Soft Serve 💕🌈🍦
Thesis statement:
When I was young, I danced around my room in hot pink tutus and tiaras on a daily basis. Where does this energy go as we grow older? In my own experience, I felt shame towards the typical “girly-girl” aesthetic. There is a massive shift in traditional feminine themes in relevance to a girl’s life. As we grow older, the significance of pink, sequins and glitter become considered frivolous, and therefore unnecessary.
I will be drawing back the curtain on the misogynistic view that hyper-feminine aesthetics in art, design and culture are lacking depth, seriousness or complexity of meaning. My goal is to carve out the feminine space in design within an increasingly masculine world. I want to look at graphic design as Sofia Coppola looks at film. As explained by i-D magazine, “Sofia’s talent as director stretches beyond mere visual fantasy and beauty, because she uses her aesthetic world as a way of exploring the complexities of girlhood.”
For my thesis, I will be reclaiming my own pink, glittery, and downright girly aesthetic. The aesthetic I am portraying is by no means universal, however it connects my personal experience as a permanent Y2k teenage girl and graphic designer. Through a body of work, I will be validating my own female authorship while promoting other feminine works and the femme people behind them.
I created the Soft Serve video as the beginning of conversation about feminine traits and aesthetics in pop culture, media, and as a crutial piece of nostalgia for many people who grew up between 1990–2010.
The music I chose is an ode to Sofia Coppola's 2006 film Marie Antoinette. Sofia Coppola’s entire portfolio as a director has greatly inspired me while adding to the body of work this semester for my thesis. Most of her films offer an unabashed insight of what it is like to be a teenage girl during a specifc world event. Marie Antoinette was a teenager during the French Revolution. The Lisbon sisters in the 1999 film The Virgin Suicides were living through the decline of 1970’s Detroit. The Bling Ring follows wealthy high school students’ heist of celebrity homes during the 2008–9, just following the financial crisis of 2008.
I feel these stories personally relate to me as a young woman living through the current pandemic. It’s frustrating that we can only be trapped in our own narrative, but it is all we have.
I chose the title Soft Serve as an ode to the softness often attributed to the aesthetic of young women, pink, and youth, but serve as a a tribute to the edge and hardness of persevering through tough times. The mental image of soft serve (the ice cream) itself offers a pre-existing concept for viewers to attribute to youth and better times. 🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦🍦
The font I chose to use throughout the video is a font I created for my thesis, also approprietly called soft serve. I knew I wanted to create a font for my thesis since the beginning, and after many variations, trial and error, I came across a belt. The belt was made by Marc Jacobs in 2020 for his Heaven collection. The originial letters and artwork on the belt were designed by artist Shana Saghedi-Ray. I loved the use of soft, gummy characters but in a statement piece. The belt takes up space, and i decided my font needs to as well.
I created the font based off of the five different letters and also used the star as inspiration for the glyphs. I am using this font as a connection between all of my thesis projects. The colors of the belt have also been used as the color pallet in most of my projects.
The type and videos within the video all correlate to eachother in one way or another. I first explore the definition of “the girly-girl” which is:
“to dress and behave in a traditionally feminine style”
Soft Serve then explores the styles of the Rodarte Runway, David Bowie, and my personal favorite, Cher, who all provide a glimpse into the traditionally feminine style while breaking away from traditional gender binaries.
The most important text to note is:
“Gender binaries only realistically represent a small part of who we are”
This statement wraps my entire thesis into a neat little package. Just because a person decides to act, dress or portray in a traditionally feminine way does not conclude that the person is considered frivoulous. The same concept applies to the opposite. Having masculine traits does not equate to a more serious nature. This inspirtation comes directly from an article in Harpers Bazaar where supermodel Emily Ratajkowski “explores what it means to be hyperfeminine.”
“Prejudice against hyper-feminity doesn’t just affect cis women.
Feminine gay men are often ostracised to a higher degree, straight feminine men are ridiculed. Lesbian feminine women are often accused of lying about their sexuality, as hyper-feminine people must be interested in men. Trans women and men struggle to either conform to or be accepted to these optional labels of femininity and masculinity, too.
The truth is, gender binaries are wrongly entrenched in our society. While they realistically represent a small part of who we are, they have wrongly become a definitive indicator of who we are as people. Whether that’s accusing trans women of not being “feminine enough” to be who they truthfully are, or assuming that hyper-feminine characters cannot be successful in STEM careers. It is playing a bigger role than necessary.”
Being hyper-feminine in an increasingly masculine world is a strength that needs to be celebrated. Dressing girly is a form of rebellion. It’s not about the traditions in conventional beauty, but about the stories that lie beneath them. Femininity is about acceptance.
