Image from here: Norah Cyrus, looking “sweet, yet edgy” (?) standing against a wall of advertising for toys.
A bunch of people are saying that Norah Cyrus and Emily Grace (two Disney stars, I think) are putting out a line of lingerie for young girls. Norah is nine years old and Emily is eight years old. Ooh! La, La! Couture are suggesting that their joint collection with the girls will be clothing rather than lingerie but none the less they are describing it as “sweet, yet edgy”, which you know, is a term kind of like ‘sassy’ that has always led to such good things when it comes to products for young girls. So, can hardly wait.
While I am on the topic, this is a great post from One Good Thing on the deliberate misuse of Lolita.
I find that photo quite shocking. I assumed she was a young adult.
That is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.
It’s just Emily Grace, and they’re just tutu dresses, with stuff like cupcakes and flowers and peace symbols on them. And the odd trousers and top set. There’s plenty of pink, but they’re basically just typical “girl” clothing, with nary a midriff or dodgy slogan in sight. One of them is labelled a “can-can dress” (though not on the garment) because it has a ruffled underskirt; that’s about the most inappropriate thing I can find.
I’ve been pretty disgusted at the mediafest dissecting Noah Cyrus, salivating over her thighs, and comparing her to a “stripper”, a “dominatrix”, and a “ho”. How early does the slut-shaming of individual celebs have to start? It’s a witch costume. Apart from being short – and prepubertal girls have worn short skirts for a long, long time – it’s not explicitly sexual. And if it was explicitly sexy, plastering her photo all over the internet for people to paw over would be, IMO, the worst possible response.
Thanks Lauredhel, thought-provoking as always. I have a couple of responses to your comments.
Agreed, the Ooh lala range looks pretty typical for a girl clothing range at this point in time. And I am sure that even if they weren’t originally going to be that they will now, following all this publicity, be very cautious about their upcoming range with Emily Grace.
Re. Norah Cyrus mediafest. While I think it is very wrong to direct the criticism on to individual parents and children when discussing the trend towards the sexualising of little girls (apart from anything it is usually terribly classist in nature), I also think celebrities are a more murky area for the debate. People are going to discuss and scrutinise celebrities as public figures, and I guess that is why I also hope one would be careful in permitting a child as young as 9 to become a celebrity. Given the public nature of celebrities, the deliberate commidification of the personal I think it is ok for people to discuss their response to Norah Cyrus’ image/look/fashion choices, using her as a social marker of particular times in popular culture, even though she is a very young person. (Though I wouldn’t defend misogyny of course). This is, after all, a photo of Cyrus at a public event doing publicity photos in front of a backdrop for the sponsors of the event.
I didn’t realise this photo was Cyrus dressed as a witch, but regardless it looks pretty vampy to me – the full make-up, the knee-high high-heeled lace-up boots, the skin tight tiny black dress – it the kind of thing I see as evidence of the compression of girlhood.