personal interview; Charlotte, personal interview. On the Superdry label:} Amy, personal interview; Charlotte, personal interview. Lesley Abernethy, personal interview, 29 November 2011.

92 Frankie as ‘dykey’, pointing to the character’s ‘T-shirt, tattoo, [cigarette], beer, converse and skinny jeans’ as ‘standard’ lesbian iconography.152

Frankie, then, looks very much like a lesbian, but also exhibits some sexual interest in men. In the very first episode of the first series, the character admits to being attracted to both men and women, although claims to only fall in love with the latter. We see her having sex with several women, and in the fourth episode she sleeps with her male friend Jay. Frankie remains within Braun’s classification of a butch lesbian despite her participation in sexual activity with men as well as women. Notwithstanding Frankie’s on-screen sex with a man, out lesbian actress Heather Peace, who plays Sam, used her subcultural affiliation to legitimise the look sported by Gedmintas, saying: ‘she plays the type of gay girl that I see out

Figure 10: Frankie from Lip Service

93 and about so often now’.153 I am not arguing that self-identified lesbians do not or should not have sex with men, an arguably prohibitive mind-set challenged by lesbian-made media as far back as Go Fish (Rose Troche, USA, 1994) in what Michele Aaron calls a ‘dykes-fuck- fellas’ storyline that undertakes the queer work of blurring fixed identities.154 However, interestingly, it is Frankie’s image more than her actions that seems to classify her as a lesbian for both Braun and Peace. Braun’s ‘types’ are revealed as defined primarily by style: Frankie is regarded as the most butch/androgynous ‘lesbian’ because she looks like one, not because she displays a particular kind of behaviour.

Interestingly, Braun’s insistence on the inclusion of lesbian style led to a strange situation in this instance that directly opposes Lip Service’s Frankie with much of the cast of The L Word. Instead of several lesbian characters who do not exhibit recognisable lesbian images, their costumes telling stories which downplay lesbianism as a significant defining characteristic, here we have a character whose costume speaks lesbianism so strongly that it overwhelms the non-lesbian aspects of her character. As such the character returns us to the premise that recognisably butch imagery on women speaks gayness so effectively that it conveys little else. Bruzzi and Tamar Jeffers MacDonald have both argued that costume can create meaning when not directly supporting narrative and character.155 Revealingly, Frankie’s costume and style are so over-determined with lesbian meanings (that butch/androgynous women are sexually interested in other women), her ‘dress’ telling the woman’s story to such an extent that the connotations of her image seem capable of not only creating meaning beyond narrative and character but actively overriding both.

Braun’s style instructions contained a very definite remit to include butch looks in the series, resulting in a sort of affirmative action for butch lesbian styles. There was a strong effort, stemming from Braun, to ensure that masculine elements of clothing were not eliminated from the costuming in Lip Service. The emphasis that the creator placed on butch images

153 _{Heather Peace, quoted in Beattie and Longley, ‘Great LezBritain: Interview with Heather Peace from Lip} Service’ AfterEllen.com, (25 October 25 2011), p. 2 <http://www.afterellen.com/greatlezbritain/10-25-2010>, accessed September 29 2011.

154 _{Aaron, ‘New Queer Cinema: An Introduction’ in Aaron (ed.), New Queer Cinema, p. 6.}

155 _{Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema and Tamar Jeffers MacDonald, Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and} Transformation in American Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).

94 being represented makes it seem highly likely that Braun was reacting to negative publicity over the lack of such women in The L Word and aiming to either redress the balance slightly with her own series or at the very least avoid the same criticisms. Both Abernethy and Morrison spoke to me about the importance Braun placed on representing masculine elements in the styles on display. Abernethy emphasised how important it was to the creator to show characters from the ‘whole lesbian community’, but specifically mentioned butch characters as needing visibility, saying:

She’s worried, I suppose, about criticism about there not being butch characters… I think when it started she was probably concerned that there was going to be all this criticism about them all being lipstick lesbians, so she’s really concerned that it doesn’t go that way.156

Morrison also hinted at deliberate efforts to create a mix of lesbian identities that included butch elements, as when she described one of the reasons for keeping Heather Peace’s make-up incredibly minimal for her part as the ‘soft-butch’ Sam: ‘it definitely was [a case of] “Yes, we want her to look more gay so she’s going to have less make-up on because we don’t have enough, perhaps, of that”…’157

The desire to have not only ‘authentic’ images but specifically images that incorporate masculine elements is evident in some decisions made over the character Tess. Tess proved to be the most feminine of the cast, with Button’s long, blonde hair curled for the part, and the character’s propensity for wearing dresses, skirts and heels.158 Abernethy spoke of counteracting this femininity with specifically masculine elements. For example, in a promotional image in which actress Fiona Button also wears a kilt, with her long blonde hair curled and loose in an extremely feminine manner, the designer put her in ‘a boy’s vintage waistcoat’ (See Fig. 11).159 This served to deliberately render Button’s top half ‘really quite boyish… rather than [putting] her in a girly blouse’ and was intended by Abernethy to ‘just