Queering Fashion’s Pathologies in Killing Eve 1

Abstract

The rise of fashion as a star attraction in recent television serials points to the complex critical languages of fashion in fleshing out character and in shifting generic expectations. It also discloses the relation between fashion as commodity and fashion as an extension of self in a way that signals the queer potential of fashion on several fronts. Here I examine how fashion in Killing Eve (Waller-Bridge, 2018–2022) drives a form of queer attachment that speaks to the complicated terrain of a post-queer, post postfeminist critical moment. Throughout the series fashion is as a vehicle for the protagonist’s mercurial moods, from fun and playful to terrifying and anarchic, whilst also driving the audience’s visual pleasure and scopophiliac thrill. But the series is less interested in moral opprobrium of the protagonist’s excesses, either killing or shopping, than revealing “desire’s unruly attentiveness” (Berlant 2002, 72) through Eve's impossibly queer obsession with Villanelle: “I think about what you’re wearing and what you’re doing… I just want to know everything” (Thomas 2018). In queering our fantasmatic relation to fashion, from pleasure and ambivalence to novelty and disgust, Killing Eve dwells on the treacherous flux of our desires, alongside the underlying queerness of the commodity.