All round champion of juggling all things related to fashion styling, Melissa Maxted-Henderson teamed up with the talented photographer Bianca Theron, fashion designer Anmari Honiball and illustrator Alettie Marx on a project interrogating the role of women and engaging with gender as a mode of constraint. Their visual narrative ‘Lady Like’ draws attention to the various ways femininity is assigned particular attributes through the use of fabric, stitching, styling, photography and painting.
The title ‘Lady Like’ can be interpreted as both a question and a description. In the first instance, it asks who women have to be a lady like. In this sense feminine qualities have been identified in another and other women are asked to perform femininity in the same way. This calls attention to the way in which femininity is given flesh through action. In the second instance, viewers are forced to engage with what constitutes “lady-like” clothing and demeanor. Here contradicting interpretations of what it means to be a lady come into play. The word ‘lady’ is heavily loaded with interpretations and misrepresentations which can bear down heavily on women’s shoulders as they play these roles and sometimes challenge them.
Models were styled in loose fitting garments constructed with delicate fabrics such as netting and lace, flowing over curves, exposing their vintage underwear beneath, bringing to the fore the question of how and who women are made to stitch themselves together for within the attributes they are assigned. The combination of sensitive photography and soft styling made the heart of each image the woman being photographed, focusing on the motion of the woman and the feminine narrative.
This collaborate effort constructed a visual account of femininity provides guiding questions in its probe which offer a sense of women as subjects; women as questioning and active agents despite the constraints within which they operate:
“Like the ways we’re hemmed in but the stitches are different. Like can we breathe beyond the seams? Like how much is woven in place? Are you putting it on or taking it off? Like performing against polite praise. Will it be a nice trim if it’s shaven? Like I’ll touch you before I touch myself. Like to be in the presence of hunger. Like the language of survival can’t be spoken. Like I open my mouth anyway…
Is that the pattern?
I won’t make your signs of understanding…
Unlike”
