SCHRÖDINGER'S BIKINI CONTEST

Philippa SnowPhotography by Harry Mitchell

Is it possible for a beauty pageant to be feminist? This year’s Miss England final seemed to hope that question might be answerable in the affirmative.

It was a glorious mid-October morning at the Holiday Inn Birmingham Airport, and everyone seemed to agree that the big draw of the weekend would be a girl who wore no make-up. That Sunday, one Melissa Raouf – a 20-year-old with the glassy, unblemished complexion of, what else, a 20-year-old – would become the first contestant in the almost century-long history of Miss England to compete in the full final with a bare face. “We wish her the best of luck in Miss England,” competition director Angie Beasley told the Independent in late August. “It’s a very brave thing to do when everyone else is wearing make-up, but she’s sending out an important message to young women.” It is undeniable that what is considered to be an ideally photogenic or telegenic female face, per the mainstream, is increasingly unnatural – think, for instance, of the poreless and augmented women of Love Island, or of the phenomenon a make-up artist once described in The New Yorker as “an Instagram face … that looks like it’s made out of clay”. These are faces that owe no small debt to the Kardashians, and as with many things that spring from California and are further popularised in American culture, we have seized on them here, too, and have begun assimilating them in the same way that we assimilate most trends from the United States: a little less expensively, a little less bombastically and at a modest scale. All of this has meant that to suggest the prettiest girl in any country – even one as small and badly organised and, frankly, strange as England – might be one with no adornment or enhancement whatsoever is now radical enough to garner, as Raouf did, coverage in newspapers from New Orleans to New Delhi. So, yes, perhaps something brave, or at least interestingly unusual, was about to happen, and we were to consider ourselves fortunate to have seen it. “We had no press last year,” a photographer on the riser informed me as all 32 women, practicing their smiles, walked slowly back and forth in a rehearsal. “This year, a lot more – because of Melissa.” He paused for a moment and looked out towards the catwalk, where at present all of the contestants were in red promotional T-shirts reading “BEAUTY WITH A PURPOSE”, and then cracked a pageant smile himself. “If she wins,” he added, nodding, “it will go really, really viral.”

In spite of Raouf’s status as the biggest media story of the show, my allegiances were split once I caught sight of Georgia Austin, a professional dancer representing Liverpool with a name featuring two separate American locales, the sultry looks of a biracial Megan Fox, the undulating catwalk stomp of one Naomi Campbell and the winner’s quiver of a Grand National racehorse. In an “eco fashion” competition, for which contestants were asked to style themselves in second-hand clothes, three girls cited Audrey Hepburn as an influence; two made reference to the late Diana Spencer and four to the 1950s as a decade; and almost everyone involved at one point or another made some reference to their grandmother. Austin, who appeared onstage in a top hat and tails, a leotard and sheer black tights, high-kicked her way into my heart by saying she had styled herself in “an almost exact recreation” of an outfit worn by Cilla Black, “a Scouse legend”. On the catwalk, she vamped wildly, sliding one elegant hand over the brim of her top hat, and in the talent competition, she won by performing a routine to “I Just Can’t Do It Alone” from Chicago, wearing a flapperish leotard and winking at the judges. It occurred to me that this was pageantry as a kind of cis-feminine take on drag, and accordingly it felt just as disruptive as Raouf’s willingness to give up make-up – some effort had been made to take the sex out of the competition, and yet here was Austin, forcibly injecting it back into the proceedings. I began to mentally prepare to write a text that saw Miss England as a two-horse race, and that two-horse race itself as a reflection of the push-me-pull-you between modernity and tradition that characterised Miss England in the present: a dialogue between camp and empowerment, glamour and earnestness, entertainment and altruism and so on. If neither of these women won, my central thesis might collapse in on itself like a soufflé – but then, to paraphrase a famous girlboss who has graced a number of tote bags, we tell ourselves stories in order to live through two days of pageant rehearsals and festivities at the airport Holiday Inn. 

Mercifully, the contemporary Miss England pageant is less white than it has historically been. Of its finalists this year, roughly a third were women of colour. Last year’s winner, Rehema Muthamia, is British-Kenyan, and Dr Bhasha Mukherjee, or Miss England 2019–2020 – the first title holder to reign through two competitions thanks to the pandemic – is British-Indian. (Demonstrating the good grace and tact that one imagines helped her to achieve the title in the first place, Muthamia barely flinched when one of this year’s female presenters, having previously announced the other judges by their names, appeared to be struck by a terminally Caucasian fear of mispronunciation, and simply described her as “Miss England 2021”. “As Natasha said,” she responded, slyly, before launching into her pre-judging speech, “my name is Rehema Muthamia.”) In addition to Raouf’s status as the first contestant without make-up, it turned out that there were other first-times, too, and they were if anything a little more serious and thus a little more intriguing: India Fenwick from Northumberland would be the first contestant to compete with a prosthetic eye, and Jennifer Carless, Miss East Yorkshire, was the first to compete with a catheter, which she showed off with delightful elan by stalking down the catwalk in a shimmering orange-soda-coloured gown split to the thigh. Both of these women were, of course, white and conventionally beautiful and slender, but each did pose an interesting challenge to the very narrow parameters of the beauty standard, and it had to be admitted that they were not what one thought of as the “usual” pageant queen. At moments, I became aware that I was being won over by the contest’s efforts to rebrand itself as an exercise in empowerment; many of the girls – especially when one saw them scarfing chicken tenders from the buffet or listened to them discussing famous crushes – seemed so earnest and so sweet and so unbelievably young that it was easy to imagine the affair as an assembly at a high school run by, in the form of Angie Beasley, a firm but benevolent headmistress. Still, those entry rules, with their Madonna-whore restrictions, nagged at me, and the competition’s strange conviction that objectification became feminist if it also became anti-sex unnerved me. That impression of backstage camaraderie, too, proved to be partially illusory. “Some of the girls,” one contestant euphemistically told our photographer, “know what they’re here for.”

The night of the final, two blonde audience members of a similar age and build, both similarly augmented, were engaged in what appeared to be a friendly and familiar conversation. Suddenly, it became clear that each had been mistaken when she’d believed she had recognised the other – in fact, they both simply resembled a number of other women in the room. “I think it’s just that I’m tall and blonde,” one of them sighed, not surprised or disappointed, but resigned. Miss England 2022 continually created these small moments of divine, mockumentary-style comedy – the contestant, for example, who announced onstage that she believed that children “are the adults of the future” – in a way that would have made it easy to dash out a catty little bit of reportage that suggested that this modernised beauty pageant was, in fact, exactly like the beauty pageants one remembers from comedy films and television. To do so would have been lazy, however, and would have bordered on misogyny. Two days did not prove to be enough for me to fully solidify my opinion on Miss England, which in some ways felt depressingly outdated and medieval, and in others felt like harmless, female-centric entertainment – effectively, heterosexual high camp. The revelation that the contestants had raised £32,000 between them for their charity causes meant, if nothing else, that some straightforward good had come from the proceedings. By the time the final three were being announced onstage, I was invested, not simply because I had hoped that either Raouf or Austin would prevail and that, in doing so, they would give me a neat ending for this piece, but because I was genuinely interested as to what the chosen winner would reveal about the competition’s current ethos. As it happened, neither Raouf not Austin made the cut. I overheard a bystander saying that Austin had not expected to win – that at 25 she’d felt too old, and that the whole thing had effectively been self-promotion for her career as a dancer, anyway. She had known, as that contestant said, what she was there for. Maybe Raouf had, too, since her brief time as a media sensation had allowed her to illustrate her on-camera cool and her adeptness at expressing her opinions, both attributes proving her suitability for the political career she claimed to want.

Ultimately the winner, representing Lancashire, was a strawberry blonde named Jessica Gagan who had struck me in barefaced rehearsals as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, and who looked in full-face make-up like a taller version of the actress Isla Fisher. Doll-like and exquisite, she seemed like a traditional beauty queen, although in the speech she gave after being nominated in the final three, she pointed out that there had never been a redheaded Miss England. This would be the big “first” of the year: one small step for the rewiring of beauty standards, but a giant leap for hot, formerly bullied girls with red hair. The decision, in its own way, was a perfect summary of the contest, functioning as it did like a seeing-eye puzzle vis-à-vis progress. Viewed from one angle, Miss England had successfully elevated a member of a group it had previously discriminated against; viewed from another, it had wrung publicity from the diversity and feminist bona fides of some of its finalists, and then selected a winner who was tall, white, model-thin, perfectly proportionate, glamorously made-up, not too sexual and entirely able-bodied. When the final moment came, I expected some hysterics, having only really encountered a pageant coronation in the movies. The reality was somewhat less emotionally fraught. Raouf, with her bare face, would have been free to cry; Gagan, her foundation masklike around her prizewinning smile, knew better than to smudge the image. Carefully and prettily, she swiped a single tear from her right eye, posing, as a crowd of photographers, all male, closed in and obscured her from the audience’s view. ◉