'No friends @ the fashion show :(': Crowds, Spectacles, and the Art of Being Alone

By Hanna Yoon

Photograph of Lana Del Rey attending a fashion show alone, 2011.

Image courtesy of Tumblr.

There is a photograph – or rather, there is a meme – of Lana Del Rey sitting alone at a fashion show. Around her, the gilded apparatus of the industry turns on its axis: photographers jostle, editors recognise one another, and the front row arranges itself into a tableau of calculated proximity. And there she sits, composed and faintly celestial in her white dress, belonging to none of it – she tweets: ‘No friends @ the fashion show :(‘

Whether it’s my love for the singer or the sheer relatability of the situation, the image has always remained lodged in my mind. When it resurfaced in my feed, I found myself instinctively viewing it through an art-historical lens, as I tend to do with many of my favourite things. And the more I thought about it, the more art-historically relevant it seemed – this image has a lineage. The solitary figure inside the spectacle – present, composed, and physically elsewhere – is a concept not new, but one of the defining fixations of Western painting from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

This preoccupation emerged precisely when modern life began to generate its characteristic paradox: never before had people been so surrounded by one another, and never before had they felt quite so alone. The fashion show is simply the latest staging of a condition that Seurat understood in 1886, that Bêraud dissected in 1878, and that Hopper eventually rendered permanent. Lana Del Rey did not invent this feeling – she merely inherited it.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1886, Oil on canvas, 70.5 x 104.1 cm.

Image Courtesy of the Met.

Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1886) is among the most technically ambitious paintings of the nineteenth century, and also among its most socially devastating. The Grande Jatte was a popular island of the Seine – a Sunday destination of Parisians of various classes who came to promenade, to picnic, to perform the rituals of leisure that industrialisation had newly made available. Seurat spent two years on the canvas, making hundreds of preparatory drawings and studies, and the result is a painting that rewards the same obsessive attention its creator gave it.

Seurat was a committed theorist of colour, working from the scientific writings of Michel Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood, and his pointillist technique – the application of discrete, unmixed dots of pure colour that the eye is invited to blend optically – was intended as a rigorous application of perceptual science to painting. But the technique produces something its theory did not quite predict: figures that cannot cohere. Because every element of the canvas is rendered in the same atomised fashion, the human figures are given no special privilege of solidity or warmth. They exist in the same condition as the grass and the water and the shadows – as an aggregate of separate particles that approach but never achieve unity.

The social consequences are extraordinary. Couples stand beside one another without apparent connection. A mother ignores her child. A woman fishes alone in water that barely acknowledges her presence. The famous monkey on a leash strains toward something just outside the frame. The whole scene is drenched in golden light and yet feels, in T.J. Clark’s phrasing, like a painting of people who do not know how to spend their Sundays. Class has given them leisure; modernity has not given them the means to enjoy it together. Togetherness, Seurat seems to suggest, is a problem that cannot be solved by proximity. Sometimes the most rigorous way to paint loneliness is to paint a crowd.

Jean Béraud, La Soirée, 1878, Oil on canvas, 65 cm x 117 cm.

Image courtesy of the Musée d'Orsay.

Jean Béraud worked in a mode of precise social realism that the critics have always found slightly too legible, too interested in documentation to be properly interesting as art. This is, of course, exactly what makes him indispensable to this scene. Where Seurat theorises, Béraud simply records – and his La Soirsée (1878) has the unnerving quality of surveillance footage: a rendering of Parisian bourgeois social life so direct that it seems almost impolite.

A woman sits apart at a glittering evening gathering. The social machinery of the soiree proceeds around her – conversation is managed, alliances are consolidated, the evenings are quietly negotiated – and she is not participating. Her expression is the detail that Béraud gets exactly right: it is not sad or wistful. It is composed to the point of opacity, a face that has decided, quite deliberately, not to give the room what it wants from her. This is not the melancholy of exclusion. It is the cooler, more sovereign state of simply choosing not to engage.

The art historical question the painting raises, and does not answer, is whether this constitutes a form of resistance or merely its aestheticisation. To opt out of the spectacle while remaining inside it is a gesture with a long feminist genealogy – think of the women in Mary Cassatt’s theatre paintings, who ostentatiously look away from the stage, declining to be the passive recipients of spectacle that the culture requires them to be. Béraud’s woman may be doing something similar – or she may simply have no one to talk to. Béraud, characteristically, refuses to say. He is a realist, not a moralist. And so, he renders and does not adjudicate.

The ambiguity is, I would argue, the painting’s greatest sophistication – and its most direct connection to the opening image: the viewer is asked to wonder whether the woman in Béraud’s painting or Lana Del Rey is suffering or triumphant. Is she lonely, or is she simply, magnificently, not performing? Both pieces refuse to resolve the question.

Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927, Oil on canvas, 71.4 cm × 91.4 cm.

Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

The question that Béraud leaves open, Hopper answers – though not comfortingly. Edward Hopper’s Automat (1927) removes the solitary figure from the social gathering entirely and places her in a space that American modernity had specifically engineered for impersonal consumption: the Horn & Hardart automat - a restaurant without waiters, without the social friction of service, without the pretence of sociability that a conventional dining room maintained. You selected your meal from a machine, ate with whoever you were with, and left. It was, structurally, a room designed to make loneliness convenient.

Hopper’s woman sits before a coffee cup, one glove still on – a detail of such precise psychological curiosity that it has generated decades of critical commentary. She has not fully arrived. She has not fully committed to being here. The window behind her reflects only the interior light, sealing her inside a brilliance that illuminates without warming. Outside, by implication, is the city: millions of people in the same condition, lit by the same indifferent electricity, waiting for a connection that the spatial logic of modernity has made systematically difficult.

What Hopper contributes to this lineage that Seurat and Béraud cannot is the sense of the condition as permanent rather than episodic. The Sunday promenade concludes. The concert in the Tuileries disperses. But the automat is always open, and the city is always producing new versions of this woman, this cup, and this window that shows you only yourself. Modernity’s loneliness is not an event. It is infrastructure. It is the background condition against which all the spectacles are staged – the fashion shows and the Sunday afternoons on the Seine – and it does not resolve when the spectacle ends. It simply waits.

Screenshot of Lana Del Rey’s tweet, 2011.

Image courtesy of Tumblr.

Which brings us back, inevitably, to the front row. The women in Béraud’s painting, Seurat’s riverbank, and Hopper’s diner did not choose to be the subjects of these works. They were seen, selected, aestheticised, and made to carry meanings not of their own making. This is the foundational condition of women in the Western pictorial tradition: to be the object of the gaze rather than its author, to be made meaningful by an external intelligence rather than one’s own.

This is what the art historical lineage illuminates that the meme alone cannot: the figure of the solitary woman in the spectacle has always been, at some level, a site of contested meaning. Is she excluded or exempted? Is her partial absence a wound or a weapon? The paintings do not agree, and neither does the photograph. What they share is the recognition that this figure – present in the room, absent from its logic – is more interesting than anyone performing their attendance correctly. She is the rupture in the spectacle that makes the spectacle visible. She is, in the oldest possible sense, the most important person there.

The fashion show, like La Grande Jatte, like the Parisian soiree, like the all-night automat, is a stage on which modernity rehearses its central impossibility: the desire for connection in a social architecture designed to prevent it. The crowd assembles. The spectacle proceeds. And somewhere in the front row, a woman sits alone, looking magnificent and faintly elsewhere, and the whole room – and eventually the whole internet – recognises something it did not know it had been waiting to see.

Some feelings are simply that old. And some feelings, it turns out, have always looked this good.

Bibliography

“Automat, (Painting) | Smithsonian Institution.” 2025. Si.edu. 2025. https://www.si.edu/object/automat-painting%3Asiris_ari_417683.

sarahpaulsonsfreak. 2015. “Reblog by @Sarahpaulsonsfreak · 2 Images.” Tumblr. August 5, 2015. https://www.tumblr.com/sarahpaulsonsfreak/125929327494/jsuhn-lana-del-rey-attending-a-fashion-show.

The Met. 2020. “Study for ‘a Sunday on La Grande Jatte.’” Metmuseum.org. 2020. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437658.

“Une Soirée - Jean Béraud | Musée D’Orsay.” 2016. Musee-Orsay.fr. 2016. https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/oeuvres/une-soiree-69320.