From Julia Roberts to Smiley via Mick Jagger. she’s a pop culture cult icon, star-struck but also kidnapped. Sign language decoding.
Laughter is starry. The smile too. Magnetic, iconic, iconic, some smiles imprint themselves in our minds and become legendary. It was the film actress who made him smile his trademark. Or a politician like Kennedy, making him his best ally in his campaign. Or the spontaneous smile of an athlete crossing the finish line amid applause. All these smiles from cinema, sports, art, advertising, literature or pop culture form a common heritage, a reservoir of fleeting or permanent smiles that, beyond marketing, gives us a sudden glimpse of facial radiance. And that light up a world that hardly smiles.
It Mona Lisa
If, according to the work of an American psychologist, there are 19 forms of smile that express 44 different emotions, what can the Mona Lisa mean? One or two billion euro conundrum, the estimate of the world’s most expensive work of art. For a long time the identity of the beauty signora Leonardo da Vinci’s painting was as mysterious as his indecipherable smile. But since the Mona Lisa name was established in the early 2000s; no, it’s not a prostitute or a transvestite, but Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the wealthy Florentine cloth merchant Francesco Del Giocondo. to smile has not lost its universal aura. It reminds us that life sneaks by like a smile.
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Julia Roberts
Since the pin-up era in Hollywood, the smile has been eroticized. Marilyn Monroe made it a huge weapon of seduction. Julia Roberts’ speech is perhaps less clear, but metaphor and hypertrophy. Extra-magnetic, extra-contagious, extra-popular. This XXL (smile) laugh and perfectly aligned teeth contributed to Pretty Woman’s universal success. After thirty-two, it hasn’t lost its sting.
A certain smile By Francois Sagan
It’s the one worn by Dominique, the heroine of Françoise Sagan’s second novel, published in 1956 after a huge success (and scandal). Hello Sadness!. Happily living her life as she sees fit, a student in love with an older and married man, she has that “certain rebellious smile” that heralds revolutions. In 1958, an American film was made from it.
Laughing cow
Like Tintin, we love him from 7 to 77 years old, this cheerful cow who graces the round box of industrial cheeses of our childhood. Flirty, she wears earrings in the shape of boxes of Laughing Cow, a dizzying abyss of urine that makes you dizzy. Sympathetically, if not completely believably (according to scientists, cattle communicate with each other more through their posture than through laughter), this advertising star is known around the world. As a diva, she took her name from Richard Wagner’s opera; what else? – as Benjamin Rabier’s first painting was called Vachkiriasubtle hint Ride of the Valkyries, the famous air of the German composer. Something to think about before you attack your next batch of processed cheese…
joker
There are crazy or carnivorous smiles that freeze the blood. The smile of the Joker, Batman’s evil double and his sworn enemy in DC Comics, is one of them. Inspired by a very real torture that the character would undergo in his youth, the “Glasgow Smile” or “Angel Smile”, which consists of enlarging his victim’s smile with a “blade weapon” up to his ears, it turns into: a sardonic grimace or a demented smile when Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix play the psychopathic clown in the movies. Beware of the laughing man. her smile sometimes hurts us.
Tom Cruise
A smile sometimes speaks louder than a long speech. As proof, Tom Cruise’s Ultra Brite-esque toothy smile, jumping for joy on Oprah Winfrey’s couch in 2005 when he announced his love for Katie Holmes is a textbook case, in this case the Actors Studio. An ecstatic smile lit up too muchwhich almost cost him his career, but which made him famous in Hollywood.
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Vanessa Paradis
In Vanessa Paradis, it is symbolic. Happy teeth, sincere smile – pure French charm. One signature.
The smile
It celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The restless little yellow face, adorned with two black ovals for eyes and a sparkling bow for a mouth, is a global icon of good humor and joie de vivre. It was imagined in 1972 by a journalist French evening, to Franklin Loughran, for illustrating the good news section on the front page of the newspaper. Smart, he submitted his picture to the National Institute of Intellectual Property (INPI) and quickly gave away his work, printing it on millions of stickers or T-shirts. Smiley’s success, which is as immediate as the smile it brings to the person who discovers it, enriches his fortune. Straying from Talking Heads or Nirvana album covers, it became much more sultry in the 1990s; a symbol of domestic and infantile delusions, it stamped, in spite of itself, ecstasy pills… But the little yellow man is not there. the end of his transformations. Nicholas Lufrani, Franklin’s son, who took over the burgeoning company, released a dictionary of Smiley symbols inspired by the emoticons, which were then found online. It will be quickly overtaken by tech giants like Apple developing their own emojis. It remains the fashion that liked the cute little face with the infectious smile. Reinterpreted by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac in 2008, Ora-Ito in 2009, Colette in 2015 by AMI, the famous logo also inspired Justin Bieber for his clothing brand, Drew. Pop and shock, Smiley begins his fifth life with a banana.
Mick Jagger
Although the artist is approaching eighty, his Dionysian and devouring smile has not aged a bit. The Big Red Mouth logo and its famous protruding tongue, created in 1971, appears to have been modeled after Sir Mick Jagger’s huge mouth. He has become the universal symbol of the Rolling Stones. When rock rhymes with zygomatics.
The Cheshire Cat
In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, the little girl notes. “I have often seen a cat without a smile, but never a smile without a cat.” Cheshire cat grin – a gorgeous feline, a bit of a nihilist who philosophizes at all costs, really floats alone in space. We never saw a cat.
The anonymous ones
Mustache, goatee and a big smile on a pale face. Face of Guy Fawkes, historical figure, in mask form taken by Anonymous. When a smile becomes political to protect free speech…
The sister smiles
Can a smile travel the world and be nominated for four Grammy Awards? “Yes, I can,” replied (in French) Sister Surir, the stage name of Sister Luc-Gabriel, a Belgian Dominican nun who burst onto the charts with her faith and a guitar slung over her shoulder. No. 1 selling in the United States in 1963, his hit Dominica and its chorus (“Dominique, nique, nique, s’en va tout tout simples”) may be funny, but no one has yet broken their records for French-language album sales in the US. A smile, a weapon of mass union?
Usain Bolt
The smile to destabilize the enemy. In the 100m semi-finals at the 2016 Rio Olympics, the Jamaican sprinter takes the time to give photographers a genuine smile before winning. The cheeky laugh of a true champion.
Yue Minjun
Eyes narrowed, mouth wide open, Yue Minjun’s portraits destabilize us to the point of anxiety. For the Chinese artist, it is a smile of struggle and resistance to political power. Let’s smile, the fight continues.
Source: Le Figaro
