Why Were The UFC’s Ring Girls Outfits At The White House So Bad?

A Thesis

Once Upon A Time About Mexico

One of the best and only creative things the UFC has ever done is commissioning the wardrobe for the ring girls at UFC Noche, an event at The Sphere celebrating Mexican Independence Day. Normally the most thought that goes into what the models wear is how small a bikini worn indoors can be before stretching the limits of bad taste, and whether an energy drink or beer sponsor gets to put their logo on it. If that attire has any intention or purpose, it is to avoid an obscenity charge.

This time the UFC hired Marina Toybina, an Emmy award winning costume and wardrobe designer, a genuine world class talent in this field. She is responsible for wardrobe design for events such as Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show and Taylor Swift’s tour. For the UFC Noche show, she put together several rounds of costumes and makeup between nine women celebrating multiple aspects of Mexico’s culture and history. Not only was the wardrobe stunning, it provided substance for the women. For once these were not just generic sexy lady forms holding up signs to assist the many fans who can’t count to five, they were characters with distinct backgrounds and attitudes to portray. It was successful storytelling in a visual and artistic medium, covering the rise and fall of indigenous empires, anti-colonial battles against conquistadors, the cultural value of Día de los Muertos, and more. The attire was fulfilling a purpose.

The Less Triumphant American Attempt

The UFC brought Marina Toybina back for wardrobe design to celebrate the United States of America at UFC Freedom 250 At The White House Presented By World Liberty Financial cryptocurrencies. The budget is claimed to be $60,000,000, triple what they say the UFC Noche event cost. They did not rely on a lesser creative talent or suddenly get cheap. And yet the wardrobe looked like a horny teenager asked Grok to put his teachers into a Betsy Ross themed porno.

Or has the aesthetics of a Spirit Halloween costume called “Flag Slut” that goes for $40 which a maid of honor decided everyone has to wear for a Nashville bachelorette party.

Or someone thought that the comically hyper-patriotic supervillain Firecracker from The Boys, the least subtle show on television, wasn’t quite getting the message across strongly enough.

On a spectrum from the standard purposeless uniforms to the purposeful storytelling at UFC Noche, it’s unclear where this falls. What substance was there to this offering?

Any Plausible Celebration Of American Culture?

The lack of any specific reference point to celebrate is striking. A friend suggested it was meant to be a throwback to USO shows of the 1940’s or 50’s, the era most conservatives wish we could get back to, the era when the National Review declared they would stand athwart history yelling Stop!. Those USO shows did not look like this. You wouldn’t find Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe wearing a chopped and screwed American flag, they wore evening gowns and luxuriant furs. Norman Rockwell, even with his notoriously bad taste and love for chintzy Americana, depicted attractive women from the USO simply wearing dresses in his Willie Gillis cover for the Saturday Evening Post.

It was still an insightful starting point. Eventually I found what this aesthetic is referencing and celebrating. Please bear with me on a detour first.

A Philosophy Interlude

In the essay Simulacra and Simulation, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard discusses the nature of symbolic representation; those symbols gaining distance from reality, ultimately drifting so far away that reality is no longer part of the picture. He described a simulacrum as “copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original.”

For example, the Frontierland park at Disneyland is a symbol that ostensibly depicts a town in the American Old West. However the park is not based on references to anything true or real about an old west town. It is a reference to cartoon depictions of the American west, which are a symbolic representation of popular western movies (filmed overseas no less), which are a symbolic representation of pulp novels, which may have finally been in reference to some crumb of reality about the historic American frontier. Each step of symbolic representation perverts the previous one until the final step he called hyperreality, where the symbolic representation no longer has a connection to an original. Knowledge of the original is no longer perceivable by those who participate in these exercises. Merely experiencing the hyperreality at Disneyland restricts one’s literacy.

Ok, What Was That About?

So what was behind the UFC’s concept of patriotic wardrobe? Look to this depiction of a 1940’s USO show in the 2011 film Captain America: The First Avenger, produced by Marvel Studios, a subsidiary of the aforementioned Walt Disney Corporation, a leading purveyor of hyperreality.

Suddenly the UFC’s decisions feel like a familiar spectacle. The wardrobe was referencing a movie, a reference to a comic strip, itself a deliberate exaggeration not meant to portray the reality of those patriotic USO shows, and now playing a role in the chain of symbols obscuring the original reality. This easily blended and merged with the empty performative post-9/11 patriotism of smearing the flag over everything.

It would be easy to assume the ring girls’ wardrobe at UFC Freedom 250 At The White House Presented By World Liberty Financial’s crypto exchange was bog standard gaudiness and bad taste but I urge you to consider this alternative. Through the repetition of signifiers and symbolism, by filtering through the stages and orders of signs, this is actually what American culture can offer. While Mexico has cultural touchstones that could be referenced and rendered through art, the United States of America no longer does. The aesthetics of Bush era conservatism successfully erased knowledge of the past and the ability to tell stories regarding it. Whether building upon that was the UFC’s intention or not does not change that it is accomplishing a purpose. We have been rendered hollow, dressing up as The Flag Slut is all the nation has to offer.