"The image is saintly."

Announces Washington Post fashion writer Rachel Tashjian, in "Jill Biden is Vogue’s cover star. What timing. The first lady covers Vogue for the third time, positioned by the magazine as a savior of the country’s fate."

Here's the image:

Tashjian proclaims that "a striking, fascinatingly out-of-character image in its storytelling."  What's the usual "character"? More smiley? More of a sidekick? I really don't know. Do you? We're told "the religious undertones are startling": "Her pose and visage, not to mention the color of her dress, recall religious paintings of saints communing with their higher power."

IN THE COMMENTS: Rafe — short for Raphael? — says "Which paintings? What a lazy comparison, to paintings which only exist, apparently, in her mind." 

I went looking for paintings of saints gazing upward. There's this, by Raphael:

Notice that Catherine's hands do not hang limply at her sides. They are expressive of ecstasy and placed in locations that would seem truly odd on a modern-day politico. Unlike Jill, she's got her weight shifted to one side, and also unlike Jill, she's leaning on what we know to be the device used to torture-murder-martyr her. Jill exists in an empty brown-gray void.

But it's the difference in the eyes that is most striking. Jill's eyes are rotated sideways, and only slightly upward, as if she is gazing fondly at her somewhat tall husband. They're not fixed on Heaven. 

Can we find paintings of saints with eyes rotated sideways, which seems mildly coy? Consider the entirely un-Jill-like Saint Lucy:

"[A]bsurd trends flooded [TikTok]: 'night luxe,' 'coastal grandmother' and 'clean girl,' each with a highly specific set of principles, imagery..."

"... and even beauty standards. They were usually framed as rejections of what came before. The 'mob wife' aesthetic, for example, was contextualized as a brash, dramatic and flashy rebuttal to the clean girl aesthetic, which encouraged women to be contained, efficient and beige. 'People on TikTok started to realize that they could go viral if they had a really pithy aesthetic name,' says Casey Lewis, who started her newsletter, After School, to chronicle these ridiculous trends. There was even a trend for anti-trends: 'quiet luxury.' Pitched as the ultimate dunk on all the trends that came before it, it claimed that people who really have money and taste wear understated labels that you’ve never even heard of.... [F]ashion media took this experimentation as gospel. When [Mandy Lee, a trend forecaster on TikTok] made a video... predicting the return of what she called 'indie sleaze,' or the 'amateur-style flash photography' and 'opulent displays of clubbing,' Dazed magazine wrote a story about it within a week. GQ, British Vogue, Vogue, Highsnobiety, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Refinery29 heralded its return, and anything remotely related to mid-2000s indie rock or American Apparel was seized upon as proof...."

Writes Rachel Tashjian, in "How TikTok changed fashion/As the app faces a potential ban, it’s stepping into the spotlight at fashion’s biggest night: the Met Gala" (WaPo).

"Once the gifting took over — and women realized they could charge tens of thousands of dollars per social media post — the originality essential to fashion blogging’s initial success receded."

"In its place came the veneer of a successful, aspirational lifestyle; the idea was for an influencer to look as cool and carefree as possible so that women could understand exactly what they don’t have (and needed, immediately). What seemed like a fun alternative quickly became homogeneous. 'The kernel of this innate, benevolent desire to disrupt the system became its own form of establishment,' as [Leandra Medine AKA Man Repeller] put it. 'And so no longer was the desire to become part of the disruption, so much as part of the new establishment.' And consumers seem increasingly skeptical of the idea that they should buy a handbag or visit a place just because an influencer posts about it. So prevalent is the sense that digital marketing and data have too much control over what we want and desire, that TikTok is experimenting with letting users turn off their algorithm...."

Writes Rachel Tashjian in "Whatever happened to having taste?" (WaPo).