Emily Ratajkowski is an art girl, so perhaps she knows that Andy Warhol was the first person to experience the Dionysian thrill of a tomato girl summer. The artist had been painting cans of Campbell’s tomato-flavored soup since 1962, and in 1966 the tinned-goods firm capitalized on Warhol’s popularity with the production of a disposable dress screen-printed with its own cans. It was a fortuitous meeting of art and consumerism that precipitated the TikTok trend—that in turn precipitated various fast fashion categories—by almost 60 years.
See also: Inès de La Fressange closing Jean-Charles de Castelbajac’s spring/summer 1984 presentation in a sleeveless dress shaped like a Campbell’s soup can; Dolce & Gabbana’s spring/summer 2017 burlap dress which resembled a traditional can of peeled Sicilian tomatoes; and the asymmetrical Miaou dress that Emily Ratajkowski was yesterday afternoon photographed in. She wore that silken slip—printed in a cut-and-paste melange of branded canned tomatoes— with verdant Reebook Club C 85 sneakers. (She has a unique gift for styling dresses with sneakers.)
There are few differences between Warhol and Ratajkowski’s approach to image-making. Much like the artist’s 1962 Marilyn Diptych—a screen print in which he repeated the American icon’s image hundreds of times in a grid-like formation—a cursory scroll through the model’s Instagram will reveal her own face atomized across a thousand digital squares. Both of them understand that celebrities can and will be mass-consumed, like canned tomatoes.
“I was the living testament of a woman empowered through commodifying her image,” the model wrote in her 2021 book. “I built a platform by sharing images of myself and my body online, making my body and subsequently my name recognizable.”
This article first appeared on British Vogue.
The post Emily Ratajkowski Reminds Us Tomato Girl Dressing Was More Than a Passing Trend appeared first on Glamour.
