Why do women think this is the face of beauty?
Tandoori tan. Towie-style blonde locks. Eyeliner galore. Tilda Swinton’s makeover and a troubling question...
Pale, androgynous and distinctive, there is no mistaking Tilda Swinton. Wi t h platinum cropped hair that accentuates her interesting features, she has an elfin and eccentric presence.
Her appearance is as deliberate and personal as an art installation: it’s a trademark.
So when pictures emerged this week of the Oscar-winning actress with a deep orange Towie tan, sooty vamp eyes and long streaked hair, jaws dropped at the nature of the transformation.
Some people (well, a couple of blokes) said she looks far more attractive this way; others thought it a hideous travesty, wasting all of Swinton’s quirky charisma.
even she called the makeover — for a role in a new film — ‘pretty extreme’. and she is known to enjoy complete physical transformations for screen appearances: a vampire in Only lovers left alive; a wrinkled widow, all age spots and saggy neck, in The Grand Budapest Hotel.
She was also the omnisexual heroheroine Orlando in 1992 and may be switching gender again, opposite Benedict Cumberbatch, in Marvel’s forthcoming fantasy Dr Strange.
But it is remarkable that it is this look — adopted to play a tough magazine editor for a new film, Trainwreck — that’s caused such a commotion. Because ‘extreme’ as it is, it is not strange or unusual, but quite the opposite. What’s shocking is Tilda has become ‘everywoman’.
Or at least, one sort of everywoman and an unnervingly familiar one. This is a figure we see everywhere every day, in the shops, in the office, in the street. and what Tilda makes you realise is how strange and artificial this woman looks.
The film’s make-up artist Kyra Panchenko has revealed the effort needed to create this effect. The wig is streaked — ‘over- ombréd, filthy blonde’. It takes an hour a day to put self-tan cream and ‘layers and layers of bronzers’ on Swinton’s face and swan-like neck. ‘She’s normally translucent, and we turned her the colour of a coconut shell.’ as for the eyes, they are rimmed in enough smoky eyeliner to paint a ship’s funnel.
So yes, as Tilda, 54, says, ‘pretty extreme’, but her character Dianna ‘looks, frankly, like a lot of women I pass on the street every day, the women who go for that particular tandoori tan and the eye make-up and hair’.
and the fact that we consider her change extreme says far less about Tilda than i t does about this particular disguise.
For the film look she adopts is one of the most popular modern female standards today: carefully artificial, sexy by numbers, voracious, disciplined, tough and assertive. a look distinctly descended, alas, from a hackneyed porn film image of what a sexy woman ought to look like.
Tilda Swinton muses that ‘it’s a burlesque . . . deep disguise’. and that burlesque, as she points out, is all over the place. You see women sporting it everywhere, from City law firms to suburban malls, behind reception desks or pushing prams, even in school staff rooms.
You can see it on very young women, whose skin doesn’t need that dark mahogany polish and whose natural hair might be a shining, subtle auburn they decry as mouse.
YOu see the same look on women 40 years more than old-enough-to-know-better, bronzing their facelifts and tossing faux-gold manes over their kohl-rimmed eyes. It’s a drag-queen style, but you can see why one would want to vanish defensively behind it. It’s as tough, in its way, as motorbike leathers.
Theoretically attractive as this particular appearance may be to men, this isn’t about attraction: it’s armour.
It’s a way of not looking different, but of blending in. and it carries a message: ‘Yes, I am sexy, but not in a vulnerable way. I put work into this. I may look like a big doll, but only because I choose to.’
It’s fascinating how — in an age when you can get away with just about anything in terms of dress and hair — most of us adopt one disguise or another from a set of pretty standard choices.
Those of us who cringe at Tilda’s tandoori tan and proudly boast how we wouldn’t touch fake bronzer or layer on lashings of make-up, adopt other, equally cliched looks.
Oh, yes we do: not one of us can claim we never adopt one. The fashion industry tries to persuade us that things are new and original every season, but actually the trends simply circulate round small changes of fabric and shape, serving a set of particular cliches of womanhood.
aside from that popular sub-porn, tough egg look, there are plenty of disguises to choose from. You could be the clipped, groomed young professional woman in neat shortish
skirts and click-clack heels; or her much older sister, her hair artfully streaked blonde to disguise the developing grey hairs, dressed in even smarter suits.
Later on, there might be relief in taking up the conventional white perm and cardigan outfit, a signal that you’re a great-grandmother, enjoy your garden, secretly rather fancy Alan Titchmarsh and certainly don’t do that hair- dye nonsense any more.
For the care-free student young, or those who think they are still down with the kids even though they’re knocking 50, there are groovier uniforms: the weird fashion for wearing denim shorts or microskirts over black tights or leggings; the hippie plait and long Fairtrade muslin skirt to show you have soul; or ripped jeans with a designer bomber jacket to signify that the rips are deliberate because you are a bored yummymummy from a £2 million house in London’s Primrose Hill.
You may really be a rich wife, or you may be just pretending. But the point is that you’ve put together an image and it’s probably not original. After all, this look isn’t about identifying yourself, it is hiding. Arming oneself.
Not least against the pitiless gaze of men. We’re still judged, and scored out of ten, and whistled at or insulted routinely in the street.
The character played by the disguised Swinton in the new film is the founder editor of a harsh, cynical magazine for young men. Her tandoori tan and carefully tousled hair are not expressing a private and individual personality, but lining her up with a regiment of similar hot media women who don’t care, earn a lot and call the shots.
In the same way, a sleeker, more modest business suit and smooth hairdo (though probably still blonde) might signal: ‘I am a lawyer/company director/head teacher.’
That black-tights-and-shorts outfit shouts, as seen on writer Caitlin Moran and her many followers: ‘I’m a bit of a maverick, a feminist.
‘I call the shots, I’m dead brainy and soooo funny, and basically still the naughtiest girl in the school. And if you don’t like that, Mr Patriarchy, you can suck it up.’ Alternatively, there is the timeless, modern county lady, Kate Middleton style, saying: ‘Respectable, sporty, kindly, never needing to worry.’
Or, at any age, an untidy borderline Ken Dodd hairdo and voluminous kaftan can let you pass unremarked at a literary festival (one of my own favourite, indeed inevitable, looks).
I suppose that just says — well, in my case at least — ‘I like bright colours, dress in two minutes flat and gave up on fashion in 1972 because I have better things to do with my time.’
Women are brilliant mistresses of disguise. The really clever ones can switch effortlessly from one look to the other. Most of us, though, have one uniform we are confident with and as often as not — and whether or not we want to admit it — it has been copied from someone else, or a film or a magazine.
We may give it a twist, have a signature colour or quirk. But we should perhaps admit that we do it, and not keep mocking men (fun though it is) for their boring business suits and their nervously smartcasual chinos and very wrong jumpers when the office alarms them by announcing that it’s Dress Down Friday.
There have never been fewer rules about dress than there are today — heck, Grayson Perry collected his OBE at the Palace in a midnight blue frock and ostrich feathers. And yet for men and women in daily life, any real individuality, originality, playfulness and acceptance of natural hair and skin and shape seem harder to achieve than ever.
Personally, I am happiest about myself, and those around me, including the men, at this holiday time of year when it gets hot. Bring on the tatty sandshoes, the terrible old holiday T- shirts, the random bits of sailing kit, the gardening trousers, the fearful trodden- on straw hats.
Let’s all get out of uniform and be genuinely playful for a while. And not be imprisoned full-time in any ‘look’ at all.