Why TikTok Sees Music Video Vixens as the Unsung Heroes of Y2K Fashion
A “video vixen” is a expression to start with applied to explain ladies who appeared as qualifications dancers or like pursuits in hip-hop video clips all over the late-Nineties and early 2000s. She is offered to the viewers as a modern-day-working day goddess. The receiver of admiration from male artists who serenade her on digital camera — at periods to the position of objectification. The viewer does not constantly know her by name but is aware the names of the male artists singing to and about her. The absence of identification suggests the vixen could be any person all people. We could all be a wonderful girl who is truly worth being sung about.
Online video vixens have a certain keep on today’s youth lifestyle for the reason that of how they impacted the prior generation of younger people, still hungry for a lot more inclusive media figures. “I can identify with a video vixen because I know as a darkish skin black girl my features are exclusive and I know I am lovely,” influencer Mary Poppin tells Rolling Stone. “When I was a minor female, I employed to stare in awe at the elegance of these movie vixens. I bear in mind looking at my most loved movies and wondering, ‘I can not hold out right until I get older to look like her.’”
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On TikTok, there is sweeping admiration for the online video vixen variations of the early 2000s. The hashtag #videovixens at the moment sits at around 5.8 million views on the platform.
Shardell Todd, who creates video articles less than the username @themoderndiva, recollects the movie vixens of her adolescence, and how it connects with an perspective of nostalgia online. “It reminds you of your childhood! Very little beats the pleasure of coming household from faculty to check out Rap Town or 106 and Park and catch your most loved video vixen on the Tv,” she tells Rolling Stone. “We did not have social media so catching your favourite video clip or a video premiere was unique.”
And it was the video vixen who actually defined the Y2K model that is currently generating a roaring comeback amid Gen Z. Material creator Diamond Taylor emphasizes that the design and style of early 2000s video clip vixens is “the type of late Nineties and early 2000s Black society.” The traditional model of a movie vixen can be described by low-rise denims, mini-crop tops, tracksuits, chains, and mini-skirts, accessorized with massive sun-glasses, hoop earrings, assertion necklaces, and significant-heels. Taylor specially notes, “the jersey dresses, the mini-skirts, the hoops and the jet black hair, Child Phat bedazzled shirts, and these darkish tint glasses,” as getting very important to the fashion.
The video vixens of the early aughts set the precedent of style and personification for today’s “Instagram baddies,” helping make the landscape of what our lifestyle distinguishes as attractive, in particular by appreciating ladies with curvier figures.
At present, songs movie vixens have a lot more agency when it comes to making an audience and independently sharing their encounters. A lot of the social media dialogue around video vixens makes reference to how they are positioned in tunes movies. Numerous place out the inherit electricity imbalance. How the movie vixen’s task is in element to make the artist shine.
Kendal Bernardez, a experienced video vixen identified as a “cameo queen,” has appeared in audio video clips for artists these types of as Drake, Long term, Youthful Thug, and far more. She went viral on TikTok for disclosing several of her experiences.
“There’s undoubtedly execs and disadvantages. I’ll say in general it is entertaining. Currently being glammed up, the middle of attention, and staying compensated to seem fantastic on digicam and fairly significantly celebration with acknowledged famous people is fantastic,” she tells Rolling Stone. “On the other hand, because it is centered about your appears and your human body, sometimes there is a significant stage of objectification wherever the sector fairly practically sees you as an object.”
Miranda Huerta is a further video clip vixen that has manufactured appearances in films for artists like Tyga, Travis Scott, and Gunna. Huerta has also taken to TikTok to share her movie vixen experience, racking up much more than 900,000 sights.
“From hair and make-up to wardrobe and dope areas, it’s a satisfaction, but what people don’t know is the 10+ hrs on set it normally takes — sometimes till dawn the up coming day,” Huerta tells Rolling Stone. “It would be nice to get our names and placement highlighted in the remarks, but for the most element I’ve gotten a large amount of recognition and I understand that we are there to make the artist glow additional and it is a humbling expertise to even be witnessed by tens of millions of viewers on the net.”
With the culture’s fascination with early-aughts nostalgia as a result of vogue and new music, it is time to admit the video clip vixen as the primary “it girl.” With out her, the music would not audio the exact same.
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