Dressing and Undressing in "Dirty Dancing"

The book The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture, published in 2013, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, is a collection of scholarly essays about the movie.

The cover of the book
"The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture"

I already have published seven blog articles about the book and its articles:

Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture

Is Dirty Dancing a Musical?

Straightness and Dirtiness in Dirty Dancing

Generic Hybridity in Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing as a Teenage Rite-of-Passage Film

Dirty Dancing as Reagan-era Cinema and "Reaganite Entertainment"

Anachronistic Music in Dirty Dancing

Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "Dressing and Undressing in Dirty Dancing": Consumption, Gender, and Visual Culture in the 1980s", written by Pamela Church Gibson.

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Pamela Church Gibson

The book identifies Pamela Church Gibson as follows:

Pamela Church Gibson is reader in cultural and historical studies at the London College of Fashion. She has published widely on film, fashion, gender and consumption.

Her edited anthologies include: The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford University Press, 1998), Dirty Looks: Women, Power, Pornography (BFI Publishing, 1993), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Exploration and Analysis (Routledge, 2001) and More Dirty Looks: Gender Power, Pornography (RH, 2004). Her most recent book is Fashion and Celebrity Culture (Berg, 2011). She is currently co editing a new anthology, Fashion Cultures Two for Routledge and preparing a new monograph.

She is Principal Editor of the journal Film, Fashion and Consumption and in July 2012 organized the first conference of the European Popular Culture Association of which she is currently president.

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In her article about Dirty Dancing, she focuses on the mid-1980s, when the movie was made and released (1987). The popular culture of the mid-1980s resonated with the movie.

In particular, the culture's new celebration of male physical beauty resonated with the movie's sometimes semi-nude presentation of the actor Patrick Swayze.

... in the mid-1980s, most notable to many [people] were the new centrality and the changed configurations of masculinity within visual culture. Pictures of semi-naked me were everywhere. Their giant torsos were emblazoned across billboards, and their perfectly formed faces looked out from the covers of the new glossy magazines, swiftly created to tempt customers in this new climate of consumption. ....

We need to contextualize the film [Dirty Dancing] within this changing climate, with its altered marketplace and shifting gender politics, where men were newly visible, women actively seeking power, and a new liberalism was emerging to counter the excess of this "designer decade".

All these factors are reflected and ... are carefully yoked within the diegesis of Dirty Dancing. The film's appeal and longevity may be attributed to its combination of four particular elements within a single text:

* the visual codes around the "new masculinity"

* a proactive heroine

* impeccably liberal politics ... and

* deployment of retro costuming, styling, and music.

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Church Gibson's article does not include any illustrations, but it does include references to fashion advertisements of the mid-1980s. For example, she mentions wall posters produced by the Athena company. One popular poster showed a shirtless, muscular man cradling a baby. Such a physically beautiful, apparently sensitive man -- "a new man" -- appealed to young women.

Church Gibson describes Johnny's appeal as follows:

... important for our purposes is the way in which Johnny s New Man is styled and costumed: he is initially presented to us in the then very potent fashions of a mythical, and hybridized, American past. And as a retro-styled, 1980s male pin-up, Johnny dances, throughout, in and under the gaze of Baby, the most active of cinematic heroine, an idealistic, independent, and resourceful girl.

Although the movie took place in 1963, the movie audience was watching and appreciating it from the culture of 1987.

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Church Gibson mentions also photographs of actor Richard Gere taken by photographer Herb Ritts in the mid-1980s.

A popular photograph of Richard Gere in the mid-1980s

Church Gibson mentions other such photographs of that time, but I am not motivated to look for more of them on the Internet. These two photographs should be enough to get the idea.

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Church Gibson goes on and on about young women wanting to look at and chase after handsome men.

The new visual currency of the decade [the 1980s] provides men who are there to be looked at; young women might now feel that they could exercise their seeming new power and perhaps move from looking, gazing, and longing to action. At a historical moment when it was still assumed that "woman is depicted to create appetite, not to have any of her own", Baby's "appetite" actually creates the narrative.

A movie convention is that the male character admires the female character's physical beauty. In Dirty Dancing, however, the admiring character is Baby, who stares at Johnny. He often is shirtless and is even bare naked for a moment. He always looks beautiful in his clothing; she often looks homely.

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Baby is not a remarkable beauty, but much her 1960s clothing is delightful for the female audiences in the 1980s.

She ties up her hirts in front to reveal her taut midriff. This loks back to both Grigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn. .... She [Baby] already possesses striped Breton T-shirts, which evoke ... the androgynous chic of Coco Chanel ....

She shows up for her first lesson with Johnny in a loose, checked shirt and neat jeans. We see, across the sequence of lessons, her swift adoption of skimpy vest tops, midriff-bearing blouses, and two-piece outfits, while her shorts get progressively shorter.

But it is Johnny, not Baby, who is gradually disrobed as the narrative progresses.

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The 1980s movie audiences perceive the 1950s and early 1960s to be an amusing, light-hearted period. The juvenile delinquents and rebels are not a concerning social problem, but rather merely comical stereotypes. The 1980s audiences viewed such characters through the prism of the movie Grease and the television series Happy Days. 

Young girls may watch it [Grease] and know the words to all the songs, but they don't want to emulate Sandy or to end up with Danny. ... The "retro-fantasy" here operates in a lighthearted way ...

The 1980s audiences are amused and even delighted by -- but emotionally detached from -- that earlier period.

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Church Gibson comments on Baby's clothing in relation to her father.

When Baby goes to confront her father after the disclosure of her sexual activities, she is back in simple cotton frock and cardigan, just as when she first heard the siren call of the soul music from the staff quarters. Now she can tell him that his liberal politics are severely limited.

Baby puts on her simple cotton frock and cardigan
in order to apologize to and talk with her father

After Baby's humbling conversation with her father, she must dress in humbling underwear, described by Church Gibson as follows:

After her humbling conversation with her father,
chastened Baby dresses in 1963 underwear.

So she ... must be chastened, and thus we see her donning genuine period underwear of the 1960s to replace the tactile Calvin Klein-like garments we glimpsed before.As she prepares for the last night celebration at Kellerman's, she is seen in stiff petticoats, rolling up nylon stockings -- imprisoning herself. She has been relegated to seemingly restrictive dress and submissive behavior -- put back in the corner.

Well written!

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Here is a key passage from the article's conclusion.

Surely the real secret of the film's longevity is its particular form of assurance for young women: conventional glamour is unnecessary, parents can be defeated, principles affirmed.

The "cool" young man, punished and humiliated, nevertheless returns to acknowledge Baby's power, crooning publicly, "I owe it all to you." Even in 1987, when many were already asking if there really was a New Man, the film showed female audiences that, yes, he did exist. Those who watched knew that he would come to rescue him from their own corner, and lift them safely upwards, high above parents, sisters and rivals.

Many of the article's passages are very well written.

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I did not find this article on the Internet. As far as I know, it is available to read only in the book.