SNL, 90th Oscars, Premiere of ‘Girls Trip”  

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/05/why-tiffany-haddish-keeps-re-wearing-her-4000-oscar-gown.html

I chose this article to read alongside Llewellyn Negrin’s piece “Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Embodied Existence,” and Jessica Kennedy and Megan Strickfaden’s piece “Entanglements of a Dress Named Lavern: Threads of Meaning between Humans and Things (and Things),” as a contrasting embodied experience. Merleau-Ponty, Kennedy, and Strickfaden speak about how the body and the thing modify each other. The audience can observe this symbolic alteration. In the article “Why Tiffany Haddish has worn her $4000 Oscar’s Dress at least 3 Times, ” Emmie Martin calculates that through amortizing, “Haddish has gotten the cost of the dress down to at least $1300 per wear” (Martin). Through repeated wear, Haddish changes the value of the dress. It is also necessary to note the dress’s own agency in its (his/her/their?) relationship to Haddish. The cost of the Alexander McQueen dress, impels Haddish to wear it more than once. The dress becomes synonymous with its value, which accrues additional value for Haddish because the dress cost more than her mortgage (Martin). We can observe the entanglement happening as Haddish’s personal life is woven into the very makeup of the dress. The mutual dependency between Haddish and the dress is further illustrated when this “breaking of social taboo” through the repetitive wear of the dress warrants explanation (Martin). Haddish must explain why she has decided to break the rules and wear an expensive gown more than once. She is almost forced to reveal how poverty and homelessness have influenced her decision to (re)wear this dress. Her body and dress are now entangled and influence how they navigate social and public spaces. The dress, in turn, is made famous (and Haddish too, made known for these rebellious actions), as the dress is “now iconic” (Martin). Speaking to the materiality of the dress, Haddish cares for it, and wears it despite its fragility and its whiteness is prone to staining. This expensive gown, is a very disposable thing. It is too delicate to be washed (only fabreezed), and too recognizable to be worn more than once. Haddish’s commitment to the care of the dress along with the way she and the dress imprint value on one another through repetitive wear point to the idea that,“when we act in the world, we do not act just as bodes, but as clothed bodies” (Negrin 130). We (and I include things in this we) always move dependently in spaces.

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