Nő, anya, divatinfluenszer? Chiara Ferragni Warrior Woman and Mother ruhája a Sanremói Fesztiválon
Woman, Mother, Fashion Infl uencer? Chiara Ferragni’s Warrior Woman and Mother dress at the Sanremo Festival

Summary/Abstract: The 2023 Sanremo Festival was hosted by Italian fashion influencer and designer Chiara Ferragni, who opened one day of the festival in a particularly high-profile dress by the revived fashion house Schiaparelli, designed by Daniel Roseberry. Warrior Woman and Mother is a controversial fashion piece not only in the context of the event, but in itself. The blue and gold (the same Madonna blue that artists were once required by the Pope to use when painting the Virgin Mary) Schiaparelli dress sculpture features a baby lying on her mother’s breast. Thus motherhood, ‚feminism’ and eroticism meet in a single dress. In my paper, I use the seminar text Qui est la mere? (Who is the Mother?) by Jacques Derrida to examine how motherhood appears in (post)surrealist fashion, and how fashion is affected by influencer culture, and also how influencers affect fashion culture itself. I will argue for the contradictory nature of the fashion object and the double meaning of the ‚feminist’ perspective of Chiara Ferragni’s Schiaparelli (and Dior) dresses through the lens of Western authors of fashion theory such as Elizabeth Wilson and Pamela Church Gibson. To make this argument, I draw on texts by Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler through a close reading of text and dress (textile), focusing on the concepts of motherhood and chora.

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