WINCH, Alison

BFF Celebrity Co-Brands: Fearne and Holly and What Not to Wear

I argue that best friend celebrity co-brands utilize discourses of friendship to confer expertise but also to enable ‘emotion work’. I situate these BFF couples within girlfriend media where female solidarities often supersede heterosexual attachments with men, and where girlfriendship is configured as entitlement.

Focusing on the British co-brands Trinny and Susannah (What Not to Wear) and Fearne Cotton and Holly Willoughby (particularly their conduct book Fearne and Holly: The Best Friend’s Guide to Life (2010)), I argue that displays of friendship can offer the appearance of authenticity as the private self is made partially public. Rather than producing dysfunctional narratives, much of their emotion work is mediated through public displays of friendship. The performance of their companionship reveals their feeling selves; it exposes their vulnerability. The production of celebrity intimacy is generated through the friends knowing each others’ private thoughts and habits. Having a best friend provides material evidence of an interior realm and, consequently, it psychologically connects with intimate publics. Photographs, footage, and pseudo-private conversations of the BFFs are tantalising glimpses into their secret selves where the other is privy to ‘the reality’ behind the public mask.

These co-authors brand themselves ‘best friends’ and market this female relating as evidence of expertise; their experience of sociality within the media industries confers them with knowledge. Extending their friendship to their readers, they create an intimate female site in order to guide the reader into making normative choices around body image. This intimacy is produced through the gendered discourses of second wave feminism and the tight knit closeness of adolescent circles.

Dr. Alison Winch is a lecturer in Media at Middlesex University.