RACQUEL GATES
Abstract: The popular television show Empire has attracted a huge following for its over-the-top storylines, memorable characters, catchy music, and distinctive fashions. In particular, Taraji P. Henson’s character “Cookie” stands out, partly for her character’s emotional complexity, as well as for her eye-catching fashions, which blend haute couture with signature markers of urban style. In this essay, Racquel Gates analyzes the ways that fashion on Empire conveys important information about race, class, and politics both on television and in American culture more broadly.
When the predominantly African American, primetime soap opera Empire premiered on FOX in 2015, the show immediately pulled viewers into its world of lush visuals, contemporary music, and dramatic storylines. An hour-long drama that focuses on the fictitious Lyon family and their music industry empire, Empire draws inspiration from the aesthetic and narrative conventions of predominantly white 1980s soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty, and the sensational plots and characters on contemporary African American cast reality television shows. Moreover, Empire’s representations of African American lives and experiences are connected to a much longer, complicated history of black representation on television and in film. These influences matter, as they establish Empire at the intersection of several related, yet uniquely distinct, cultural reference points, each of which carries its own code for referencing blackness and making blackness legible to viewers.
This essay focuses on one particular aspect of Empire: fashion. From the very first episode of the series, the fabulous and extravagant clothing worn by the characters on the show has captivated fans, journalists, and style bloggers. In particular, the over-the-top fashions worn by the character Cookie—the family matriarch played by actress Taraji Henson—have inspired the most attention. Yet fashion is more than just adornment on Empire. Instead, the clothing and accessories that various characters wear provide important information about their personality traits, serving as a kind of narrative shorthand for viewers. Indeed, mise-en-scène in the form of costuming serves this purpose throughout television, as a way of conveying important information without sacrificing limited storytelling time. We might think of King of Queens character Doug’s parcel carrier uniform, a constant reminder of the character’s, and the show’s, representation of a working-class identity. Likewise, Regine’s wigs on Living Single served as a visual marker of the character’s vanity. In addition to providing significant character information, the fashion on Empire connects the show to other black cultural reference points, such as Motown in the 1960s and 1990s hip-hop. Thus we can see how Empire uses fashion to convey information about blackness beyond the show’s explicit references to race.
While it makes sense to analyze representations of race from a narrative perspective—focusing on how a media text frames blackness through its characters and stories—it cannot be the only way to examine these topics. Like all media texts, television is a collaborative process. We tend to focus on the most obvious contributors to a television show: the actors, directors, and writers. Yet the final product that makes it to the screen is also shaped by other creative talents who likewise contribute to the text: set designers, costume designers, music supervisors, and individual actors all bring their personal touches. Therefore, if we focus strictly on the types of images that a show presents as opposed to how the show visually articulates those images, then we risk missing out on the elements that make Empire unique and distinctive.
Therefore, by turning our attention away from narrative and toward some of the stylistic elements in Empire—in this case, fashion—we can reveal how the show codes blackness into its representations. This way of “encoding” blackness, to borrow from Stuart Hall, serves dual purposes. First, it functions to save valuable narrative time. As a melodrama, Empire often relies on appeals to the audience’s emotions rather than detailed character development. The show needs to cover a lot of ground—love affairs, murder schemes, and secret children—and the twists and turns of the plotlines can easily dominate the story. While the series often addresses race quite explicitly, it prioritizes the interpersonal conflicts between the characters more, a hallmark of the melodramatic mode.
Second, this process of encoding serves to allow Empire to engage in more nuanced, culturally specific explorations of racial identity than its narrative format and targeted audiences allow. As I mentioned above, Empire does not avoid explicit portrayals of race and racism. Yet, as a show that deliberately courts both black and nonblack audiences, Empire must balance cultural specificity with universality. In other words, the show is very measured in the way that it presents blackness, in order to avoid making the show “too black” and therefore, presumably, unrelatable to nonblack viewers. Whether it is true that too much blackness in the show’s diegesis would alienate nonblack viewers, it is very clear that those responsible for bringing the world of Empire to the small screen thoughtfully curate where and how blackness appears. For instance, the show makes visual connections between the fictional Empire dynasty and the real-life Motown Records via Lyon family patriarch Lucious’s (Terrence Howard) hairstyle and clothing, subtly coding blackness into the “background” of the text while saving the “foreground” for more immediately relevant plot developments. This makes sense if we think about the fact that Empire airs on FOX, a network that has only recently begun to produce racially diverse programming, in spite of its early reputation as a home for black-cast (and black-produced) content.1 As a program whose viability is largely predicated on its success with both black and white audiences, Empire must walk a fine line to provide viewers with content that is culturally specific as well as able to cross cultural lines.
On Empire, fashion is more than simple costuming: it provides information about the individual characters and connects them to broader aspects of black culture. A quick sketch of the main male characters demonstrates how the show accomplishes this. The first season of Empire focuses on the Lyon family’s interpersonal conflicts and how they deal with external threats to their music empire. The three brothers of the Lyon family—Andre (Trai Byers), Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray), and Jamal (Jussie Smollett)—are radically different from one another, as conveyed through their styling. Andre, the CFO of the company, is the one son whose role is in the business side of the company, rather than the artistic side. He sports traditional business suits in dark colors and wears his hair in a conservative, closely cropped style. His thoroughly respectable attire signals his own respectability politics, the idea that members of a minority group make themselves less culturally specific and thus more acceptable to mainstream society.2 Hakeem, the rap superstar of the family, dresses in hip-hop fashions and accessorizes with oversized jewelry consistent with rap “bling” culture. He also wears his hair in a high fade style with intricately shaved designs on the sides of his head, another emblem of hip-hop style and a throwback to 1990s black urban hairstyles. Finally, Jamal, the most musically gifted of the trio and a talented R&B singer, sports a hipster fashion aesthetic: slimmer-fitting clothes than Hakeem that combine a range of styles from urban to bohemian. His style conveys how Jamal does not fit neatly into existing categories of either fashion or personal identity, an important detail that reinforces his character’s initial journey to reconcile his sexual identity with the private and public image that his CEO father, Lucious, wants him to present.
FIGURE 2.1. The styling of the three brothers of the Lyon family—Andre, Hakeem, and Jamal—conveys their deep character differences.
As the head of the Empire dynasty, Lucious Lyon’s wardrobe and styling ground the show in black culture, past and present. In the pilot episode, Lucious wears his hair in a chemically straightened style, what we would call a “perm” or a “relaxer.” The style is an anachronism, belonging more to the era of 1940s and 1950s black male fashion rather than 2015, when the show premiered and takes place. Producer Lee Daniels claims that Howard’s coiffure was the actor’s own choice, not the result of a discussion with Daniels
