It's the height of the summer season and some lucky ones among us may be on holiday while others may be at home, maybe self-isolating because of Covid-19. We all need some kind of distraction, though, so let's pick an icon for this Sunday - actor and samba singer Carmen Miranda - and ponder a bit about her looks.
The embodiment of the Tropicalia trend, Carmen Miranda is certainly an icon of style with her signature turbans decorated with feathers, ruffles of fabrics and fruit, colourful and sequinned gowns, oversized jewellery pieces and peep toe style platform heels inspired by Portuguese clogs.
Usually covered in sequins, rhinestones and stones, the shoes, originally commissioned by Miranda to an orthopaedic cobbler in Rio de Janeiro to make her look higher (she was just 5 ft tall), sparked a trend after the star started wearing them.
While she definitely created a colourful aesthetic that appealed to Hollywood in the '40s, her ensembles were also deemed controversial as they were inspired by the outfits of Afro-Brazilian female street vendors in colonial times and in particular by the lace tops, gold jewellery and cloth turbans of the Baianas (women from Bahia) and by the trays of fruit and produce that these women often carried on their heads. Miranda turned their clothes around, becoming her own designer, embellishing her gowns, shoes and turbans and transforming them into the main ingredients of a very glamorous fashion cocktail.
Miranda's turbans were indeed made with more glamorous fabrics such as lamé and the fruit was obviously not real (for more fake fruit watch her in Busby Berkeley's 1943 "The Gang's All Here" (1943), as she sings "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" among chorus girls creating a choreography with giant bananas, an image that then inspired the logo for United Fruit Company's Chiquita Banana), so, in a way, her look was a sort of exercise in appropriation that became extremely appealing in the US with wealthy white ladies.
As she became popular, she ended up endorsing a variety of products including costume jewellery, turbans, and platform shoes sold in department stores (Bonwit Teller department store even had mannequins with faces and poses reproducing Miranda's), but also General Electric radios.
Portuguese-born Miranda (her family immigrated to Brazil in 1910 shortly after she was born and her real name was Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha) turned therefore into a fashion icon and an ambassador of samba and of Brazilian identity for the regime of Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas. Yet she was also considered as shocking and controversial for having appropriated the Baianas' looks and for playing the stereotypical role of the Latin charmer, often ending up becoming a caricature of her own self.
So if you want to channel the tropicalia look as channelled by this icon, do so, but first explore Carmen Miranda's story and remember that those extravagantly decorated turbans and frilly multi-coloured dresses hide quite a few questions about identity, native culture and appropriation.
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