Swan diving 🦢

Emily Danielle Leibert on “swancore” and the tension inherent between two archetypal birds.

There’s an image I return to often of two women in elaborate swan headdresses arm wrestling. It’s a still from the 2020 film Tzarevna Scaling (roughly translated, The Fisherman’s Daughter), which I’ve never seen. Maybe it’s just the blue glow of my iPhone, but I’ve found myself hypnotized by these interlocked swans. I like that they’re engaged in a game of might, without putting forth any noticeable effort. In motion, but posed, like mannequins. Or like they’re aware they’re part of a scene intended to be consumed in a theater in the dark but will instead be saved in the annals of Instagram by women like me.

I first noticed swan imagery ticking up early last year, though the trend is more than likely predicated on the Guggenheim's 2018 Hilma af Klint retrospective. One entrant in the artist’s “Swan” series is the 1914 work Swan no. 1, which depicts a pair of swans, one black and one white, merging at two touchpoints: at the tips of the wings and again at the beak. “Unified at the centre, intertwined yet distinct,” as the Moderna Museet puts it, the contrast between the birds mesmerizes the viewer, the boundary between them collapsing as the series progresses, their duality implicit in their oneness.

Years later, so appeared FX’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, which chronicled Truman Capote’s takedown of his high society muses in the Esquire article, “La Côte Basque, 1965.” Its animated opening sequence stayed with me longer than the show itself: women choking on pearl necklaces, white birds picking at a corpse, a swan spattered in blood flapping its lashes. Then came indie perfumer Gumamina, one part Marissa Zappas, one part Courtney Rafuse, who launched their brand with two swan-shaped bottles based upon the imagined scent profiles of Swan Lake’s Odette and Odile (Odette, pure and tragic: grapefruit soda, rhubarb, rose, orris; Odile, erotic and hedonistic: blood orange, dark chocolate, rubber, suede). Later that year, Apartment Therapy christened “swancore … interior design’s next bird movement” following the flight path of other trendy birds like sparrows, owls, and peacocks. Art Deco swans flooded Facebook marketplace and Urban Outfitters, where a swan takes the form of a ceramic planter, a soap dispenser, a floatie, a bathmat, and a $195 Olivia Wendel blanket.

I’m not sure when observation turned into fixation, only that I’d been absent-mindedly bookmarking images of swans on Instagram, curating a private digital scrapbook to call upon when I felt stupid or lost. I looked at the birds often. I felt drawn to them, not for their monogamous lifestyle or their shocking white plumage, but because I saw a familiar contradiction in them that unnerved me.

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