Ways of Being: The female gaze and surveillance of self in Cou Cou Intimates’ Instagram
Launched in 2021 by then-philosophy student Rose Colcord, Cou Cou Intimates is an undergarment brand aiming to create elevated yet sustainable daily lingerie pieces which empower their customers to feel both confident and comfortable. Cou Cou, like a rising number of small and up-and-coming fashion brands, markets its pieces predominantly on social media. To better understand this brand’s identity, I investigated Cou Cou’s Instagram page and began to question whether the “female gaze” is being instrumentalised as a marketing strategy.
Cou Cou Intimates presents underwear as a part of everyday life in their seemingly effortless yet thoroughly designed form, a harmless homage to the ‘everyday embodied experience as women’, as Colcord explains in an interview with Forbes Magazine (Lei 2022). Underwear for daily use is too often disregarded as it remains publicly unseen, she remarks, making it the only garment that one wears solely for oneself. It is these undeclared values, those that the woman chooses to represent in her private sphere, which are the most important. Colcord’s aim with Cou Cou is to disrupt the damaging dichotomy between lingerie and daily underwear, so that feeling comfortable and feeling beautiful are no longer mutually exclusive. The garments were designed specifically for young women like herself, reminding them to indulge in the mundane. This ethos is apparent in the marketing of the pieces, as large proportion of the photographs shared on Cou Cou’s Instagram account depict a domestic environment, as opposed to the superficial studio or runway setting commonly seen in the advertising of more commercial undergarment brands.
The nature of these images is, as the brand name suggests, intimate. They are photographs of beautiful young women dressed in garments of sweet pointelle patterns and French lace. This ‘Cou Cou girl’ is shown lounging in her stylish home, posing in the big city, and papped on solitary walk through the lush countryside, wearing nothing but her camisole, pants, and wellie boots. The posts range from professional photoshoots, videos of interviews with their models, curated series of aesthetic images of books, bedsheets, and baguettes, and photographs submitted by customers or women that have been send the brand’s pieces, often paired with a short caption akin to ‘Cou Cou girls showing us how it’s done’ and emojis of bows, clouds, and white hearts. prioritises the complete encapsulation of a certain sensual, feminine image through its marketing.
The chronic romanticisation of the everyday on social media, however, can carry negative consequences. Bentham’s Panopticon was a mechanism of punishment in prisons, in which prisoners situated in a ring of cells were perpetually exposed to the gaze of the guards in a central tower. Never certain whether or not they were under surveillance, the prisoners would self- regulate their behaviour at all times. As Michel Foucault highlights in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the major effect of the Panopticon was ‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility’ (Foucault 1975: 201) which enforced discipline and assured the automatic functioning of power. He applied this technology of power to the modern age, claiming that it enforced the “normalising gaze”, an understanding of officially sanctioned knowledge about what is appropriate and desirable in the behaviour of people.
These ideas have a certain applicability to the contemporary new media age; from a Foucauldian perspective, social media is a valuable vehicle for identity-formation, but it inexorably also comes to be an alternate, virtual form of the Panopticon, wherein users voluntarily engage with platforms which continuously survey their activity, conceivably and concerningly invoking a reaction similar to that of the prison. As a normalising gaze is enforced through permanent visibility, users of the platform feel they must present appropriate and desirable behaviours by uploading visual material, never knowing what audience will view it, and when.
The private sphere of someone who desires becoming a Cou Cou girl is thus no longer truly her own. Her hyperawareness of her own image invades the areas of her life in which she should feel free from surveillance and the gaze of the external voyeur. In a sense, by viewing and identifying with the flawless aesthetic of these images, she has cultivated her own internal voyeur which, even in her most intimate state, infiltrates her privacy and speculates about how she would be hypothetically perceived in that moment. The Cou Cou consumer risks attempting to “self-discipline” in order to accomplish this almost ironically idyllic and enact an ultimately unattainable everyday—after all, is the aim of the brand to not ‘make women aspire to be anything other than who they naturally are’ (Lei, 2022)?
This infiltration of the normalising gaze of an omnipresent voyeur can also be likened to concepts presented by film theorist Laura Mulvey in her seminal article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Hypothesising patriarchal society through the lens of cinema and psychoanalytic theory, she notes that in film, a male protagonist is assumed as an active and controlling subject who regards women as nothing more than passive objects of desire. Worse still, directors and writers assume a male spectator who, in his identification with this protagonist, his ‘screen surrogate’ (Mulvey 1974: 12), feels a sense of omnipotence and ownership over the objectified female form. The male gaze thus migrates off the screen and into the everyday, becoming engrained into the psyche of every viewer.
This “pleasure in looking” can be further understood as fetishistic scopophilia: the act of viewing becomes pleasurable in itself. In the darkness of a cinema—or in this context, in the act of consuming social media—one is isolated and free to look into another’s private sphere without being seen, further augmenting this desire to look. This condition encourages not only the voyeuristic process of female objectification, but also the exciting illusion of understanding and control. This tendency is visible in the stylisation and fragmentation the model’s body in the photographs produced by Cou Cou Intimates which, analogous to the disposition of narrative cinema, causes the ‘beauty of the woman as object and the screen space to coalesce’ (ibid.: 15), favouring the image of the woman as a perfect product ‘in direct erotic rapport with the spectator’ (ibid.).
Of course, this article may be seen as somewhat outdated today, and these concepts have gradually dissolved with the emergence of new postfeminist discourse which has rendered the male gaze obsolete and associated with a traditional, misogynistic Hollywood. In its place, the “female gaze” has emerged, a parallel psychoanalytic theory which prefers the sensual over the sexual and presents women as active subjects rather than the objects to counter the regular gaze. Often conveying the female experience through the use of a music score or a certain visual aesthetic, the female gaze is a supposedly empowering expression of pure and unabashed sensuality through the reclamation of female autonomy and the woman’s body. This practice is present in the photographs used by Cou Cou Intimates to market their pieces, as the intimate medium of photography brings the viewer closer to the subject and minimises her objectification. The Cou Cou girl often stands alone; she is a woman who is independent and self-assured in her reclaimed sensuality, for which she has been exploited, yet shamed for openly expressing, for centuries.
As art historian John Berger remarks in the second episode of his BBC series Ways of Seeing, which deals with the portrayal of female nudes in the tradition of European painting, the intrinsic male voyeur in every female media consumer determines the relation of the woman to herself; she turns herself into an object of vision—a spectacle. From this perspective, any performance of a purer, empowering form of non-objective femininity is but a more comfortable way to inevitably cater to the male gaze.
Even if the photographs taken to promote Cou Cou Intimates were truly empowering, they are far from being representative in their exclusion of a number of groups of women. The age of the women modelling the garments does not seem to exceed thirty years old, the vast majority of the models are no bigger than a UK size 10, and over half are White, strongly evincing the tendency of the brand to cater predominantly to a young and normatively attractive woman. Further still, the consumer must predominantly assume a privileged, middle-class position in to afford these exorbitant yet ultimately disposable products.
In this sense, Cou Cou Intimates’ use of the seemingly effortless, wholesome, and inclusive female gaze in its marketing strategy is not as radical as it believes itself to be. Arguably, it is just as oppressive as the explicit male gaze with its subtle mirage of the woman possessing control, if not more. Whether this is deliberate or mindless is impossible to know. Regardless, its effects are far from inconsequential in their marginalisation of less privileged or minority groups, further exasperated by the brand’s claims of inclusivity and self-acceptance.
While I wonder whether regaining full autonomy over the female experience will ever be truly possible, I truly support the principles of female empowerment and reclaiming sexuality through the female gaze, and acknowledge that they can be positive for some. This marketing strategy certainly has the potential to enable women to feel relaxed in the domestic space through its presentation of independent women unapologetically practicing self-care and non-productivity. Perhaps, one day, a platform will emerge which upholds these feminist values in a truly candid, sincere, and non-instrumentalising manner, devoid of the hyper-aestheticization of every moment, and separate from the remnants of self-discipline and the internal voyeur.
Lei, A. (2022) Meet Cou Cou, The New Generation’s Intimate Wear With A Purpose. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelalei/2022/09/06/meet-cou-cou-the-new-generations-intimate- wear-with-a-purpose/?sh=68c089d87cb8 [Accessed: 5 December 2022].
Foucault, M. (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Paris: Gallimard.
Mulvey, L. (1974) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16(3), 6-18.