Superstars: Edie Sedgwick

This series will introduce a Warhol Superstar a month. When the major Superstars have been introduced, it will locate the Warhols Superstars with reference to other superstars and concepts of superstardom before and after the 1960s.

We will start with Edie Sedgwick, one of the first Warhol Superstars and the Superstar to coin the concept for Warhol Superstars to come.


Watson calls 1965 the "Year of the Superstar." It was in fact Edie's year. She had a wealthy upbringing in New England. One of her forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence. She came to New York to study but started modelling instead. She accompanied Warhol to exhibitions and parties and became the first of his human works of art, of his Warhol Superstars.


Her style was unique. Her earrings were too big and very uncommon for a woman of twenty-two. The combination of dyed blonde hair, dark hair line, and dark eyebrows stuck out. She accentuated her skinny body by wearing leotards. She looked sick and anorexic and very different from the lush models of her time. She also differed from the women which iconically represent the 1960s today, such as Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, and Jane Fonda. Like Warhol she stood in an odd relationship with "the Sixties". However, her style has been copied over and over again.

When female moviestars of classic Hollywood fucked up, because they got old or addicted to tablets and alcohol, this fuckedupedness spoiled a previously generated and upheld sublimity. This sublimity is probably best described by Barthes in his famous essay "The Face of the Garbo" in Mythologies:

Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.

In 1965 the stars of classic Hollywood had fucked up. The Misfits is a watershed in this respect. It featured Marylin Monroe and Montgomery Clift – their addiction to tablets and alcohol just below the surface. It would be Monroe's last film and also the last film for Clark Gable who played an aging cowboy and died from a heart attack only weeks after shooting the picture was completed.


Other stars of classic Hollywood were likewise on the decline. Judy Garland's TV shows and live performances hardly managed to conceal her drug problems.

Unlike classic Hollywood stars, however, Edie never tried to conceal that she was fucked up. Her images carried the sublimity of a star and the marks of degeneration. What made her special – and other Warhol Superstars after her – was that the sublimity of the flesh and its degeneration appeared at the same time. Both were on the surface for everyone to see.

The exaggerated surface quality of a lot of Warhol's pertains to the sick looks of Edie Sedgwick as well. Both Warhol and Billy Name - the stock photographer of the factory - shot Sedgwick often indirectly, when she was preparing to appear in a movie or reproduced the actual movie prints.




In 1967 she left the factory, apparently over money issues. She continued to model and appear in movies. Bob Dylan wrote "Just Like a Woman" for her and The Velvet Underground "Femme Fatale". She spent part of the next years in psychiatric institutions and hospitals. She was busted for drug offenses. In 1971 she died from an overdose of barbiturates. Edie's attraction, however, has lost little over the years. She is probably the Warholstar most popular today (try Google).

This is something pertaining to all Warhol Superstars. There is both surface and tragedy in each of them. Edie did not just only look anorexic. Neither did she just look like an addict. At issue with the Warholstars are various layers of representation, representations of representations - what Baudrillard calls Simulacra - , and also personal tragedy which is caught by the images and makes them so haunting.


A select bibliography for this project which will be extended:

Barthes, Roland. "The Face of Garbo." Mythologies [1957]. London: Paladin, 1973.

Baudrillard, Jean. "Simulacra and Simulations." Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP: 1988. 166-184.

Comenas, Gary. Warholstars: Andy Warhol Films, Art and Superstars. March 21, 2008 <http://www.warholstars.org/index.html>

Dyer, Richard. "Don’t Look Now: The Male Pin-Up." The Sexual Subject: A Screen
Reader in Sexuality. Eds. John Caughie, Annette Kuhn, and Mandy Merck.
London: Routledge, 1992. 265-276.

Meyer, Moe. "Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp." Queer Cinema: The Film Reader.
Eds. Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin. New York: Routledge, 2004. 137-149.

Sontag, Susan. "Notes on ‘Camp’." Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York:
Dell Publishing, 1969. 277-293.

Suárez, Juan A. Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture,
and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996.

Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. London: Cassell & Co, 1975.

Watson, Steven. Factory Made: Andy Warhol and the Sixties. New York: Pantheon, 2003.

Waugh, Thomas. "Cockteaser." Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Eds. Jennifer Doyle,Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996. 51-77.