L OUD
Mouth
For generations
of polished,
confident women,
red lipstick
has been a fashion
statement—but
also a call to action.
Lena Dunham
reports on
the color’s return to
the spotlight.
Photographed by
Patrick Demarchelier.
M
y first memories of
my mother are red-
lipstick memories: her
smearing it on as we
headed out the door
on a Saturday night to an art opening,
the color so bold against her slate-gray
Yohji Yamamoto pantsuit; her clean-
ing out the cupboard under our sink
where she kept her lipsticks (all vary-
ing Chanel and Revlon reds) and nail
polishes (same); and the time she let me
draw it on my face in concentric circles
like a Yayoi Kusama installation gone
deeply wrong.
My mother’s style wasn’t overtly
feminine. She was one of a group
of women (Cindy Sherman, Sarah
Charlesworth, and Marilyn Minter,
to name a few) whose emerging pres-
ence in the male-dominated art world
in the late seventies and early eighties
signaled a tidal shift. Being a woman
wasn’t an easy space to occupy then—
it required strength, precision, and
fearlessness. Maybe that’s why, grow-
ing up, I remember a lot of menswear:
crisp white shirts, J.Crew khakis, desert
boots, shoulder pads. But always red
lipstick, reminding the powers-that-
be that their femininity was an asset
rather than an albatross.
Nearly 40 years later, we find our-
selves asking similar questions about
our rights that we never thought we’d
have to revisit. This has galvanized a
new generation of women, women who
never considered themselves political,
to engage in a dialogue about what we
want, what we deserve, and what it will
take to get it. The exciting news? The
second-wave sense that taking up this
call to action means denying your femi-
ninity (see: images of oversize T-shirts,
corduroy pants, and unmascara’d lash-
es at the protests of the seventies) has
been replaced with an anything-goes,
all-encompassing idea of what woman-
hood can be, reappropriating makeup
as a simple pleasure that allows a mo-
ment of private joy for even the most
public activist.
The revolution will wear red lipstick.
We saw it on the fall 2017 runways,
from Topshop to Prada, Jason Wu to
Preen: lips in every shade of vermilion,
from just-sucked-lollipop to vampire
assassin. As the world reeled follow-
ing the surreal circus of the U.S. elec-
tion season, it was hard not to see the
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