Picturing the Woman-child: Fashion, Feminism and the Female Gaze

London College of Fashion's Cultural and Historical Studies Department invites you to a talk and drinks reception to mark the launch in paperback of Picturing the Woman-child: Fashion, Feminism and the Female Gaze (Bloomsbury Visual Arts) by Dr. Morna Laing. The event will take place in RHS West, from 5.30-7.00pm.

The book takes as its starting point the way childlike representations of femininity have long been critiqued in feminist literature, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Simone de Beauvoir. Yet women continue to be represented as childlike in the British fashion media, despite the connotations of inferiority associated with practices of infantilization. The study questions why such images still hold appeal to contemporary women after four waves of feminism, focusing on British magazines from 1990-2015. In this talk, Morna Laing will present images from the book and outline the four categories under which such images can be categorized – from the Romantic woman-child, who presents a coherent and nostalgic subject-position, to the unsettling figure of the Surrealist femme-enfant, Lolita style, and the parodic potential of Kinderwhore. From there, she will point to recent changes in the media landscape since the conclusion of the study in 2015, such as the drive for inclusivity in British Vogue under the stewardship of Edward Enninful and the way childlike femininities now play out on a more diverse range of bodies in the fashion media.

There will be copies of the book on sale at the event with a discount for attendees (although we can accept cash payments only).

Biography

Dr. Morna Laing is Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies in the school of Art and Design, History and Theory at The New School, Parsons Paris. She has published widely on gender and spectatorship, including the monograph Picturing the Woman-child (2023) and the co-edited volume Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking (2020). Her current research focuses on discourses on sustainable fashion, and will be published in a monograph, Sustainability and the Fashion Media: Spectatorship, Affect and Social Change (Routledge, forthcoming).