Barefaced: Ageing women stars, ‘no make-up’ photography and authentic selfhood in the 2017 Pirelli calendar

Celebrity culture has long been driven to seek out and appraise signifiers of authenticity. For women celebrities, a willingness to share photographs of themselves make-up free has become a hazy but provocative marker of a certain ‘barefaced’ daring, in which they (seemingly) come closer to imparting their ‘real self’. In practice, these images are still heavily mediated, often contested and have become part of the celebrity machine itself; indeed, I argue here that, for all the staging of candour and spontaneity they can enact, they are increasingly even an expected component of women’s celebrity performance. What happens to women’s star status or signification, then, when they forego the comfortingly illusionary and perfecting properties of cosmetics for ‘make-up free’ photography? And how are the stakes entailed in such photography more challengingly laden, more hazardous, but also more potentially gratifying, for ageing women stars? This analysis looks most particularly at the widely debated 2017 Pirelli calendar as a pre-eminent example of the contentious cultural currency of such star-imagery, photographed ‘make-up free’ by Peter Lindbergh and featuring mature woman actors, including Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman and Robin Wright. Constructing a brief critical timeline of the escalation of the make-up free movement across popular culture and social media in recent years, incorporating extant research drawn from disciplines including cultural and celebrity studies and cultural gerontology, undertaking textual analysis of the 2017 calendar and critical discourse analysis of its promotion and media reception, the work brings interdisciplinary approaches together with a breadth of allied cultural artefacts. Interrogating how ageing women stars may effectively marshal make-up free photography to signal their growing gravitas, I forge new insights into both the polemical meanings of the repudiation of make-up in contemporary visual culture and the import of make-up for conceptualising the nexus of ageing, gender and stardom.