I’m not sure why beauty pageants still exist. I get the idea that they can provide recognition and national identity to women who would otherwise be in a much poorer economic position. It can provide a nice little narrow idea of what ‘beauty’ should be. It can probably make a decent bit of money for the organisers. But ultimately, these events feel hollow in the contemporary landscape, and frequently bizarre.
During the 2022 Miss Universe competition, Miss Ukraine winner Viktoriia Apanasenko was given the ‘Spirit of Carnival Award’, a prize presented by Carnival Cruise Lines for an individual who represents ‘fun, friendship, diversity and inclusion’. Apanasenko was lauded by Carnival Cruise Lines for her ‘mission to remind us that the war is ongoing’. Despite the hard work involved in creating the outfit (it was made under extreme conditions by candlelight and with no electricity), it’s difficult to see how a woman wielding a sword and dressed in fancy costume embodies any of the categories in the award’s description, or how her pristine unmarked costume is in any way reminiscent of the horrors of warfare.
The Miss France 2024 award was given to Eve Gilles, the candidate representing Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. What marked her out from the crowd and lead to criticism online? Gilles’ short hairstyle. Not the fact that events like this are outdated, sexist and unnecessary. Just short hair. The fact that Gilles was the first contestant to sport a short hairstyle says something about the narrow boundaries of beauty in these events, which isn’t exactly surprising considering the constant focus of long hair as idealised beauty in social media, magazines and just about every clothing shop on the street.
But then the Twitter trolls rolled their way out of their caves and had something to say on their keyboards. One French lad tweeted: ‘It’s not Miss France, it’s Miss Woke! We’re still lucky she doesn’t have a beard’. Nice. Another one roared: ‘Did we just have a woke Miss France or what’. Elegant. Check out links to both tweets from another interesting article about the hair in the following link (https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/miss-france-pixie-cut-reaction). The comments represent an odd but nonetheless intriguing idea about the politics of hair in the contemporary world. Short hair is supposedly a rebellious move from an accepted Western female ‘norm’ (Long hair = beauty, fertility Short Hair = rebellious, unwomanly Buzz cuts = Huh? No hair at all due to alopecia or cancer treatment side effects = Eww!).
The idea of the short hair cut being unacceptable seems particularly out of the blue considering its popularity in France; as Meg Walters points out in the above link, Leslie Caron had a short hair cut in in the famous 1951 musical An American in Paris. The actress Audrey Tatou, known for her roles in Amelie and playing Coco Chanel, often sports a shorter style. In terms of British actresses, look no further than Carey Mulligan, the queen of the stylish pixie cut. Short hair works, it’s just not as conventional as the long-haired women we’re used to seeing in movies. Speaking of movies, the tweets feed into an interesting trend of idealised masculinity that’s been buzzing around the internet for a while known as ‘Literally Me’. Sort of. Well, slightly. If you’d like to know a bit more about that, then…check out my upcoming book. Was that a loose, cheeky segue into promoting my own work? Maybe. But still, it’s an intriguing subject.
On that subject…you can purchase my upcoming book, The Sound of Silence: Ryan Gosling, Expressionism and the Silent Hero in 21st-Century Film on the link here (released in e-book format on January the 11th, and in hardback on February 8th, for a, um, low price *cough*): https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/sound-of-silence-9798765108055/
Also, if you fancy an earlier hair piece (see what I did there?) from a while ago where I talk about, you know, hair, then click below: