Image: Diane Guais, courtesy of the artist.
I learned about ‘girl power’ before I knew what power was. It was like a candy necklace – meant to adorn, not to actually consume. My family couldn’t afford cable so I had my best friend, who was Taiwanese and lived an hour away, record three hours of MTV on a VHS tape for me. Everything I knew about pop culture was relegated to this one afternoon of programming that aired one day in 1996. The first music video I saw was of the Spice Girls’ Wannabe. I loved the archetypes – the innocent one, the glamorous one, the sexy one, the sporty one, the wild one– all the ideal categories of womanhood in one super-girl group. It wasn’t exactly empowering, but it was energising. I wanted to wear glittery hot pants and babydoll dresses and platform boots and stilettos and, most of all, I wanted to be someone who got invited to the kinds of places where I could show up dressed like that and be stared at in the good kind of way.
I had been stared at plenty of times, but it was always in the bad way. My first year of high school, I was boyish and underdeveloped. Most people I passed in the hallways at school made a point to let me know I was ugly – obscenely so. It didn’t help that I was Chinese in a mostly white neighbourhood and wore vintage dresses from my mother’s closet.
Image: Diane Guais, courtesy of the artist.
Like many outcasts living in the suburbs in the late Nineties, I got into alternative music. Later, I would renounce all mainstream music and declare myself a Punk, but in 1997, my attempts at impudence were confined to listening to a cassette tape of No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom (1995). I especially liked that song where Gwen Stefani dressed up like a boy and sang, “I’m just a girl / all pretty and petite”, because it was something to aspire to. It was meant to be a feminist anthem in the vein of girl power, but I listened to it longingly. Wouldn’t it be nice to be the kind of girl men wanted to take care of? To be possessed by love, I thought, was to be free.
Long before she sang about badly wanting to be a wife, Gwen’s signature style was a cropped ‘wifebeater’ with her name stitched out in rhinestones. She often wore her platinum dyed hair in victory rolls, a hairstyle that resembled the exhaust rolls World War Two fighter planes left behind in the sky. In the Forties, this look was popularised by Hollywood pinups as a show of patriotism, as well as by women who had to enter the workforce during the war and needed a practical way to keep their hair away from their faces. She often paired her throwback victory rolls with Sporty Spice-style track pants. A girly-girl who could throw down with the guys – the ultimate pinnacle of femininity.
"I wanted to be someone who got invited to the kinds of places where I could show up dressed like that and be stared at in the good kind of way."
At some point, I roped my best (and only) friend – who lived an hour away – to make an MTV-style variety show. I wanted to call it We’re Just Girls! It would air weekly and feature skits centred on the trials and travails of two outrageous girls navigating the world of boys, fashion and school. Our theme song was, naturally, No Doubt’s I’m Just a Girl. We set-up my father’s camcorder on a tripod and danced hyperactively while wearing virginal little girl white undershirts that revealed our soft bellies, and low- slung baggy cargo pants that only emphasised how unfit we were for physical combat. I tried to stitch my name, ‘JENNY’, with pink thread on my white tank, but ran out of space at ‘JEN’. It was better, I reasoned, to rhyme with ‘Gwen’. We were going to do a whole bit about why people called these white tank tops ‘wifebeaters’, but quickly got more invested in this sketch about a teenage girl with terrible eyesight who mistakes a literal toddler for a teen heart-throb and is so lovestruck that she absent-mindedly crashes a truck on her way to prom with her best friend in the passenger seat. As the two girls lie in a ditch, slowly dying, the girl with the terrible eyesight reveals that she can die happy because she met her soulmate. Her best friend informs her that he was, in fact, a three-year-old boy. This was what made us laugh. We had nowhere to go with it.
When I was a teen, I just assumed Gwen Stefani was five years older than me, but looking her up now, I see, in fact, that she’s a whole decade and a half older than me. All that time … a woman in girly drag. She was then what I am now. Nowadays, it’s easier for young people to record themselves, to channel all that sublimated creative energy into a product for consumption and share it immediately with the world. Scrolling through Instagram now, I see nothing has changed. Reading a long caption about how beauty standards are harmful and bullshit from a conventionally beautiful woman creates the same cognitive dissonance I felt when I was a teen: that yes, everyone is suffering… but still, it is received differently coming from a woman so pretty and petite.
All video stills: Diane Guais, courtesy of the artist.
Jenny Zhang’s new book of poetry “My Baby First Birthday” is forthcoming from Tin House Books in May 2020.
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 65, out now.
Alongside the launch of our spring issue putting glamour under the microscope, SLEEK is dropping our “No one cares if you dress up now” tees. Available to purchase here.