Celebrities dressed like a goddess: Admiration, cultural appropriation and disrespect

Abstract

In September 2020, the Italian edition of Vanity Fair magazine published a series of interviews with Italian women in important professional positions. Each woman interviewed was compared with a female figure that had a paramount role in history or in popular culture. Chiara Ferragni, entrepreneur and influencer who had established herself in the international fashion scene, was depicted as the Madonna with child, painted by Giovan Battista Salvi, also known as Sassoferrato, upsetting readers and social network/internet users. This will be the starting point of our analysis of other cases. At times the media portray or adorn the celebrity as a deity, or as a cult figure, thus mystifying or desecrating the sacred meaning of deities and history; there are dozens of examples of famous people who were portrayed or have made appearances dressed as divinities. The article will aim to offer a comparative analysis by attempting to systematically explain the variants of the social phenomena found in the parallelisms between appropriation and spectacularization of religious clothing.