Amanda Lear would still have two questions for Salvador Dalí.
Why didn’t you understand me?
Why did you use me?
The second one makes more noise.
The first, perhaps, hurts more.
Because Amanda is not speaking about an ordinary man.
She is speaking about Dalí.
A man who, long before we all became managing directors of our own image, had already turned himself into artwork, provocation, publicity and character.
Dalí did not have to become Dalí.
He was already Dalí.
And that is the paradox.
You can spend years beside someone capable of creating extraordinarily powerful images and still wonder whether that person ever truly saw you.
Not simply looked at you.
Saw you.
Amanda has been described for decades as muse, presence, mystery, provocation, part of the Dalí universe.
But muse is a curious word.
It tells us a great deal about what a person represents to the artist.
Much less about what the artist represents to her.
Perhaps that is why, so many years later, such simple questions remain.
Did you really know me?
Or did you know perfectly the character I occupied in your story?
I do not know.
And that is fine.
I am not interested in delivering a verdict on Dalí and Amanda.
I am interested in what the question leaves behind.
First the photograph
Amanda had encountered the problem long before we invented social media.
In 1973 Bryan Ferry chose her for the cover of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure.
Black dress.
Heels.
A panther on a lead.
An image built to be impossible to forget.
David Bowie saw that cover and wanted to meet the woman inside it.
Many years later Amanda would describe the episode with an almost brutal simplicity: Bowie had fallen in love with the photograph.
First the photograph.
Then the person.
The question is whether, when the person finally arrives, anyone still wants to know her.
Amanda had not predicted Instagram.
She had not predicted TikTok.
She had not predicted screenshots, comments, algorithms or millions of strangers analysing a photograph in the time it takes to tap a heart.
But she had already encountered the central problem:
the distance between a person and the image through which everybody believes they know them.
Almost half a century later the mechanism is still there.
Only faster.
Louder.
More permanent.
And today the public does not simply receive the character built by media, record companies and photographers.
It takes part directly in building it.
And in destroying it.
When the public decides who you are
That is also why I thought of Elodie.
Not because I want to establish which Elodie is the real one.
Quite the opposite.
I think the problem begins the moment we feel the need to decide.
Over the years we have seen many versions and many passages.
Television.
Sanremo.
The recording industry.
Success.
Changes of image.
The body.
Sensuality.
Provocation.
Criticism.
The way she presents herself changes.
As it does for almost everyone.
With one difference: we can change our haircut and, at worst, our mother looks at us badly over lunch.
She changes in front of millions of people.
And millions of people archive.
Compare.
Remember.
Judge.
A dress.
A photograph.
A performance.
A statement.
A body.
Then there is Franceska.
And even a relationship becomes material to interpret.
It is not enough to observe that two people are living something.
We have to decide what it means.
We have to give it a name.
And above all, we want the sums to work with everything that came before.
What about the men?
Were those relationships real?
Is this one real instead?
As though loving a woman today automatically made what one lived yesterday with a man less authentic.
It is a strange demand.
We want other people’s biographies to add up perfectly.
Every part confirming the next.
No detours.
Discoveries.
Second thoughts.
Areas that do not require a name.
But a life is not a dossier assembled backwards.
Not everything that changes disproves what came before.
We can have been sincere yesterday and be different today.
We can understand something about ourselves at forty that we had not understood at twenty-five.
We can also decide that we do not owe everybody an explanation.
Too much
One word often returns around Elodie.
Too much.
Too sensual.
Too exposed.
Too provocative.
Too much body.
Too different.
Too much appears to describe the person in front of us.
Often it describes the limit we had set for her.
Up to here, you were fine.
Beyond this, you begin to confuse me.
And when somebody confuses us, one of the quickest ways to restore order is to define them.
Arisa
Then I think of Arisa.
And apparently we are somewhere completely different.
When the public first knows her through Sincerità, the image is immediate and powerful.
Fringe.
Large glasses.
Voice.
A character instantly recognisable.
It works.
And when an image works very well, something strange can happen:
we begin to think it belongs to us.
But behind Arisa there is Rosalba.
And Rosalba keeps living.
The body changes.
The image changes.
The way she presents herself changes.
A sensuality appears that many had not associated with the girl in glasses.
And every transformation becomes material for comment.
Thinner.
Heavier.
Sexier.
Less sexy.
Why is she showing herself like this?
Why did she not before?
Where did the woman from Sincerità go?
Perhaps nowhere.
Perhaps she is still there.
Alongside all the others.
That is what I find resilient in Arisa.
Not the uplifting story of the woman who “made it”.
That would be too easy.
I am interested in someone who has repeatedly allowed herself the right to begin again.
To alter her image.
To inhabit her body differently.
Not to resemble forever the first version of herself that worked.
The first version that makes us recognisable should not become a life sentence.
Emma
Then there is Emma Marrone.
And with her the conversation about the body changes again.
Because that body has not only been photographed.
It has also lived through illness.
Operations.
Treatment.
Fear.
Changes that had nothing to do with the obligation to satisfy an aesthetic ideal.
Emma herself has spoken about how illness and its consequences affected her body.
And yet that body has continued to be commented on.
Her legs.
Her weight.
Her shape.
Her photographs.
As though even after going through something enormous, a person must still pass the aesthetic examination of strangers.
Emma has answered back.
Sometimes with humour.
Sometimes with anger.
But beneath those answers is something that should be obvious:
behind a photograph there is a person.
We see the result.
We do not necessarily see the history.
We see a leg.
We do not see an operating theatre.
We see a few kilos more or less.
We do not know what happened before.
And above all, we are not necessarily entitled to know.
A body should not have to display its scars in order to earn the right not to be judged.
Emma interests me for this reason.
Not because she is a perfect role model.
Nobody should have to be one.
But because she makes one thing very clear:
you can be strong without being invulnerable.
Perhaps resilience is not emerging immaculate from every battle.
Perhaps it is continuing to be a person while everybody else keeps demanding a character.
Three bodies, the same jury
Elodie, Arisa and Emma tell three very different stories about the body.
One is judged for how she shows it.
One while that body changes.
One even after that body has lived through illness.
The stories change.
The assumption that we are entitled to judge remains remarkably similar.
It would be easy to call it the price of fame.
I do not think it is.
Fame turns the volume up enormously.
But we all know the mechanism.
Meet someone you have not seen for a few months.
You’ve lost weight.
You look as though you’ve put some on.
You looked better before.
Sometimes we say it without malice.
Sometimes we even think it is a compliment.
But the result is curious.
Someone else’s body becomes a quarterly report.
As though it owes us updates.
As though every variation requires explanatory notes.
And here I return to something I had already been thinking about:
the body is not a CV.
We look at a body and assign information we do not possess.
Thin: discipline.
Fat: neglect.
Beautiful: wellbeing.
Muscular: strength.
Tired: unhappiness.
As though flesh were obliged to make a biography immediately legible.
It does not work like that.
A body does not certify how happy someone is.
It does not certify fragility.
It does not certify self-love.
It does not certify worth.
And above all, it is not obliged to remain recognisable in order to reassure the person looking at it.
The model does not suffer
There is something we forget when we turn someone into a model.
The model does not suffer.
The person does.
The character does not lose a mother.
It is not left by someone.
It does not grieve.
It does not fall in love with the wrong person.
It does not wake up one morning thinking:
I no longer know what I am doing.
The person does.
Many artists have publicly spoken about stopping, asking for help, going to therapy, cancelling tours or slowing down a professional machine that kept working while they no longer could.
That does not mean fame necessarily makes people ill.
That would be simplistic.
Nor does it mean every transformation hides trauma.
It means something much simpler:
the success of the character does not guarantee the wellbeing of the person carrying it around.
You can have a career that functions perfectly and a life that, at that moment, does not.
You can be instantly recognisable to everyone else and no longer recognise yourself.
And perhaps that is one of the cruellest parts.
While a person is trying to understand who they are becoming, the world keeps reminding them who they are supposed to be.
The cover is not the life
We look at a famous person and almost automatically place them above us.
Success.
Beauty.
Money.
Desirability.
Travel.
Covers.
All of this begins to look like proof of a successful life.
But a cover tells us what it has to show.
Not what it costs to be on it.
It does not show pressure.
It does not show fear of losing everything.
It does not show loneliness.
It does not show how difficult it can become to distinguish what you genuinely want from what the character has to keep wanting.
Sometimes we look at a life from the outside and call it privilege.
The person living it might call it a price.
That does not mean success is a punishment.
It simply means we cannot know the final bill by looking at the shop window.
Fame, beauty, money and recognition do not protect anyone from what makes human beings vulnerable.
Fear.
Loss.
Frustration.
Love.
Rejection.
The need to be understood.
Perhaps this is the real leveller.
Not something that denies the differences between our lives.
Something that makes those differences suddenly less important when we arrive at what we feel.
Amanda may have been Dalí’s muse.
Elodie may stand in front of tens of thousands of people.
Arisa may have a voice millions recognise within a few notes.
Emma may fill stages and covers.
I may have lived through a relationship known by people who were never part of it.
You may never have appeared in a newspaper.
Then loss arrives.
Fear.
Someone who no longer loves us.
Someone who does not understand us.
And the pedestal becomes useless.
We return to the same height.
We can change rooms
There is at least one advantage many of us have.
We can disappear.
Not completely.
But we can change friends.
Leave a group.
Change jobs.
Move.
Begin a life somewhere nobody remembers who we were ten years earlier.
A famous person has far less opportunity to do that.
The past remains available.
Photographs.
Videos.
Interviews.
Headlines.
Previous bodies.
Previous relationships.
Things said fifteen years ago.
Someone can always take an old version and place it beside the present one.
We can change rooms.
A public figure often changes in front of the same audience.
Yet you do not have to be famous to understand how exhausting it can be to be observed.
Years ago I lived through a relationship known by far more people than were actually part of it.
People who had seen one hour.
Heard one version.
Collected one piece of gossip.
And still felt authorised to know what was happening.
To judge.
To advise.
To take sides.
At a certain point you are no longer managing only what is happening between two people.
You are also managing the story everyone else has built about you.
And when that noise becomes loud enough, something worse than judgement can happen:
it can become difficult to understand what you actually feel.
Today I do not know what would have happened if that relationship had remained more private.
Perhaps it would have ended anyway.
Perhaps not.
Hindsight is exceptionally good at writing alternative endings.
But I know one thing.
When too many people enter a relationship without actually being inside it, it becomes harder to understand which problems belong to the two people and which have been enlarged, distorted or fed by everything around them.
And if that can happen in an ordinary life, I can only imagine what it means when the audience is made up of millions.
Perhaps we also need this:
places where we can change without being immediately interpreted.
But you weren’t like this
At this point Amanda, Elodie, Arisa and Emma can leave the stage.
Because the story is no longer about them.
We do this constantly too.
A mother looks at her adult child and continues to see the child.
A brother keeps a version of us that may not have existed for twenty years.
A partner falls in love with our confidence and then does not know what to do when we become fragile.
Friends assign roles with impressive precision.
The strong one.
The one who fixes everything.
The funny one.
The fragile one.
The responsible one.
The one who would never do something like that.
Until one day they do.
And the sentence arrives:
But you weren’t like this.
Perhaps not.
Or perhaps I was also like this and you did not know.
Or I did not know either.
Or I became like this yesterday.
Why should that make it less authentic?
The right to disappoint
We have turned authenticity into another form of consistency.
Be yourself.
Beautiful.
But it often hides a footnote:
Be yourself, as long as you remain the person I understood you to be.
Perhaps being ourselves also means allowing ourselves the right to become incomprehensible.
To change our minds.
Our bodies.
Our jobs.
Our lovers.
Our convictions.
To go back.
To make mistakes.
To say something and, years later, admit we no longer believe it.
Not because everything can be excused by a comfortable that’s just who I am.
But because a living person is inevitably contradictory.
A character can be designed to remain consistent.
A person moves through time.
And time, fortunately, ruins the plan.
Amanda had shown us the problem before we had invented the language we now use for it.
First the photograph.
Then the person.
Elodie shows how quickly we try to redefine someone when they leave the container we had prepared for them.
Arisa shows how necessary it can be to change skin several times without denying the earlier ones.
Emma shows how absurd it becomes to judge a body while ignoring what that body has lived through.
But in the end they all take us to the same place.
Not to the question:
Who are you really?
Perhaps that is the wrong question.
The question might be:
Why should you have to be that person in exactly the same way forever?
We have a right to be recognisable.
But perhaps we should also have the right, sometimes, to become unrecognisable.
And if that disappoints someone, so be it.
Some disappointments do not happen because we have betrayed other people.
They happen because we have stopped performing the character other people wrote for us.
Continue the thought
How much of the person you are today
do you keep maintaining simply
so as not to disappoint those who think they know you?