Embodying Withdrawal:Abjection and the Popularity of Heroin Chic

The advertisement begins with a woman's voice speaking the word, "Obsession," as we watch a muscular man pose for the camera's eye. The word "fascination" flashes across the screen, quickly followed by "fetish" and "preoccupation." Accompanying these are images of a woman's naked back, a nude woman face down on a couch, and the man, again. We realize this is not a "real" advertisement when the male model looks worriedly into his briefs, as "preoccupation" is spoken. The next shot is again of the woman's back. This time she is swaying rhythmically and urgently moaning. The voice asks, "Why are nine out of ten women dissatisfied with some aspect of their own bodies?" The camera pulls back and we see the woman retch into a toilet. The voice answers its own question by stating, "The beauty industry is the beast." [1]

This "uncommercial," made by the media watchdog collective Adbusters, is a wry spoof of Calvin Klein's television advertisements for Obsession perfume. More than merely a clever parody, though, this advertisement points to a significant trend. The fashion industry, with its array of models, magazines and photographers, has been under serious attack in recent years for its portrayal of women, which groups like Adbusters and About-Face [2] see as leading to eating disorders, poor self-image, violence against women and drug use. These first and last accusations are leveled most heavily at the style of fashion photography known as "heroin chic," which displays, without airbrushing or heavy cosmetics, the extremely thin faces and bodies of female and male models in withdrawn poses and in urban settings. These attributes, which are exaggerated almost to the point of absurdity, are seen as invoking drug use, earning the style its name. The backlash against heroin chic even gained support from former President Bill Clinton, who proclaimed that "the glorification of heroin is not creative, it's destructive; it's not beautiful, it is ugly. And this is not about art, it's about life and death." [3]

That heroin chic has elicited such vehement reactions and can be parodied in uncommercials and real commercials [4] suggests its power and pervasiveness—a parody is only possible when its subject matter is well known to the viewer. But more than just an eye-catching style, heroin chic works as a means of advertising in part because it expresses the anxieties of the American social body by inscribing them on the physical bodies viewed for consumption in the popular media. [5] What we see in heroin chic photographs are powerful images of women [6] that play with the idea of desire to gain the attention of particular market niches: young adults and sophisticated middle class urbanites. Heroin chic pictures, which differ markedly from classic fashion photography, show emaciated female bodies in ways that often are uninviting and not conventionally attractive. The meanings of these images—withdrawal, a lack of desire, abjection—are surprising in a medium intended to persuade people to buy goods. The fact that this withdrawal, this corporeal abnegation, is written on women's physical forms, is particularly intriguing. Western culture and philosophy have long portrayed "woman" as the consummate consumer and as the desiring "body," two positions undermined by heroin chic. [7]

Much of the media has viewed heroin chic as a style that exploded into existence in the early 1990s. However, this ignores the two trends from which it draws. The first is the drug that lent the style its name. Heroin, which has long been associated with the urban lower classes, has seen an upsurge in use in the 1990s. What has been most commented upon, however, is the fact that heroin's newest users are white middle class youth and young adults. [8] This upsurge has coincided with a boom in the portrayal of heroin use in popular culture, especially in film. Taken together, these images create a trope of the junkie as the ultimate, authentic critic who withdraws from society. The second inspiration for heroin chic is the art and fashion photography of the 1970s, characterized by its realistic style and gritty subject matter. The subjects of these photos are the socially marginalized—the poor, the transvestite, the drug user—"others" who capture attention because they are rarely seen at all in the mainstream media.

Fashion photographers in the 1990s have brought these trends together to create heroin chic. While it began as a style used in haute couture magazine spreads, heroin chic soon was being used to sell lower-priced clothes, accessories, makeup and music. I will argue that heroin chic expresses a sense of hostility to middle-class American ideals, particularly consumerism. Advertisers and marketers have linked this with a romanticized view of lower-class life. While linking rebelliousness and consumption has been a trend since the 1960s, heroin chic differs markedly from the rebellion that the counterculture represented. [9] Both the counterculture and heroin chic expressed disgust with consumption and middle-class mores. In both cases, this aversion can be seen as a pointed critique. Heroin chic, however, unlike the counterculture, is neither politicized nor a social movement. Instead, marketers have created "a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the...everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption." [10] By using these images to sell commodities, advertisers and editors are enticing the alienated magazine reader to consume goods in order to become a member of a community of social rebels and outsiders, which has been coded as "hip" and desirable. One of the major ironies of 20th century American culture is this fact—that the public is fully aware that advertising is manipulative, yet still buys into its claims. [11]

In order to engage with these complex issues, I will examine images of heroin use in contemporary popular culture. Then, I will trace the development of heroin chic out of the art and fashion photography of the 1970s, which will lead into an examination of one specific heroin chic image. This picture (Figure 6) was chosen due to its wide availability in American fashion magazines and its use of the major characteristics of heroin chic: an extremely thin model, a sense of abjection and a style evocative of photographic realism. Finally, I will examine heroin chic's paradoxical ability to stimulate consumer desire.

Tragic Magic: Popular Images of Heroin

While heroin has had a long history in the U.S., it has become particularly associated with the 1990s, due, in part, to increasing numbers of users. For example, according to the Federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 1,250 more people were admitted to hospital emergency rooms after ingesting heroin in 1994 than in 1988, bringing the total to 27,300. [12] "By rough government estimates," Newsweek reported in 1996, "U.S. heroin consumption has doubled since the mid-'80s." [13] But statistics alone do not explain the linkage between the decade and the drug. Contemporary popular culture depicts heroin as a drug used to withdraw from the deadening morass of middle class life into something seemingly more authentic. Images of heroin, heroin use and the bodies of heroin users take on a particular cachet and representational value, which creates a trope that has been adapted by heroin chic photographers, many of whom have admitted to heroin use themselves. Thus, heroin use informs popular culture as it is informed by it.

Historically, heroin has been associated with urban slums and with "the rebel." After being criminalized under the Harrison Act of 1914, it shifted from being a "gentleman's vice" to the drug of the urban slums, connected first with Irish- and Italian-Americans and then with African-Americans. [14] In the post-war period, the image of the poor black junkie preying on society became a widely used and recognized one.

However, there was another aspect of this vision which coded the heroin user as the "cool" artistic rebel, embodied in jazz musicians, like Charlie Parker. [15] For certain groups, like the Beats, jazz was seen as a vital and authentic cultural expression, in opposition to 1950s consensus society. [16] While the Beats may have been fascinated by the (assumed) outsiderism of jazz culture, for the community of largely African-American jazz musicians, heroin use signified social vanguardism and power. [17]

The settings of the photos as well as the implication of heroin use convey a lower-class lifestyle, into the midst of which are placed expensive clothes and fashion models. These connotations of wealth amongst intimations of poverty suggest a fall from grace, a desire for life on the edge and a fascinating incongruity that draws the viewer in. Although heroin before the 1990s was widely depicted in film, television, and mainstream media as a drug used by blacks, heroin chic models are almost universally white. Heroin chic, it seems, could only become a culturally meaningful style when predicated on an abstract notion of blackness, one that must remain invisible. [18] Placing black models in lower-class settings that evoke heroin use would be to create a situation that seemed too "real." It would conform to racist social expectations, and would reduce the possibility of identification between the ad's target audience—the angst-ridden white, middle class hipster—and the product. Yet, the sense of style in the photos, the use of haute couture dress, and the attitude of the models all come together to suggest "coolness," and particularly the coolness of the heroin-using rebel. These models are "safe" because of their whiteness, but exude a form of "coolness" potentially coded as "black" which makes them desirable. [19]

Although the typical heroin-related overdose in the 1990s was of a poor white male in his thirties, [20] the association between heroin and the black lower classes still exists. The tragedy in the Oscar-winning film Traffic, for example, is the use of heroin by Catherine Wakefield, the upper-middle-class white daughter of the nation's new drug czar. Although the majority of the users we see in the film are white, when Catherine and her prep school boyfriend need to buy their drugs, they go into black urban neighborhoods. When the children of the white upper middle class begin to dabble in heroin, the danger is more than physical. They are also crossing racial and class boundaries—as pointedly expressed in a scene where the black drug dealer has sex with the nearly unconscious Catherine. [21]

The film's depiction of white users mirrors their increasing numbers in the early 1990s. As Ann Miller, the director of a drug treatment center in Portland, Oregon commented, "We see kids you don't expect to use it [heroin] because it was once considered a ghetto drug." [22] Added to this were the high-profile heroin-related deaths of a number of musicians and actors including such anti-heroes as Kurt Cobain and Shannon Hoon. These celebrities, like the black jazz musicians before them, were known for their rebelliousness and disaffection from middle class life. As I have suggested, heroin has been imagined in a number of complex ways: as the drug of African-Americans living in ghettoes, of brilliant jazz musicians, and, increasingly, of white middle class anti-heroes, people who see themselves, or want to be seen, as outsiders.

With heroin use, and by extension its representation in fashion photography, the "degree of disaffiliation from workaday respectable oppression and its assertion of the desirability of labor...is marked on the surface of the body." [23] From weight loss to track marks, heroin use mars the body, physically showing the user's retreat from the conventions of middle class life. The desire to retreat from society is quite literally "embodied," whether in "real" or fictional representations.

The question of whether the real drug user's perceptions of heroin use creates the fictional one or vice versa is difficult to ascertain. What is more important, however, is that both draw on the same trope. Heroin is the drug of an outsider's life on the edge, one that is marked by authenticity. [24] While a concern with the authentic is by no means restricted to American culture, Miles Orvell has argued that Americans desire images of authenticity even when they realize that such images are fake, or what Orvell calls "factitious." [25]

This search for authenticity arises in the Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll's personal account of coming of age in New York City in the 1960s, adapted into a 1995 movie. Carroll began using heroin at the age of thirteen and quickly became a serious addict. As Carroll writes in his diary, "People are always branding junkies the slob wastes of society. Not so, chumps. The real junkies should be raised up for saying fuck you to all this shit city jive, for going on with all the risks and hassles and con, willing to face the rap," unlike the rich or middle class dabbler in the drug culture who is merely looking for a thrill. [26] The real junkies are those whose lives are already on the edge—of poverty, of society—while Carroll disdains the very people who are supposed to find heroin chic appealing, namely, middle class people looking for a seemingly authentic slice of "real life."

Basketball Diaries relies upon a popular cultural trope of the honest junkie whose outsider position gives him/her the ability to see through society's pretexts and who refuses to be part of the illusion. While other equally marginalized members of the lower class may try to work within the system to succeed on its terms, the junkie denies the system itself. The user withdraws from society and is seen as authentic due to limited social and economic possibilities as well as a rejection of bourgeois ideals. At the same time, heroin is always shown as an individualized drug. It does not lead to increased social interaction or a desire to change society, but instead to a definitive retreat away from the social. It is the individuation of the heroin trope that makes it ideal as a style to be used in the marketplace. Advertisers and marketers use heroin chic to tap into feelings of disgust and withdrawal. The goal is to create "primary media communities," which Joseph Turow argues makes consumers "feel that a magazine, TV channel, newspaper, radio station...reaches people like them, resonates with their personal beliefs, and helps them chart their position into the larger world." [27] Individualized purchases, then, become a way to enter into this community of disengaged strangers, and help, as well, to contain these aversions within the mainstream.

Realism in Fashion and Art Photography

When fashion magazine editors, clothing stores and designers realized that young "hip" people with disposable incomes felt that they were alienated, they yearned to find ways to appeal to them. But it was these market segments in particular that had become increasingly savvy about advertising and inured to its claims. [28] To combat this, the fashion industry decided that "an arrest of vision is required at all costs—even at the expense of accentuating the alien quality of the clothing itself." [29] This arrest of vision was achieved by turning to the styles of the fashion and art photography of the 1970s for inspiration. While both genres were characterized by gritty realism, the art photography centered on images of the poor and socially marginalized, including drug addicts and transsexuals, while fashion photography placed models in scenarios evocative of violence and sexuality. Heroin chic brings these two strands together by placing models in situations evocative of poverty and drug use and photographing them in a realistic style.

With aesthetic roots in the realist mode made famous by such artists as Jacob Riis and Margaret Bourke-White, art photography in the 1970s differed from this tradition through its emphasis on scenes of intimacy and the politics of private life. [30] Nan Goldin's work is exemplary. Goldin rose to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, becoming known for her realistic photographs of her friends, which spawned a traveling slide show called "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," three books, and a number of exhibitions at major art museums throughout the country. The friends in these pictures included drag queens, drug users, and a host of young people living on the edges of poverty. These dejected figures were posed in seedy settings, and seemed more like snapshots than composed art. As Goldin wrote in the book which accompanied the "Ballad of Sexual Dependency," "I don't select people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life." [31]

Fashion photographers like Deborah Turbeville, Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton borrowed this realistic style. As Judith Williamson has noted, advertisements and fashion photographs only gain meaning through their "not-being" something else. [32] Guy Bourdin's (in)famous advertisement for Charles Jourdan shoes, which simply shows a pair of shoes lying on a street near the bloody chalk outline of a woman's body, [33] startles us because it defies the conventions of fashion photography. It brings together the police or newspaper photograph and fashion, disturbing our expectations and our conceptions of "good taste."

At the same time, however, this gritty realism is tempered by the viewer's knowledge that these are professionally created images. While they play with being representations of the authentic, we are also aware of their fictitious nature. The artistry of the pictures, and their use of line, shadow, color (or its lack) and form, beautifies them, drawing the viewer into this artfully created illusion. Like heroin chic, these pictures "conveyed a sense of alienation, despair and suffering" that designers saw as distracting from the actual clothes themselves. [34] Cathy Griggers suggests that this situation became acceptable because fashion photography moved away from a focus on displaying clothes. It was redefined "to catch and engage the reader's attention, to hold a subgroup of readers in the audience who enjoy reading fashion parodically, and to capitalize on the average middle-class reader's ambiguous relation both to the commodity sign and to her own subjective positions within the socio-discursive field." [35] Fashion photography, by becoming more referential of contemporary social debates and issues, engendered a more nuanced relationship with the image and stimulated desire by acknowledging the viewer's savviness.

By the 1980s, fashion photography returned to the luxurious settings and voluptuous models of 1950s haute couture. By the next decade these trends had reversed themselves and the styles of the 1970s came back into Vogue. Suddenly, minimalism, austerity and a somber palette of colors were the hot fashion looks. Cutting edge fashion magazines in Britain, like i-D and The Face, began combining the art and fashion photography of the 1970s. A bevy of young fashion photographers including David and Mario Sorrenti, Corinne Day, Juergen Teller, Craig McDean, and David Sims, became associated with this style which moved across the Atlantic in 1990-1. In the United States, it was first seen in high fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar, W and Interview. Soon a number of clothing companies, most controversially Calvin Klein, as well as Matsuda, Miu Miu, Prada and Hugo were also using the style. [36] Enter heroin chic.

Reading Heroin Chic

Designed to gain attention, the pictures were characterized by shocking images of emaciated bodies, withdrawn demeanors, sparse cosmetics, and realistic settings. Figure 6, an advertisement for Macy's department stores found in the June 1996 issue of Harper's Bazaar, offers a representative example. The barely dressed woman in the photograph is shockingly thin, with a body that is nearly flat, except for the jutting concavities of her hipbones, collarbones, and cheekbones. This slender body is childlike, without adult female features, denoting it as sexually unavailable (and in certain terms unattractive) to the viewer. Furthermore, she is completely disinterested in the viewer or her surroundings. Yet this is an advertisement designed to make people "desire" Macy's. How do thinness, abjection and realism accomplish this, and how do they influence prevailing conceptions of female body image and sexuality?

As Susan Bordo has noted, "female slenderness...has a wide range of sometimes contradictory meanings in contemporary representations, the imagery of the slender body suggesting powerlessness and contraction of female social space in one context and autonomy and freedom in the next." [37] For our culture, the thinness of heroin chic models must be seen in the framework of the rising numbers of women suffering from eating disorders such as anorexia, which is estimated to affect one in every 200-250 women between thirteen and twenty-two years of age and which has been blamed in part on photographs like Figure 6. [38]

Psychologists view anorexia and bulimia, which often occur after sexual abuse, as a rejection of the body, particularly the sexually developed and attractive body. [39] One anorectic felt that sexuality was "an abominable business" and that being thin allowed her to be "androgynous." [40] While the destruction of the physical body in response to sexual degradation and violence is distressing, images of women who are not attractive in a classically sexual fashion are powerful as they allow women to be imagined outside the boundaries of childbirth and motherhood. As Katharine Wallerstein writes, the models' "thin, withdrawn bodies and melancholic demeanors enact not only emptiness but a deliberate refusal to be filled, fulfilled, satisfied...[which] suggest[s] a counter-social, rebellious act." [41]

In heroin chic photography, thinness represents a very particular situation, which correlates strongly with the idea of the anorectic's renunciation of the body. The model in Figure 6 does not seem to be struggling to control her desire for food—she simply seems to have no desire at all. [42] This is a body made of denial—denial of nourishment, denial of an adult figure, and a denial of female sexuality, associated with hips and breasts. This body refuses to become what society expects of it: a mother, a mature woman, and a consumer.

The refusal of food consumption can be extended to goods as well. Although these photographs are used to sell apparel, we never see these models enjoying the garments they wear. As Erving Goffman has pointed out in his seminal book Gender Advertisements, women are generally shown touching themselves or their clothes, expressing a sense of satisfaction through and because of them, leading the reader to desire that same satisfaction and those commodities. [43] This gratification through goods is notably absent in heroin chic, which further denotes rebelliousness. These women refuse to behave as women in ads often do, suggesting opposition to common cultural conventions of women as mindless automatons who receive instant fulfillment from objects.

While thinness represents one aspect of withdrawal, another comes from the demeanor of the models and the use of photography itself. Diana Fuss writes, "Photography, the very technology of abjection, functions as a mass producer of corpses, embalming each subject by captivating and fixing its image." [44] Photography promises to capture details and subtleties of reality, but returns a flattened, lifeless image. For this reason, photography is ideal for portraying the disavowal that heroin chic represents, as it separates these models from the world by the very nature of the medium.

The poses and facial expressions of the models further this feeling. The model in Figure 6 stands with her hands hanging loosely at the sides of her nearly naked body. Her eyes look off, away from the viewer. The position of her neck evokes popular images of female sexual ecstasy, but her face denies this possibility, as it is almost expressionless. Her eyes are half closed, and she seems totally disengaged from the world of the magazine reader. In many classic fashion photographs women are shown looking away from the camera, but in those cases, they are usually actively looking. At other times, the model directly confronts the viewer, often with a sexually charged or haughty expression, which, again, engages with the audience. Even in heroin chic photographs where the model looks at the reader, she often does so with a confrontational and uninviting facial expression. Alternatively, interaction between the viewer and the model is subverted because the model looks completely disinterested in others.

Heroin chic photographs have been defended by their creators and marketers for their portrayal of realistic-looking women and have been seen as representing a "rebellion against phony airbrushed images." [45] Indeed, part of what makes heroin chic photographs so eye-catching is that blemishes or defining facial characteristics, which would be covered by cosmetics in classic fashion photos, are still present, giving the pictures a more lifelike quality. This shift away from flawless perfection is intriguing and reemphasizes the realism of the photographs.

This realism extends from the models to the settings of the photographs. While many are unidentifiable, a number are situated in urban surroundings or squalid interiors. A fashion spread in Spin magazine's February 1999 issue is illustrative. The location is a subway. One man appears homeless, with a long beard and greasy hair. A woman, with huge bags under her eyes, sits in another car, with a baby on her lap and another playing on the floor. Yet both are models wearing designer clothing. Hearkening back to the fashion photographs of the 1970s, these images of wealth in the midst of dingy surroundings simultaneously expose and deny consumption to capture the viewer's attention.

Although I would argue that heroin chic denies consumption, it is nonetheless being used by advertising, the very medium of consumption. Fashion historian Valerie Steele maintains that it has been a successful marketing strategy, especially with young people and twentysomethings, its particular target markets. [46] Furthermore, the fact that the style has been widely adopted throughout the fashion world as well as by other industries suggests that it has been at least as successful as other styles.

The question to ask is how these images of abjection and withdrawal create a desire for goods in their largely female viewers. I have contended throughout this essay that heroin chic is part of a tradition of romantic representations of life on the edge, denoted through risky activities like drug taking, and/or living on the margins of poverty. This poor heroin user is a fascinating and authentic "other" to the middle class consumer. [47] As Dick Hebdige has noted, this other is "untouched by the dreary conventions which tyrannized more fortunate members of society." [48] Media reports of extensive heroin use by photographers and fashion models suggest that these photos are informed by some real knowledge of what a life on the edge is like. At the same time, though, the viewer is aware that this is a staged scene populated by paid models that is designed to look authentic, but not be authentic: they are not news photographs or documentary footage.

A similar trend was expressed with the counterculture of the 1960s and its anti-middle class ethos of "voluntary poverty." While, at first, the counterculture only affected a small part of the population, coverage by the mass media induced a wider dissemination of its beliefs and look. By rejecting mainstream society, the counterculture immediately became a symbol of social rebellion and the avant-garde. As Thomas Frank argues, middle class advertisers used this link between countercultural markers, like psychedelic colors and social revolution to project an aura of edginess onto their products. Products became metonyms for revolution, and they subverted revolutionary possibilities by substituting real change for a change of goods.

Heroin chic also draws on images of social rebellion, but one quite different from the more politicized/communal counterculture. From the outcast lower-class heroin user to the withdrawn woman, these photographs link high-price commodities with disaffiliation from the hegemonic middle class. Buying these goods becomes a way to play both with social rebellion and identity. The ads and magazine spreads suggest that the middle-class female consumer can become another person through these goods, a person who has an exciting life in a completely different world. The fact that these images are often used in the context of haute couture accentuates this. Most women cannot afford the high cost of designer clothing. Therefore, looking through fashion magazines is an exercise in wishing. The world of haute couture is one of fantasy, as is the romanticized world of lower-class life.

Furthermore, as I have argued, heroin chic photographs encourage a number of oppositional readings regarding women's bodies. The suggestion of non-desire may be quite alluring to female viewers who are most often portrayed in ads as nurturers or sexual objects. And it is not too much to suggest that women who live in a culture that valorizes thinness may be attracted to heroin chic models as the perfect embodiment of a thin ideal. As Susan Bordo argues, advertisements for a variety of products depict women as having a casual relationship with consumption, particularly of food. As she writes, "undominated by unsatisfied, internal need, she eats not only freely but without deep desire," [49] an image that is used to sell commodities such as desserts, diet pills, and cigarettes. This lack of desire is seductive to women whose real relationship with consumption is often marked by anxiety.

The advertising industry, well aware of Western romanticism with a life on the edge and women's relationships with consumption, has attempted to capitalize upon these phenomena with heroin chic's style. By marketing to very specific niches—alienated Gen Xers, who are estimated to have a buying power of 125 billion dollars [50] and hip, urban young professionals—corporations use these images of withdrawal to sell their products.

By molding and shaping inchoate feelings of alienation gleaned through surveys, [51] advertisers are creating "imagined communities" [52] of atomized individuals that are based on a dislike of mainstream society and disgust with common forms of consumption. While the heroin trope often depicts groups of users, heroin is not a social drug. The viewer is being asked to identify with a market niche, but only as an individualized consumer. The consumption of the goods sold through heroin chic acts both as a passport into this angst-ridden community of the disengaged as well as a badge of "rebellion, liberation and outright 'revolution' against the stultifying demands of mass society." [53]

Conclusion

The years 1991-6 marked the heyday of heroin chic. The popular press loudly rang its death knell in February 1997, when photographer David Sorrenti died of a heroin overdose. A barrage of articles denouncing heroin chic and its glorification of the addict lifestyle appeared in the months following Sorrenti's death and exposed the extensive use of heroin in the fashion and modeling industries. [54] Although editors and fashion industry executives swore that the look would be used less frequently, it is still prevalent and widely recognizable.

A close examination of the development and popularity of heroin chic fashion photography offers a way to understand how social anxieties and desires become mere goods to be bought and sold. Heroin chic draws on literary and film tropes of heroin use as well as the realistic style of art and fashion photography developed in the 1970s to critique mainstream culture. The photographs themselves, while using shock to gain the consumer's attention, are artfully composed, drawing the viewer into engaging with the thin bodies of the models, their dejection and the snapshot-like quality of the pictures. These characteristics make it seem like the photographs are slices of real life, not the conformist, deadening mainstream version, but something authentic and critical. These images are important for their expression of hostility and disgust with contemporary American society, and for their ability to destabilize our assumptions of what women in fashion photographs are supposed to look like. Not classically beautiful, the childlike models in heroin chic photographs are not examples of ultra-femininity; in fact, they deny their bodies entirely.

By picturing this denial—of food, of maturity, of nurturing—these women seem to be staking a claim for nonconsumption, a powerful position in a capitalist marketplace that equates "woman" with "consumer." However, the circle closes when we remember that the raison d'être of heroin chic photographs is to sell magazines, clothes, and music. Advertisers and marketers depend on finding novel images to stimulate desire. [55] Two of these fresh images for the 1990s have been the non-consuming female and the heroin user. While both images signal rebelliousness, this critique becomes diffused as it is commodified into a style to be worn or bought as trends dictate. As Herbert Marcuse wrote in The One-Dimensional Man, "this society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and oppression." [56]

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Notes

1. See Adbusters website. 6 May 1999. <http:// www.adbusters.org>.

2. About-Face is another media watchdog group, particularly focused on "negative and distorted images of women." Originally called Stop Starvation Imagery, it operates out of San Francisco. <http://www.about-face.org>.

3. William Clinton. "Remarks by the President at the U.S. Conference of Mayors." Online posting. 21 May 1997. Indiana Prevention Resource. 12 April 1999. <http://www.drugs.indiana.edu/prevention/clinton.html>.

4. For example, see Katharine Wallerstein, "Thinness and Other Refusals in Contemporary Fashion Advertisements," Fashion Theory 2 no. 2, 140-141, who describes a commercial for fast-food restaurant Boston Market, which plays on the heroin chic trope. The commercial shows a number of thin male and female models, in black and white, discussing their angst and emptiness. The company's spokesman, an average-sized man in full color, suggests that their ennui could be fixed if they just "eat something."

5. This is a theory originally proposed by Mary Douglas, which is discussed in Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Los Angeles: University of California Press), 1993.

6. I would like to emphasize that male models are also used in heroin chic photos in ways analogous to women. The men, for example, are extremely thin, non-muscular, withdrawn, and sickly-looking. However, these characteristics, while in opposition to mainstream images of men, destabilize those images for different reasons than female images do. Due to space constraints, I will focus exclusively on women, but it is necessary to keep in mind that this style also has an impact on representations of male beauty.

7. For an astute discussion of this theme, see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995).

8. See articles such as: Mark Ehrman, "Heroin Chic (drug's resurging popularity in Los Angeles, CA)," Playboy, May 1995; Rich Lowry, "Our Hero, Heroin," National Review, 28 October 1996; Michael Dorgan, "Heroin river floods U.S.," Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, 9 October 1996; Chastity Pratt, "Heroin makes a comeback," The Oregonian, 12 January 1997; Richard H. Schwartz, "Heroin use is rising among U.S. teenagers," New York Times, 8 December 1998.

9. Colin Campbell in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism sees a much longer tradition, which dates back to the Enlightenment. He argues that the "Romantic Ethic," which developed alongside the "Protestant Ethic," was based on a constant desire for stimulation and novelty, two of the major characteristics of consumerism. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

10. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

11. A number of social theorists, including and especially members of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, have made this point, as has Fredric Jameson.

12. Richard Jerome, "The Damage Done," People Weekly, 4 November 1996, 131.

13. John Leland, "The fear of heroin is shooting up," Newsweek, 26 August 1996, 128 no. 9, 55(2). See also Richard Jerome, "The Damage Done," 131, and Rich Lowry, "Our hero, heroin," National Review, 28 October 1996, 48 no. 20, 75(2), among many others.

14. "America's first cocaine epidemic," St. Louis Journalism Review, Feb 1994 23 no. 163, 18(1) and Vicki Moeser and Jara Krivanek, Heroin: Myths and Reality (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 61.

15. Bill Hanson, George Beschner, James M. Walters and Elliot Bovelle, eds., Life with Heroin: Voices from the Inner City (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1985), 3-4.

16. See Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 237-238, especially.

17. For a fuller treatment of this perspective, see Robert O'Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holliday (New York: Arcade Publishers, 1991).

18. For a theoretical discussion, see Kobena Mercer, "Black Hair/Style Politics," in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994); bell hooks, "Eating the Other," in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); and Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: The Noonday Press, 1995).

19. One can make a similar argument regarding the commodification of rap music and hip-hop culture. For particularly incisive critiques of this trend, see Spike Lee's film Bamboozled, New Line Cinema, 2000, and James Toback's film Black and White, Screen Gems (Sony), 2000.

20. Chastity Pratt, "Heroin makes a comeback," The Oregonian, 12 January 1997.

21. For example, in Traffic the daughter and her boyfriend rent a squalid room in a cheap hotel located in a slum. Certainly, they do not only do this to get privacy, since the movie makes clear that their parents are almost completely uninvolved in their lives and they have access to more comfortable locations in which to take drugs. However, placing these young people in such a setting underscores the degeneration that happens, as well as their "play" with class and race.

22. Pratt, "Heroin makes a comeback."

23. Martin Chalmers, "Heroin, the Needle, and the Politics of the Body," in Zoot Suits and Second Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music, ed. Angela McRobbie (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 151.

24. See Rich Lowry, "Our Hero, Heroin" National Review 28 October 1996 48 no. 20, 75.

25. See Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xiv.

26. Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries (New York: Penguin, 1963), 189.

27. Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 4.

28. Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 76.

29. Rosetta Brookes, "Fashion Photography," in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader eds. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 22.

30. Michael Archer, Art Since 1960 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997).

31. Nan Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency (New York: Aperture, 1986), 6.

32. Judith Williamson, "Decoding Advertisements," in Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, ed. Rosemary Betterton (New York: Pandora, 1987), 52.

33. This advertisement appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of French Vogue in 1975.

34. Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London: Routledge, 1994), 109-110.

35. Quoted in Craik, The Face of Fashion, 110.

36. For this information on the spread of heroin chic, see Richard B. Woodward, "Whither Fashion Photography," New York Times, 8 June 1997; Wallerstein, "Thinness and Other Refusals," 131; and David Lipsky, "Junkie Town," Rolling Stone, 30 May 1996, 62.

37. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 26.

38. Sharlene Hesse-Biber, "Women, Weight and Eating Disorders: A Socio-Cultural and Political-Economic Analysis," Women's Studies International Forum, 14 March 1991, 173.

39. This position is argued again in Bordo, Wolf and also in Thompson, "A Way Outta No Way," Gender and Society, December 1992, 546-561.

40. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 148, 155.

41. Wallerstein, "Thinness and Other Refusals," 131.

42. Even if we see this model as replacing the fulfillment associated with food with heroin, we must note that heroin itself is not fulfilling in a positive way, but merely allows the user to divorce herself from the world.

43. Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).

44. Diana Fuss, "The Homospectatorial Look," in On Fashion, eds. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferris (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 222.

45. Amy M. Spindler, "A Death Tarnishes Fashion's 'Heroin Look,'" New York Times, 20 May 1997.

46. Christine Cauch Summer and Peter Doskoch, "Tracking the junkie chic look," Psychology Today, September/October 1996, 29 Issue 5, 14. She goes on to assert that it is the offensiveness of the ads themselves that make them appealing to these groups, who are looking to assert their difference from the mainstream.

47. Fatimah Tobing Rony discusses her concept of "fascinating cannibalism" in The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 10. She is specifically discussing ethnographic film in the early 20th century which often showed images of a racialized and primitive other.

48. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979), 47.

49. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 102.

50. Turow, Breaking Up America, 78.

51. Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 24.

52. The concept of the "imagined community" comes from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983).

53. Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 4.

54. See for example, Ingrid Sischy, "View," Interview, July 1997, 27 no. 7, 58(1); Froma Harrop, "The Weird World of Heroin Chic," Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (originated from Providence Journal-Bulletin), 3 June 1997, 603; and A.M. Rosenthal, "Gone at Last: Fashion's Heroin Chic," The New York Times, 23 May 1997, 146, A19 and A31 col. 1.

55. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 25.

56. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 78.