Lisbeth Salander: Bringing Back Leather and Spikes |
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times
Call it the Lisbeth Salander
effect: for Givenchy couture, Riccardo Tisci used models with multiple
piercings, much like the goth hacker created by Stieg Larsson.
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Trish Summerville, who designed the costumes for “The Girl With the
Dragon Tattoo,” has the formula down pat, peppering a rash of recent
interviews with a list of rebel-girl essentials: a biker jacket, a long
hooded overcoat, holey cardigans and shredded tees — the components, as
it happens, of a micro-collection Ms. Summerville whipped up in December
as homage to that movie’s central character.
She is Lisbeth Salander, the agile hacker played by Rooney Mara
in the American film adaptation of the Stieg Larsson thriller, her
red-lined eyes, freakish piercings and body ink suggesting a hybrid of
alien and street thug. A sullen portrait in gray-black, she is also the
latest pop phenomenon driving a resurgence of leather and spikes,
shredded jeans and scruffy combat boots.
The Salander style, a subversive mélange of goth, punk, classic rock and
fetish-wear, has a spate of off-screen counterparts. They include the
battle-ready black-on-black uniforms adopted by fashion insiders like
the Elle editor Kate Lanphear; and the outlier get-ups of the rap rave
group Die Antwoord, whose waxy pallor, gaunt frames and choppy hair call
to mind extraterrestrials.
It is reflected to some degree in the wardrobes of Ms. Mara’s celluloid sisters, thorny antiheroines like the jeans-and-leather-clad Mallory of “Haywire,” a martial-arts champion who zips around Dublin on a motorbike; and Katniss Everdeen, the teenage warrior of “The Hunger Games,” a post-apocalypse adventure scheduled to arrive in theaters this spring.
But it took Ms. Mara to revive a style that has been eclipsed on the
runways of late by Kate Middleton clones, and to infuse it with perverse
allure. Ms. Mara’s image, an extension of her razor-chic film
character, has been all but inescapable, splashed on the covers of W and
Vogue, glaring from movie posters and materializing at red-carpet
events.
Hers is “the most dynamic character to jump off the screen in some
time,” said Rocky Rakovic, a counterculture pundit and the editor of
Inked magazine. Chalk it up, Mr. Rakovic said, to Salander’s maverick
ferocity.
Like Noomi Rapace, who played Salander in the Swedish-language version
of the film, Ms. Mara lends the part an ambiguous sexuality. Leslie
Simon, the author of “Geek Girls Unite: How Fangirls, Bookworms, Indie
Chicks, and Other Misfits Are Taking Over the World,” noted that
Salander’s tomboy regalia had long been the standard in Hollywood, where
a conviction persists that a female vigilante “can’t be girly to do
what stereotypically is a guy’s job.” Still, poured into shapely
goth-tinctured gowns with labels like Nina Ricci and Prabal Gurung for
her red carpet star turns this year, Ms. Mara tempered her screen
persona with a lissome femininity.
Her saturnine look in the movie mirrors that in several collections on
the fall runways. Louis Vuitton and the Alexanders, McQueen and Wang,
were among an influential handful of fashion houses offering exalted
variations on urban-industrial chic. A more untamed style was
resurrected for spring at the Givenchy couture presentation. There the
designer, Riccardo Tisci, adorned his models with multiple piercings and
an armor of crocodile skin.
Mainstream merchants are offering their own doom-y interpretations, the
most accessible among them Ms. Summerville’s 30-piece collection for H
& M; AllSaints goatskin biker jackets; shredded jeans from J Brand
and from Trash and Vaudeville; and, at Hot Topic, spiked chain necklaces
and lace-up boots.
Salander’s fierce, otherworldly mien is echoed in the menacing cuffs,
rings and earrings of Pamela Love and Eddie Borgo, the spiked metal hair
combs of Maison Michel and Jennifer Behr, whose spiny dinosaur
headbands were a hit at the Fendi show in Milan last year. Even a line
of nail polish from StrangeBeautiful, offered in 10 shades of black, is a
slick extension of the trend.
Tattoo artists are cashing in. “What Salander has done is inspire women
to go under the needle with their own message in mind,” said Mr. Rakovic
of Inked.
So are high-end hair salons. “Girls have been coming into my downtown
salon asking for more severe cuts,” Sally Hershberger said. “I have been
doing a lot of blunt micro bangs and chopping bobs.” The look, she
added, “says, ‘Don’t mess with me.’ It’s sexy in a strong new way.”
But prowess in an information age is as often equated with technological
smarts. “Today the female action hero is likely to be a master of
hacking,” said Jeremy Gutsche, the editor of Trendhunter, an online
publication. She is a type, Mr. Gutsche said, that resonates
particularly with women in their teens and early 20s.
She exerts a spooky fascination on general audiences, too, partly
because hacking is still taboo. “Few people understand what it is,” said
Ms. Simon, the “Geek Girls” author, “and no one really knows its face.”
A studied anonymity, conveyed by choppy hair, unbranded clothing and an
aura of solemnity, is the outward expression of an enduring archetype
that owes a debt to the cyborg Molly Millions of “Neuromancer,” whose
surgically inset silver lenses, black glove-leather jeans and
double-edged blades projecting from her fingers are impressed on the
minds of William Gibson fans.
There is also a dash of Cayce Pollard, the brand-averse cool hunter of
Mr. Gibson’s novel “Pattern Recognition,” a paragon of understatement in
boys’ Fruit of the Loom T-shirts, black 501 jeans, her clothes scraped
free of logos, her hair, as Mr. Gibson
described it, “poking up like a toilet brush.”
described it, “poking up like a toilet brush.”
That mode of dress “is all of a piece with the way these characters
live,” said Diane Leach, who writes for PopMatters, an online magazine.
Salander’s skinny pants, she said, put her in mind of the rocker Joan
Jett, who, despite her diminutive stature, “projects this large
persona.”
Salander, a tiny figure, too, seems just as towering, her outsize image an outgrowth of her moral absolutism.
“Corruption offends her,” Ms. Leach observed, “and the desire to set things right is what motivates her.”
She’s taking names and delivering payback. And, Ms. Leach said, “she’s not about to do that in a pair of Miu Miu shoes.”
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