This essay was originally published at Rotten Tomatoes on May 4, 2020. The first half is excerpted here with permission.
Over the last decade of cinema, audiences have shown an affection for women who steal – especially when they look good doing it. Since 2010, there’s been a number of big-budget, studio-released, female-fronted films that focus on women and girls with a taste for luxury and a penchant for crime. Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring showed the appeal of empty consumerism and label addiction, Paul Feig’s A Simple Favor gave us style and cunning wrapped up in a sharp three-piece suit, and Ocean’s 8 brought eight actresses together for the jewel heist of a lifetime. That’s not to mention the stylish, pole-dancing heroes of Hustlers, the bad girls of Spring Breakers,or the hilariously mismatched partners of The Hustle. And all these films have been successful, making bank at the box office, or becoming cult hits, and inspiring memes and followings.
So what exactly makes this type of anti-heroine – whom we’ll call The Designer Thief – so compelling? After all, even though they’re fun to watch, it would probably be a lot less fun to fall victim to one of their schemes.
Simply put? She’s got the look.
Whether it’s stealing for fun or stealing for profit, a major draw of the Designer Thief is the way she is depicted. The highly stylized treatment of these characters transforms them from figures we judge into figures of envy. They are successful thieves, able to live in beautiful homes and swan around in beautiful clothes, and through them we can imagine what our lives would be like if we also had access to unfettered wealth. These criminal characters permit us to enjoy the thrill of their ill-gotten gains, minus the guilt or responsibility of actually committing any crimes. We get a taste of the high life, without having to do the nasty work to get there. The trope of the Designer Thief proliferates because it lets us into a world most of us will never experience.
Sofia Coppola’s 2013 film The Bling Ring, based on a true story, is all about conspicuous consumption. In it, a band of idle, celebrity-obsessed teens becomes fixated on the lives and lifestyles of the socialites filling the pages of tabloid magazines and websites like TMZ. Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and The Hills’ Audrina Patridge are just a few of the women who are unlucky enough to be the subjects of the teens’ materialistic devotion. That devotion turns criminal when the group decides to relieve the women of their beautiful things by breaking into their houses and stealing them.
As their scores get bigger and riskier – they repeatedly hit the same houses and are eventually caught on security cameras – the members of the Bling Ring are almost compelled to continue stealing. They pilfer designer dresses and expensive bags to suit their own tastes, or to resell for cash, and the film takes great pains to show the teens sincerely indulging in their newfound access to this wealth. They know and understand not just the value of the objects they steal, but the social cache that comes with the labels stitched inside them. “Look at her sunglasses – these are Alexander McQueen!” one girl exclaims during an early heist at Hilton’s house. The item itself is immaterial, but the name has power. Dressing in their stolen designer gear, the Designer Thieves of The Bling Ring inherit some measure of these socialites’ mystique and allure, and themselves become mysterious and alluring within their peer group.
As moderately well-off children in and around Beverly Hills, what the teens of the Bling Ring really desired – in real life and on screen – was the lifestyle they saw depicted in the press by the models and socialites they envied. The things were merely a portal to the sense of superiority they were chasing. Crime was a means to an end. The small group of (largely) women did not steal to fund projects or pay bills, but simply to accumulate things.
And yet, we don’t judge the Ring too harshly – because we as an audience can be just like them: desperately aspiring for more. The Bling Ring’s actions allow us as viewers a perverse kind of voyeurism. We too get to enjoy playing in the closets of the rich and the famous – and even judge them. (These are not victimless crimes… but have you seen the victims?!) It’s hard to justify the conspicuous consumption of these stars in the first place. Who truly needs an entire closet filled with expensive Birkin bags? Seeing these young women play dress-up in the riches they had not earned, for fun, and even get away with it for a time, permits us all to experience our own illicit thrill. At the time, some criticized Coppola for taking aim at rampant consumerism, while seeming to also celebrate it. Perhaps that was entirely the point.
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