Hey guys, I'm Chris.
I'm a visual anthropologist here at Cut
and I'm the series editor for 100 Years of Beauty.
Today we are reflecting on the video we launched last week,
which is the 100 Years of Beauty: Argentina.
We just wanna talk a little bit about the intentions
and thought we put into the research.
There's this word in Spanish
that gets used a lot when you describe flamenco
that's called duende.
In tango, it can refer to this moment of passion,
of interest, of the hairs raising on the back of your neck.
The idea that something is beautiful
or captivating or spell-binding for a moment.
That beauty is temporary and it disappears
and it's in its fleeting nature
that makes it so enchanting.
That's something we've tried to capture in this video
with Mariela, who shows us 11 moments
of captivating, spell-binding beauty
that subconsciously we understand
to be temporary and fleeting.
Beauty is kind of a paradox.
On the one hand, beauty itself is a way of facing the past,
but it's also a way of facing the future.
We can never disentangle those two faces of beauty
when we quite literally face the world.
When we begin the video, it's the Centennial Anniversary
of the Argentine State.
So we are inspired by the art nouveau posters
that come out at around this time.
Mariela is made up to be one of these kind of
Romanesque mythic women looking out into the future
and it's interesting to say that
we've captured the second century
of Argentina's history at this moment onward.
When she's looking out, we kinda wonder
if she's going to notice that this place
is going to have five different military coup d'etats.
There are going to be tremendous and devastating
economic recessions over and over again.
Then there will be state terrorism and violence
and disappearance of children and other plentiful disevents.
So this is a place with a tremendously
turbulent and complex history and, despite that,
beauty still manages to evolve and captivate.
So that's a paradox that's at the heart of this video
and I think is interesting to explore only visually.
In the '20s and the '30s,
we used covers from Silla Landia,
which is an Argentine pop culture publication,
which is about cinema.
So one part of the consciousness of Argentina,
in particular the people of Buenos Aires, their portenos,
is that they think of themselves as very cosmopolitan,
very sophisticated global citizens, descendants of Europe.
So Silla Landia is a kind of publication
that tries to join in Argentine audiences
with a global star system for cinema.
So a lot of the people on the covers of these magazines
are actually themselves American or Canadian or European.
Okay, so of course no video about Argentina and beauty
would be complete without an appearance from Eva Peron,
which is probably one of the most iconic
and recognizable faces out of Argentina's history.
Not only is she the first lady of Argentina,
she also becomes a cultural symbol, a kind of cult figure.
Evita would make these grand public appearances and speeches
wearing jewels and pearls and she would say,
"One day you too can have all this."
Her beauty is an aspirational one.
It's kind of a symbol, in this moment for these people,
of hope and optimism and so that's kind of
one of the themes that runs through this video.
Argentina is a politically unstable place during this time.
In the early '60s, there are a number of military coups
and while that's happening, there's of course
this global women's sexual liberation on the other hand.
Our interest in this moment is on Coca,
also known as Isabel Sarli,
who is this kind of sexy vampy pop culture icon.
She appeared in kind of steamier movies (chuckles).
She's very, Coca gives us the first nude scene.
Despite this factor, maybe because of it,
she actually becomes ensconced in the cultural zeitgeist
and to this day actually is kind of an ambassador
for popular culture in Argentina.
A couple of the looks in the video are actually
taking place in the same square in Buenos Aires.
This is the Plaza de Mayo,
this kind of public gathering space
and it's been the site of bombings and protests
and over the course of Argentina's history
has been really culturally and politically significant.
So we see it when Evita Peron is standing
on the balcony of the Casa Rosada,
looking out down upon her followers in the crowd.
She's doing this thing, the Evita thing,
the super iconic look.
Flash forward to the 1970s.
We're interested in the women who appear
to protest and demand answers
for the missing children of Argentina's dirty war.
Under state terrorism and state violence,
people are disappeared.
Children are forcibly removed from their families
and placed in other families,
often without anybody's knowledge.
So they wear white headscarves and on them you'll see
the names of people who have disappeared
or the desaparecidos.
The anguish about the uncertainty
of these children's lives drives these women
to make a rather powerful
and enduring sign of political protest
and these women still appear to this day
in the Plaza de Mayo with their white headscarves,
so that icon does not go away.
Even though you see it in the '70s, it continues.
In the '80s, there was the Falklands Wars,
which was between the United Kingdom and Argentina
over this territorial dispute.
Over this tiny island that arguably has no resources
or is of any geopolitical interest to anybody,
but despite that, there's a bit of antagonism still
I think that persists between Argentines and the Brits.
If there's a theme emerging here, right,
it's that even though we're choosing women
that are from entertainment, that are produced commercially
and cosmetically to be viewed as sex symbols or objects,
despite that, those forms of beauty
and those stylings are concomitantly happening
during really dark and turbulent moments politically
and economically in everyday life.
So I don't think you actually can separate
the fantasy image of, say, Sandra Mihanovich's huge hair
and the frivolity and decadence of it
from this actually real material war
in which people are dying.
These things are always going hand in hand.
In the beginning of the 2000s,
Argentina experiences a completely
devastating recession, right?
Inflation is totally crazy.
People are losing a lot of their personal assets, right?
So I think we really wanted to choose the flogger look.
Phlogger's like photo blogger, right?
So it would be kids that are using
Myspace and other technologies
to mix and match and remix styles from punk and goth and emo
around the world to this really particular kind of style.
So the leader, the face of the floggers is Cumbio.
She's kind of like this gay icon too
and so the style is super DIY, inventive
and you could read it I think as a rejection
of the completely dematerialized promises of capitalism
in Argentina at this time.
People can no longer have faith in these institutions
that have generated ideas about beauty.
These kids represent one kind of response,
which is to say fuck it.
So one of the comments that I always see
in the 100 Years of Beauty series
is that it's because of globalization
that people all look the same,
especially towards the end of the century
and I think this is one instance where we see
something like Myspace, which is supposed to be globalizing,
it's supposed to bring us all together
into one tighter-knit global community
actually generates something incredibly specific and local
and so I like this flogger look
'cause it really complicates the idea that
because of social media,
that we're all becoming homogenized.
I think actually not.
People are on the ground doing their own thing,
using these technologies for very
hyper-specific particular purposes.
So we start the video with this kind of fantasy imagination
of a woman who's supposed to embody Argentina
looking out into the next century,
imagining what the future will look like
and then we end the video with the image of Latina
and it's a selfie of herself looking back.
When you watch the whole video from start to finish,
the thing I really see is that Argentina's
sense of beauty is, yes, about being sophisticated
and cosmopolitan and cultivated and chic,
but at the other hand, it's always about
how Argentine women have used beauty
to look both towards the future
and to remember and try to recover the past.