Who Owns the Teen Girl Aesthetic?
Olivia Rodrigo may play a high schooler on TV, but in real life she missed out on one of adolescences most storied traditions: prom. To make up for it, the pop star threw her own party in the form of a prom-themed concert film celebrating her debut record, Sour. The accompanying imagery, photographed by Nick Walker, cast Rodrigo as a disheveled prom queen, complete with a sparkly tiara and dramatically smudged mascara. The portrait shared striking similarities to the iconic cover of Holes 1994 album Live Through This, shot by Ellen von Unwerth. A few weeks back, Hole leader Courtney Love noticed the resemblance and posted the Sour Prom photo on her Instagram with the caption, Spot the difference! #twinning! Rodrigo responded in the comments, love u and live through this sooooo much. Love was apparently expecting a more formal thank you: Olivia  youre welcome, she wrote in reply. My favorite florist is in Notting Hill, London! Dm me for deets! I look forward to reading your note!  Instagram content View on Instagram  Concurrent to the Hole drama, a viral TikTok turned Twitter thread accused Rodrigo of ripping off the visual aesthetic of Pom Pom Squad, the Brooklyn band whose new record, Death of a Cheerleader, fuses riot grrrl rage and 60s pop romance. (The thread has since been deleted.) The projects leader, Mia Berrin, has spent the past few years carefully crafting a visual world to match her music, rooted in part around a closets worth of personalized cheerleading outfits and music videos oozing with kitsch. As Rodrigo became the most famous teen in America, Pom Pom Squad fans started noticing similarities between Berrins looks and some of Sours promotional imagery. One juxtaposition compared a snapshot of Berrin in her Pom Pom Squad uniform and above-the-elbow latex gloves with a shot from Rodrigos good 4 u videowhere shes also dressed in a cheerleading outfit and above-the-elbow latex gloves. Another featured a portrait of Berrin wearing bobby pins that spell out heaven and a photo of Rodrigo in hair clips that spell out sour. Yet another was a photo of Berrin as a tragic prom queen, contrasted with the same Sour Prom image Courtney Love took issue with. The DIY cog of social medias outrage machine reached a quick conclusion: Rodrigo, a Disney star at the top of the charts, had ripped off the visual identity of an indie artist. She thinks its special, but its all reused, a line from Rodrigos song deja vu, suddenly took on new significance. Even Live Through This openly paid visual homage to Brian De Palmas 1976 horror classic Carrie, arguably the original monstrous prom queen moment. While that album cover portrays model Leilani Bishop as a wilting beauty queen, sequences in the video for Holes Miss World borrow even more directly from Carries indelible climax. At one point in the clip, when Love is making her way through a sea of teens to collect her crown, the camera lingers on her smiling, oblivious face, just like in Carrie. As Amy Adler, an art law professor at New York University, told The New York Times, both Hole and Rodrigo offered images based around the smiling perfection of the idealized beauty queen. Neither, she concluded, had plagiarized. On the one hand, you dont want to encourage people to steal other peoples expression, she said. But in its goal of encouraging and protecting creativity, copyright law also wants to leave room for creators to draw on previous works because so much creativity depends on the freedom to build on and reference previous works.  The similarities between Berrin and Rodrigos art direction are ultimately less about plagiarism and more about pulling from the same pot of visual inspirationa canon that encompasses Love, her influences, and her descendants. The imagery in question is rooted around a performance of traditional femininity (frilly white dresses) offset by hints of danger and fetishism (the latex gloves, a leather harness), perhaps an attempt to reimagine teenagehood as a more autonomous, in-control time in ones life. Its easy to draw a line between this aesthetic and kinderwhore, a style worn by Love and her punk peers in the 90s. With a uniform consisting of tattered babydoll dresses accompanied by knee socks or tights marred with runs, Mary Jane shoes, and cheap plastic barrettes, kinderwhore injected a disheveled sexuality into the signifiers of childlike femininity.