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Emily Ratajkowski is having her own tomato girl summer — and making the trend as literal as it can be.
We could say that Andy Warhol was one of the first people to experience the Dionysian thrill of a tomato girl summer. The artist had been painting cans of Campbell’s tomato-flavored soup since 1962, and in 1966, the tinned goods firm capitalized on Warhol’s popularity with the production of a disposable dress screen-printed with its own cans. It was a fortuitous meeting of art and consumerism that precipitated the TikTok trend – which in turn precipitated various fast fashion categories – by almost 60 years.
See also: Inès de La Fressange closing Jean-Charles de Castelbajac's spring-summer 1984 presentation in a sleeveless dress shaped like a Campbell’s soup can; Dolce & Gabbana’s spring-summer 2017 burlap dress, which resembled a traditional can of peeled Sicilian tomatoes; and now, the asymmetrical Miaou dress that Emily Ratajkowski was photographed in on the streets of NYC.
Giving us her own take on tomato girl, Ratajkowski wore that silken slip – printed in a cut-and-paste melange of branded canned tomatoes – with green Reebok Club C 85 sneakers. (She has a unique gift for styling dresses with sneakers.)
There are a few differences between Warhol's and Ratajkowski’s approaches to image-making. Much like the artist’s 1962 Marilyn Diptych – a screen print in which he repeated the American icon’s image hundreds of times in a grid-like formation – a cursory scroll through the model’s Instagram will reveal her own face atomized across a thousand digital squares.
Both of them understand that celebrities can and will be mass-consumed, like canned tomatoes. “I was the living testament of a woman empowered through commodifying her image,” the model wrote in her 2021 book. “I built a platform by sharing images of myself and my body online, making my body and subsequently my name recognizable.”
This post originally appeared in British Vogue.