Elizabeth Brady ’25 is a public policy major and an English minor, and she is a member of Alpha Chi Omega. She loves art, music and movies. Email her at eabrady@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
If there’s one thing we love, it’s a piece of media with a clear aesthetic. Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” gave us pastel pinks and purples, kitten heels, bows and miniskirts. Before that, we waited raptly every week for “Euphoria’s” chunky glitter and strobing LEDs. So, it should be no surprise that Emerald Fennell’s very pretty, very dirty “Saltburn” is getting so much attention.
“Saltburn” is well-casted, well-written and well-shot. It has all of the technical moving pieces that make a movie good and interesting to watch and talk about. But to call it merely good and interesting is missing an entire facet of its appeal. “Saltburn” is smart and sharp and lush and magnetic, but it’s also sticky and sexy and grimy and strange. Its heavy atmosphere of over-ripeness and debauchery is largely achieved through careful visual choices. And Fennell’s choice to set the movie in the early 2000s gives her the opportunity to pull from an entirely new range of aesthetics and signifiers.
In order to communicate her chosen era, Fennell pulls from the great tradition of indie sleaze. It’s a smudged smokey eye, a cigarette break in the rain. It’s layered patterns, ripped tights, a digital camera flash. Clothes in “Saltburn” cling to bodies; they rumple, they ride up, they fall off. The key elements of the style, the messiness and the careless chaos seamlessly place us in the world our characters move through.
Such immaculately crafted, visual worlds have a certain pull to them. We too want to live in glamorous, cohesive environments where beautiful people do sometimes awful things in a deeply entertaining way. Imitating the media we love is a natural human practice. In real time, a “Saltburn Venetia Eye Makeup Tutorial” and a vintage fur coat are helping us form visual kinship with the things that we like.
So indie sleaze is back – back with a messy, slouchy vengeance. The true “it girl” of the indie sleaze era has an unnatural hair color with a healthy two to three inches of grown-out roots. Her haircut was done with kiddie scissors (or kitchen scissors), her nail polish is cracked, she’s cradling a large gas station coffee and hiding behind a pair of dark, large-framed sunglasses.
The disheveled ethos of indie sleaze bears a marked difference from its shiny counterpart, the “clean girl.” Popularized on TikTok and Pinterest, the clean girl is a matcha latte and an organized planner. She has an 8:00 a.m. pilates class and a slicked-back ponytail. Forged in the image-centric crucible of the internet, the clean girl is about artful curation, matching sweatsuit sets and water bottles. Indie sleaze is about eccentricity and nonchalance, zebra print sweatpants and a child’s t-shirt.
The clean girl and indie sleaze are two diametrically opposing aesthetic forces. Our recent turn toward the messiness of indie sleaze perhaps reveals where the clean girl chafed us. After a while, anyone will tire of the laboriousness of a perfect blowout and will turn to the easy embrace of a blunt bob with a microbang.
Maybe we are finally ready to fully embrace what it means to be a dirty woman. Maybe what fizzled out with Fleabag-core will get a second wind, and it will finally turn the tide of the way we think about a “dirty” girl. Indie sleaze’s embrace of awkwardness and imperfection is exactly what we need right now, when it seems like life is an endless treadmill of self-optimization. The maximalist imperfection of indie sleaze allows one to experiment and take up space in a way that the clean lines and matching sweatsuits of the clean girl does not.
“Saltburn” did a couple of things. It told a story, it scared a bunch of parents and it made everyone fall in love with Barry Keoghan. But as an interesting social side effect, it also brought back to our attention the enticing power of truly dirty glamor, and for that I am forever grateful.