Lorraine Henry King
As a practice-based researcher in film costume, textile art and surface adornment my research interrogates the way skin interacts with an action hero’s costume and how that reading shapes who the audience reads as, or believes to be heroic. Skin as costume, or more precisely, as a costuming device, is a well-respected area of study within the film and theatre costume practitioners’ community. Using the actor’s skin and body by using partial dress, nudity, painted skin or having the actors gain or lose muscle and body mass are all considered elements of costuming that communicates character.
Black skin (and all the shades of brown skin that encompasses) as costume is explored through the associations with the colour brown and our interactions with post-colonial discourses of stereotyping around black skin and systemic racism. Earthy browns, usually recede whilst lighter browns and bright flowerlike colours blaze before it. Brown is associated with packaging materials, waste, dirt and faeces. The experiments and embellishments in my textiles work interrogates when browns shift in our perception into being valued and precious through transformation into the realms of being burnished, polished, molten or metallic.
" Brown is associated with packaging materials, waste, dirt and faeces. The experiments and embellishments in my textiles work interrogates when browns shift in our perception into being valued and precious through transformation into the realms of being burnished, polished, molten or metallic".
This shift supports the contextualisation of precious brown and by extension, skin tones within a new framework. My manipulation of leather, twine, layering of voiles with text and sequins used as skin can be linked to Conor’s theories on ‘skinshine’ with associations of ‘forms of toughened or impermeable skin’ to produce a ‘reassuring condition of impenetrability (Conor 2004:53). The experiments speak to precious, metallic and flexible skin like armour with Afro-futuristic overtones.
It is because white skin is rarely discussed that its ties to heroism and impenetrable skin are invisibly embedded assumptions and readings within costume design. These are only highlighted when contrasted to the poor regard for black skin. White skin is ‘placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard’ (Dyer 1997:3) thus outranking bodies of colour. This black/white binary is relevant, but I am more concerned with colourism and the myriad of beiges and brown pushing and jostling for attention in my journal entries, artwork, planning, and notebooks, that all sit alongside blueprints awaiting later development.
As a Black British woman, I am studying Hollywood superheroes and challenging the limited interactions with positive black masculinities. The international dissemination of Hollywood's limited and negative associations with black masculinity means many issues around skin colour need to be unpacked. Misreadings need to be exposed and challenged across every aspect of the arts before the reading of the film costumes, textiles or surface embellishment I create could be read equally heroic on a black body as they automatically are on a white body.
'As a Black British woman, I am studying Hollywood superheroes and challenging the limited interactions with positive black masculinities'.
Reference:
Connor, S. 2012. The Book of Skin. Second Edition. London: Reaktion Books.
Dyer,R. 1997 White Routledge: Abingdon
Instagram: @lorrainehenryking
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