Herzog (eds), Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, (London & New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 186. 111 Summers, personal interview.
112 Gaines, ‘Costume and Narrative’.
113 Fiona Cox, ‘Closet Cases: Costuming, Lesbian Identities and Desire, Hollywood Cinema and the Motion Picture Production Code’, The International Journal of the Image 1:4 (2011), pp. 43-56.
114 Although, again, the true butch remained unseen, at that point being too obvious a representation to be approved by scissor-happy censors. For more on Hollywood cinema’s erasure of the figure of the butch lesbian, see Weiss, Vampires and Violets, p. 1 and Patricia White, unInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 1.
76 When lesbian sexuality can be pre-announced and communicated within a text by any number of means, as in The L Word, costume becomes far less critical—and consequently far less instrumental—in conveying the sexual preferences of lesbian characters. In addition to advertising and advanced press which indicated the lesbian content of the show, dialogue and the onscreen portrayal of romantic affection and sex between women explicitly visualised lesbian desire and lifestyles within the diegesis. The L Word’s typically feminine styles were not attempts at ‘passing’ as straight to the viewer. Passing, in Judith Butler’s terms, is ‘a performance that works… [so that] the body performing and the ideal performed appear indistinguishable’.115 This is a very different matter on screen than in real life because of the privileged knowledge that being a viewer offers. For example, lesbians who dress like the women on The L Word may ‘pass’ as straight in real life, whether deliberately or inadvertently, as outlined by Sedgwick, who described the ever revolving doors of the closet for even the most ‘out’ gay people.116 Yet because the women of The L Word are characters constructed for a viewing audience made aware of each character’s sexuality, there is no possibility of the lesbian characters passing as straight to the viewer. Verbal references to being gay, or same-sex kissing, affection, and lesbian sex all contribute to the audience’s knowledge of which characters are lesbians, and therefore the need for costume to ‘speak’ the sexuality of lesbian characters is vastly diminished.
This televisual situation is mirrored by changing social possibilities for lesbians in the early twenty-first century. These changes, which were highlighted in my conversation with interviewee Una, shed light on the lack of necessity for clothing to speak lesbianism in The L Word. In her late 60s, Una felt that the proliferation of gay social spaces she has witnessed in recent years has resulted in less need for young lesbians to dress in a recognisable fashion. Talking to me in a ‘gay’ lounge bar frequented by gay men and women and often populated by drag queens, located close to several other queer owned, run and frequented venues, Una described why she felt it was necessary to dress in an overtly lesbian style when she came out.
115 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 88. 116 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Epistemology of the Closet’ in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale & David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 46.
77 Pre-nineties there was nowhere like this. For me to go and meet other lesbians I had to go to a bar down the road that had a notice on the door—and it was only on Tuesdays—saying Private Party. There was no meeting place unless you really went out of your way, so part of the uniform look was about your publicity because, without that […] how were you going to meet people?117
Recognisably ‘lesbian’ style acted as ‘publicity’ for Una in her early years living as a gay woman, helping to combat isolation by announcing lesbianism in overwhelmingly straight environments. Una also spoke about the impossibility of being vocal about her sexuality in most social groups when she first came out. She highlighted how clothing offering a silent manner of communicating her lesbianism to those who would be willing and able to decode it while at the same time avoiding announcing her sexuality to those who might condemn it.118 As Una pointed out, wearing overtly lesbian clothing (‘the uniform look’) to be visible is less necessary when one can visit a gay space regularly and safely assume that others there are in some way queer, as well as knowing that one’s identity is also readable as not straight simply by being in that context. More widespread acceptance of queer sexualities in the early twenty-first century reinforces the lack of necessity of dressing in a recognisably gay manner as one can often announce one’s desire and lifestyle verbally or through subtle public displays of affection. The L Word is the televisual equivalent of a gay space and a public liberal, accepting atmosphere. We can assume many of the women in the series are gay because of the lesbian focus, and owing to contemporary televisual mores and lack of censorship on Showtime, dialogue and action are able to confirm the lesbianism of several women without the need for clothes to telegraph it.
In the pilot episode of The L Word, there is a fleeting moment that highlights ways in which aspects other than costume can reveal sexuality. Over breakfast at The Planet, the closeted Dana berates Shane for wearing clothes that project her lesbianism; Shane is wearing a button-up shirt with the sleeves ripped off, black leather trousers with a matching cuff on her wrist, and a black leather cord tied around her neck, with choppy, messy hair. Embarrassed,
117 Una, personal interview.
118 I am not saying that this is no longer true for many gay women all over the world. As Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote in ‘Epistemology of the Closet’, even once a person is ‘out’ one is daily faced with situations which necessitate either repeated outing or else closeting of one’s identity, so that ‘there can be few gay people … in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence.’ Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Epistemology of the Closet’, p. 46.
78 Dana remarks that ‘every single thing about the way you're dressed, like, screams dyke’, pointing out that she wouldn’t be seen on the street with Shane. Dana, a closeted professional tennis player, expresses her desire to protect her public image from association with lesbianism, unwilling to risk being ‘outed’ by mere proximity to her obviously lesbian friend.
Revealingly, Dana’s later highly obvious ‘checking out’ of newcomer Jenny causes Alice to point out the hypocrisy in Dana’s complaints about Shane. Indicating that Dana’s reaction to Jenny openly reveals her to be ‘so gay’, Alice draws attention to the fact that action and speech can disclose lesbianism just as much as clothing, if not more so. Indeed, the former are potentially more accurate indicators than image: people can wear anything they wish, but a woman visibly appraising and verbally approving another woman to the degree that Dana does in this scene—sitting upright, looking directly at Jenny, saying ‘Hello’ in a suggestive manner and smiling coquettishly—is far more likely to be gay than straight. Alice’s comment highlights the ways in which lesbianism can be made obvious through clues beyond those largely avoided in The L Word’s costume designs.119 When it comes to its central characters, The L Word allows narrative and action to reveal lesbianism, largely reserving style for the speaking of other stories.
However, although it was perhaps not necessary to convey lesbianism through clothing, the creators of The L Word may well have decided to represent lesbians dressing in identifiable ways in the name of authenticity. I believe there is a further reason for generally avoiding visual markers of lesbianism in the costumes on The L Word, a reason that goes beyond ratings, negative stereotypes and the lack of necessity. In addition to these influences, the elision of lesbianism as visible through style seems to be a result of the combination of the
119 We can witness a similar difference between Jada Pinkett Smith—playing the lesbian Alex in the 2008 remake of The Women—and Kristin Scott Thomas playing the lesbian Hélène Perkins in Ne le dis à personne/Tell No One (Guillaume Canet, Les Productions du Trésor, France, 2006). Alex is introduced as recognisably but not definitely gay through the shot of her black leather biker boots in the montage of otherwise colourful, dainty, strappy, pointed, heeled shoes in the opening titles. Hélène is revealed as a lesbian in her second scene via her glance at the retreating derrière of a waitress in her employ. We are likely to suspect Alex is a lesbian by her strongly ‘othered’, suggestively lesbian shoes, but it takes her female date at a party to confirm these suspicions. However, it would be difficult to watch the point of view shot which reveals of the focus of Hélène’s gaze and not conclude that she desires the woman in question— and therefore women in general—well before we see her with her female partner.
79 basic tenet of costume design (that dress ‘telegraphs’ character) and the ensemble nature of the series. In The Matter of Images, Richard Dyer argues that while ‘types keep the fact of a character’s gayness clearly present before us throughout the text’ the disadvantage of this continued visual presence is that ‘it tends to reduce everything about that character to his/her sexuality.’120 Rather tellingly, Shane, the central character who is dressed in the most recognisably lesbian (i.e. most butch) fashion in The L Word is a highly sexed, promiscuous woman. If lesbianism is clearly communicated through clothing, the character must be excessively lesbian, i.e. the corresponding sexual drive must be extreme.121 Yet the femme characters in the series are dressed to communicate far more than simply ‘this woman is a femme’. Gender inappropriate clothing has so long been associated with homosexuality that it conveys gayness and, putting aside more recent understandings of gender dysphoria (as well as bearing in mind the way in which Moira/Max’s trans* status stabilises the gender of the other women on the series), little else. Gender appropriate clothing leaves a costume designer scope to tell many more stories than just a particular sexuality, and is thus far more appropriate for an ensemble drama where characters are given varying personalities in order to create interesting narratives and conflict. If several people are gay, it becomes less dramatically valuable for the costume designer to ‘tell’ the story of lesbianism through dress in each case. Other aspects of identity are therefore foregrounded as the defining features of each character.
For example, as creative personnel surrounding The L Word repeatedly assured critics, the looks on the show strongly reflect the show’s setting of Los Angeles. One of the stories being communicated through the costumes of the ‘locals’ in the narrative is that they live in that particular city: a city heavily invested in beauty culture and fashion. Speaking to AfterEllen.com, Summers made recourse to geographic specificity in an interview that addressed the glamorously feminine aesthetic of the show: ‘you have to remember the group that we’re portraying here. They’re going to influence each other and how they dress.