Why Shouldn’t I Be Adored?
‘ Why Shouldn’t I Be Adored?’, is an exploration of blonde female role models and the increased worthiness some feel when imitating the hair style or costume of the people they see to be visually aspiration.
How often, in order to gain the admiration of others, we might feel the need to look more like other people who we see to be perceived as beautiful, when it is actually often the projection of self confidence that will achieve this - and the consideration as to whether the confidence that arises during the fleeting moments of dressing up contributes to or prolongs the journey to self-contentment.
There’s not many people I feel the need to imitate, being as individual and original as I can be (however futile) has always been a concern, but there have been two cases I can remember clearly.
The first:- chopping my long hair off at the end of my first year of uni to a similar style as a picture of Marilyn that I had put on my wall (then doing the same thing again when I played Roxie). I’d always had very long hair - it was 2/3rds of my personality - but in gaining independence and finding myself away from home I felt the need to appear changed. I adored the picture (/idea) of Marilyn and the complex mix of vulnerability and awe with which her history is told (a naive perspective). I saw her to be a blonde(important), broken, beautiful human - it’s how she has been marketed. For my 20th birthday I dressed up as her. The hair and the costume, all attempts to be closer to the perception of her. She appears to be everything that I’d, at various stages, loved to have appeared to have been too. Sadly, contentment doesn’t derive from ‘good’ hair (or body) and conviction in self is delayed if you feel more comfortable living as a string of fictional characters than as yourself.
The second:- Inspired by Gillian Anderson’s character Stella Gibson in ‘The Fall’. After watching the programme for the first time, I bought a new work wardrobe of silk shirts, black trousers and started wearing heels in the office again with some enthusiasm. To glide, be unashamedly feminine, assertive, self-confident, look put together and have a kick-ass career - all with a bouncy blonde blow dry. Who wouldn’t want to be her? I was sort of relieved to find the clip from an interview in which Gillian Anderson expresses the same sentiment of the character.