Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides

Fashion in Film

Introduction

Costume design in film is always intended to contribute to the narrative and characters in ways the dialogue cannot. This is especially the case in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, in which the narrative is incredibly subversive and inaccurate in itself, the clothing really lends itself as visual symbols to understand possible truths in the film. Released in 1999, the film is inspired by The Virgin Suicides Novel, published in 1993.

What is most interesting about this film is that it is one of few to be directed by a woman, but the film is made from a male perspective. This aligns with showing a typical theme in film, in which women are most often presented in relation to others, rather than standing as a character in her own right. In many cases, characters’ fashions allow them to represent themselves truthfully, but it can also be assumed that the Lisbon sisters’ styles are not as revealing of their true selves since they are still situated within a strict, conservative household. 

I will begin with some context and an overview regarding The Virgin Suicides as a novel, following with the director of The Virgin Suicides film, Sofia Coppola, and the costume designer, Nancy Steiner. An examination of formal cinematic elements that contribute to mood and assumptions will follow. Next, I will show how initial scenes in the movie featuring Cecilia, set the tone for this overarching concept of virginal purity and innocence. The patriarchal aesthetic of neutrality and order will then be depicted through the male characters’ costumes, as well as special focus on Mrs. Lisbon’s fashion. The homecoming and post-homecoming scenes will be discussed, with particular attention to the role of the Lisbon sisters’ dresses.

Finally, attention is brought to a one specific garment that Lux wears both at the beginning and again at the end of the film, to foreshadow death. The fashion in The Virgin Suicides contributes to the narrative through emphasis on modesty and naturalness, but is also equally subversive of the narrative’s truth, since the outfits do not speak to each girl’s own true individuality and identity, which is never revealed to viewers. Though there are many more scenes and outfits that could be analyzed, the chosen scenes are able to reveal a majority of the main themes of the film and its intent.

Overview & Context

The book The Virgin Suicides, was Jeffrey Eugenides’ first novel and was inspired by two distinct past experiences he had. In his writing for The Guardian, he describes a moment in which he briefly met his nephew’s babysitter, in which she rather randomly told him that her and her sisters had all attempted suicide. When he asked her why, she replied “I don’t know,” “We just had a lot of pressure.” This interaction was especially impactful for Jeffrey due to a prior interaction with a college peer, who had killed himself a day after approaching Jeffrey with philosophical and existential questions. Jeffrey explains he just thought it was weird, but nothing for concern, he hadn’t realized his peer’s desperation until after he learned of his passing.¹

This led to his novel about the Lisbon sisters, whom no one ever truly got to know, except for each other. While the novel does highlight issues of femininity in a patriarchal society, it is still written by a man, who chose to write about the girls from a male perspective within the book as well. Though it may have been more problematic for Jeffrey to have attempted writing from the Lisbon girls’ perspectives.

 Sofia Coppola keeps this perspective in the film, as it is really this concept of the male gaze of femininity that allows the message of the film to be abundantly clear. Using her own female experience though, Coppola is able to bring the novel to life through the accurate use of what I will call feminine materiality. This is most predominant in the close-up shots of the girls’ shelves and window sills which are scattered with beauty products, jewelry, and other ephemera that is more associated with girls. Coppola takes a cliched male narrative and adapts it to fit into a feminist perspective by representing the suicides as “an act that goes beyond the subversive refusal of normative patriarchal subjectivity.”² 

Nancy Steiner, the costume designer for the film, describes that she felt somewhat of a personal connection to creating the costumes for girls coming of age in the seventies, especially as she was growing up during this time as well. The Lisbon girls represent only one style of fashion in the 70s, which is more modest and natural. Steiner explains she had the girls be noticeably more natural than what was fashionable at the time because they were sheltered and likely wouldn’t have been allowed to partake in many of the beauty and fashion trends.³ This concept of naturalness is also associated with innocence, further playing to the virginal status of the girls, as well as their relationship with religion, as will be discussed later.

Setting & Formal Elements

The film is based in the 1970s, when the Lisbon girls were teenagers, and the scenes including them are thus placed within this decade. There is also the different time period about 20 years later in which Trip recalls his time with the girls as kids. It seems that this ‘future’ tense is supposed to be the 1990s, which makes analyzing these time periods interesting. As has been mentioned, the film was released in the late 1990s, so the depiction of the 1970s is from a retrospective perspective rather than contemporary.

An idealized American suburbia is the landscape for the film, taking any possible external threat out of the narrative. The film begins in the summertime and continues through the fall as is signaled by the homecoming dance. The beginning of the film highlights the cliché of the images used by making the scenes hued in summer tones. This also signals that the images/scenes are ones of the past, which as the film continues, viewers realize these fragments of the past may really all just be fragments of imagination.

The music in any film is a major contributor to the emotion of the scene and helps aid our senses to experience the intended mood of the scene. The soundtrack featured in The Virgin Suicides includes a mix of music from the 1970s, as well as music inspired by the 1970s. Though not limited to one specific genre or time period, the playlist evokes feelings of nostalgia and youth.

As has been mentioned, a crucial element of this film is the narration that is from the perspective of the boys who were intrigued by the sisters both in life and death. This lends to false imagery, often accented with fading and split screen transitions to accentuate the ephemeral quality of a memory or flashback. Though, it is especially idealized in this case as the memories are not the true experiences of the Lisbon sisters, and I am sure if we had seen a glimpse of the true reality, it would have been framed much differently.

A quote from Backman Rogers perfectly describes how the perspective impacts the film’s narrative: “At its most beguiling, the film betrays its own narrative. As the boys/men desperately attempt to relive, recapture, retell and make sense of the Lisbon girls’ tragedy (to render it meaningful), Coppola’s lyrical and metaphorical images exceed the immediate function of representation and elude the grasp of understanding. In other words, the film works on a formal level to unravel the task of making meaning that is set in place by its narrative.”⁴

Purity & Religion

The initial scenes of Cecilia are the closest to reality the narrative will come, until the rest of the sisters commit suicide at the end. Cecilia is the youngest sister, just thirteen, wears a white lace dress whilst in a bathtub full of her blood. The blood contrasted with her dress and youthful face, takes all purity out of the scene. As she is taken to the ambulance, she drops a card of the Virgin Mary, which is tainted with blood drops. This moment is the most indicative of spirituality, which is placed alongside the death of innocence and the blood of a young girl.

The image of blood cannot be found at any point in the film after these scenes, further indicating the end of the ‘true’ narrative. A hint at menstruation is made when one of the boy’s uses the bathroom and opens the cabinet to find feminine hygiene products, but his subsequent unease from it perpetuates that this is not part of the boys’ perfect image of the girls. After Cecilia’s second and successful attempt at suicide, she still makes a few appearances as a ghost.

Cecilia’s ghost is not outfitted in the dress she had killed herself in, but instead is in the white dress she wore initially in the film. Cecilia lives on in the minds of her father and the boys, but only as an innocent and pure young girl, not the reality of her struggle. Cecilia’s character can be compared to the Virgin Mary through her connection to nature (the tree), the perception of her from outsiders, and her unknown relationship with God, which is all perpetuated by the everlasting image of her in her white dress.

Patriarchal Order & Uniforms

Restriction and uniformity is most obviously seen in the sisters’ school uniforms, though their individuality can be seen through the different ways each has styled the same garments. The school uniforms keep the girls confined within the rules of school, but is also a metaphor for the restrictions placed on young women’s dress by the patriarchal society. It is also interesting that scenes of the girls in their uniforms are limited for two reasons. The first being that uniforms are meant to be non-sexual and thus it makes sense that the boys wouldn’t be idealizing the girls in their imaginations by having them wear such. The second reason being that much of the film takes place in the confinement of the Lisbon home, and then of course, the girls are taken out of school completely after homecoming. 

In contrast to what the sisters wear throughout the film, all the male characters (especially Mr. Lisbon and the neighbor boys) are dressed very simply and neutrally, without any sense of personal style. What is most interesting is this same characteristic has been attached to Mrs. Lisbon’s outfits. Despite the patriarchal order, Mrs. Lisbon actually stands in as the ultimate perpetuator of this disposition and order. She is more often placed as the disciplining and strict parent who, in an attempt to keep her daughters safe and sheltered, placed an innumerable amount of pressure on them. The distinction between Mrs. Lisbon and her daughters’ dress is most clear when she is holding one of her daughters' dresses in grief. The playful and colorful floral pattern is contrasted against the neutral brown and geometric pattern of Mrs. Lisbon’s dress.

The Homecoming Dance

The homecoming dance is a pivotal scene in the narrative as well as how fashion plays into it. Of course, the girls all wear dresses, which are a fairly classic 1970s dress style. The dresses are all the same floral pattern, but in three different pastel colors. Nancy Steiner purposely used the same fabric for all four dresses so signal that in the narrative, Mrs. Lisbon was making the dresses. The dress styles are all fairly simple, and it would not be surprising if 1970s dress patterns were used to create these. In a similar way to Cecilia’s dress at the beginning, the white base and light hues of the dresses signal their pure and virginal statuses.

The homecoming dance is also the last time we see the sisters enjoying themselves, after being given one of their few, but last freedoms. The homecoming scenes end with Lux waking up in her dress on the football field alone, after losing her virginity to Trip the night before. The early morning lighting and the fact Lux was left sleeping alone, brings a sense of unease and confusion on what really happened in the time they spent on the field. Speculations have been made that Lux was raped that night, though the only other evidence is that Trip (in the 20 years later scenes) says he will always regret what happened that night, making it unclear whether he is just referencing leaving her there or not. Any and all restrictions are placed on the Lisbon sisters after this point, creating a palpable sense of pressure and claustrophobia from the lack of freedoms the girls have.

A Sign of Death

A significant use of fashion foreshadows the death at both the beginning and end of the film. In an early scene in which a neighbor boy joins the Lisbon’s for dinner, he is met by Lux after using the bathroom. Lux stands in the doorway in her most revealing top, a floral spaghetti-strap bandeau top. While her outfit at this moment seems to have no significance, the top’s reappearance at the end of the film proves otherwise. The night of the collective suicides, the boys meet at the Lisbon house, in which they find Lux in the living room, smoking a cigarette, and with the utmost feminist symbolism, pulls her strap up which had fallen down. Lux is depicted highly sexually after homecoming night, and this final scene depicts this sensuality, which is quickly revoked once the boys find one of the Lisbon sisters’ bodies. Lux wearing this top, as well as the way she interacts with it, is the final act of appealing to the male gaze before committing their one true act of agency.

Conclusion

Sofia Coppola and Nancy Steiner’s interpretation of the story of the Lisbon sisters emphasizes cliches and stereotypes to make the message obvious and clear (at least to women). Women understand that this movie is not honest, because we have all lived through being young women in a patriarchal society. Young women are sexualized and idealized, but they also must remain pure and untouched. Each of the sisters has an individual experience, but their lack of agency is also what keeps them grouped together (other than being related). The costumes in The Virgin Suicides are extremely important in both supporting and subverting the narrative because Coppola bases much of the film on what is unspoken and unacknowledged. The viewers only get fragments from the boys’ imaginations and experiences. The fashion of the girls, which is also placed into the retrospective point of view of the boys, further highlights the cliches that are optimized to subvert the true narrative, which would be from the Lisbon sisters’ perspectives.

1. Eugenides, Jeffrey, “‘She Was Chatty, Seemingly Untroubled’: Jeffrey Eugenides on the Babysitter Who Inspried the Virgin Suicides,” The Guardian, September 11, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/11/jeffrey-eugenides-virgin-suicides-kirsten-dunce-sofia-coppola.

2. Backman Rogers, Anna, “Imaging Absence as Abjection: The Female Body in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides,” Screening the Past 43 (April 2018). http://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-43-dossier-materialising-absence-in-film-and-media/imaging-absence-as-abjection-the-female-body-in-sofia-coppolas-the-virgin-suicide

3. Weston, Hillary, “Intimate Apparel: A Conversation with Nancy Steiner,” The Criterion Collection, August 31, 2022. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7912-intimate-apparel-a-conversation-with-nancy-steiner.

4. Backman Rogers, “Imaging Absence as Abjection: The Female Body in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides.”