Essay

Comment

Film & TV

Weirdness

5 October 2023

5 min read

Disney: 100 years of waiting for Prince Charming

Reflecting on the Disney centenary, Lauren Windle finds herself dis-enchanted with Prince Charming and reflecting on what might be a better kind of attraction.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

A plastic wind-up Snow White toy stands to the right of the photo, with hands clasped waiting

Photo by King Lip on Unsplash.

Picture the scene: you’re outside running an errand; maybe you’re taking the bins out or cleaning your car in the street. The sun is blazing and you’re in a great mood. Bolstered by the good weather, you start to sing to yourself. Maybe you’ve got Spotify on or the car radio’s playing. Just as you’re getting your groove on to Gaga, someone comes up behind you, about a foot away and joins in with the song . . . Startled, you stop singing and swing round to see the other half of your unsolicited duet.

The other person also stops and says: ‘Hello, did I frighten you?’ Clearly concerned, you back away towards your house. The person continues: ‘Wait, wait, please don’t run away.’ As you dash through the front door and slam it behind you, you hear your uninvited singing partner pick up the song where the two of you left off in an attempt to serenade you as you flee.

They never made a Snow White 2. Maybe that’s because watching the slow and agonizing breakdown of a relationship that was entered into prematurely isn’t very ‘Disney’.

Menacing, right? No one’s stopping to swap numbers with the creepy crooner. Except this is the exact interaction between Snow White and Prince Charming in the Disney film (1937). Word for word. I sat through it to check. Did she call the police? Was she embarrassed and uncomfortable with his invasion of her personal space? Did she drop a message to the other princesses to tell them to watch out for the crackpot future king? None of the above. The next time we hear her speak about the prince, Snow White is talking to the seven dwarfs and explaining that she’s ‘in love with him’, he’s ‘the only one’ for her and ‘there’s nobody like him anywhere at all’. Those are actual quotes.

When the prince and Snow White are finally reunited, she is woken from her unconsciousness by his kiss and he leads her away, wordlessly, into the sunset. In the whole film Snow White doesn’t say a word directly to the prince.

They never made a Snow White 2. Maybe that’s because watching the slow and agonizing breakdown of a relationship that was entered into prematurely isn’t very ‘Disney’. I, for one, would pay to watch as Snow White grows to realize that marrying someone who looms up on young women and breaks into song isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; and as the prince gets fed up with all the woodland creatures leaving their droppings as they traipse through the house to help with all the various daily chores.

Now this is key so listen up: there is no ‘the one’ and you do not have a ‘soulmate’.

The relationships we saw as children to model our hopes and dreams on were fundamentally flawed and Disney was at the heart of what I will be calling from here on in ‘The Great Deception’. In our treasured childhood films feelings of love didn’t grow from a deep and mutual understanding of who the other was. It was an encounter that sparked love at first sight, followed by some questionable courtship practices. It’s a sinister day in the magical kingdom when you realise Belle was a hostage with Stockholm syndrome; Ariel changed her species and gave up her voice in order to gain favour with the prince; and Sleeping Beauty was given a non-consensual kiss while unconscious.

We know all these are fairy stories, but the material we surround ourselves with has a tendency to stick, no matter how impervious we believe ourselves to be. Somewhere between Cinderella’s pre-midnight Waltz and Aladdin and Jasmine’s market stall encounter we fell for the idea that instant attraction is preferable to that which builds and develops more slowly over a longer period of time. The reality is that some of the best, most fulfilling relationships don’t kick off with irrepressible feelings of chemistry. In some cases, that chemistry wanes over time and in others it develops with greater engagement.

That said, those of us who are conscious that a pretty face or a banging body aren’t all they’re cracked up to be when contributing to a lifetime-length relationship, do forget that attraction is still important. The best depiction of a healthy attraction I’ve heard is Will van der Hart’s on The Dating Course. He compares a relationship to a church candle – one of those fat pillar ones. The attraction is the wick; you need it to get the thing going. But if you’re all wick, you’ll burn out quickly. The wax is the substance, the friendship, the deeper understanding of each other, the experiences you share. But if you’re all wax, you can’t get the flame going. However, if you have both, you’ve got a candle that will burn brightly and for a long time.

Another glug of Kool-Aid that Snow White had guzzled down was this idea of ‘the one’. Now this is key so listen up: there is no ‘the one’ and you do not have a ‘soulmate’. Neither of those things exist. Mr/Mrs Right is not out there. Get on with your life.

The entertainment conglomerate has done its best in recent years to repent for the generations of young girls with unrealistic romantic expectations.

Back in the ancient days of Athens, Plato shared some questionable insight into the origin of humans. Turns out, way back when, people had four legs, four arms and a head with two faces. Zeus, despite being king of the gods, was afraid of what these eight-appendaged, double-faced people could do, so he split them down the middle. Humans, now incomplete, walked the earth pining for their other half, throwing their arms around each other and intertwining their bodies in an attempt to grow together. In summary, the idea of a missing person to complete you is not founded on any scientific or biblical truth. It’s misinformation from Plato and Jerry Maguire. It is not a great premise to build your life and expectations on. It’s a waste of time.

What someone should have told Walt was that there are a number of people Snow White would meet in her life who would be a suitable marriage partner for her. She would have a different but fulfilling life with each. A person would become ‘the one’ when she chose to commit to them, because she would be making a promise to them to eliminate all others from the equation. Leaving just one.

The entertainment conglomerate has done its best in recent years to repent for the generations of young girls with unrealistic romantic expectations. They’ve produced a slew of powerful and sassy women, out for adventure with no love interest in sight; see Moana and Raya and the Last Dragon. But for myself and my millennial peers, the stage has already been set. If he doesn’t rock up on a valiant steed, quite frankly, we’re not interested.

Article

Comment

Ethics

Fashion

Race

10 June 2025

5 min read

Anna Wintour is not a moral compass

The Vogue editor’s championing of diversity is all very well, but it’s based on what sells

Alexandra Kytka-Sharpe

Alexandra is a writer exploring the role of faith in the arts, fashion, and design

Anna Wintour.

UKinUSA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Last month, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York launched a new exhibition. “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” highlights the history of Black people resisting white supremacy through their sartorial choices. A few weeks after it opened, the 2025 Met Gala, which serves to raise funds for the Costume Institute, was chaired by Black voices across the creative industries, including A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, Lewis Hamilton, Coleman Domingo and Lebron James. The exhibition has already received rave reviews from Black writers and academics, likely in part due to its co-curation by Monica Miller, who literally wrote the book on the subject Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.

Concurrently, a few hours south of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in Washington DC, Donald Trump was calling Diversity and Inclusion initiatives “dangerous, demeaning and immoral.” A series of policies rolled out across the US federal government has led to the shutdown of not only diversity programmes, but a quiet disappearance of wording and other initiatives that might be interpreted as promoting similar themes.

But the Costume Institute, which does not receive any federal funding, is uniquely free to follow Anna Wintour’s steer. And Wintour, Conde Nast’s Chief Content Officer and Editor in Chief of Vogue, is fighting back. “I feel we need to be courageous”, she told the Washington Post last month. Now, she added, is “a challenging time”.

Until now, Wintour has been an unlikely activist. Vogue has long been criticised for a range of ethical issues that include, including lack of diversity, promotion of unhealthy body standards, and the sexualisation of young women. But are the magazine and Wintour now our bastion for future hopes of racial justice and equality?

In 2020, many of my friends and family ordered books and listened frantically to podcasts about race in America because of the events surrounding George Floyd’s death. In May 2020, a video circulated of officer Derek Chauvin suffocating George Floyd as he called out for his mother, leading to a flurry of protests and debates about the racial bias present in institutions.

In those days, learning about the systematic injustice faced by Black Americans and calling for change felt popular. Everyone was doing it. Books like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge, The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, and How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi filled our Amazon carts and library holds.

These days, many of those books have quietly disappeared from the shelves. For sure, there are those who continue to fight for racial equality. But the winds have changed, with some companies - like Conde Nast - landing on one side, while Google, Meta and Amazon disappear from the horizon.

It’s easier to flip through beautiful images and call it a day, than to be a part of real, diverse communities.

It might seem obvious that brands are not the best source for our moral formation. But the fact is that many of them see themselves as culture-forming and mission-driven. If you don’t have something else to help form your idea of what the world should look like, why not Vogue, with its picture-perfect editorials, or Google, with its future-facing innovations?

For me, my beliefs in diversity and racial justice come from something stronger: my Christian faith and the many Black men and women globally who share this faith with me. It was my reading of Black Liberation theologian James Cone that first showed me the depths of beauty I could gain by understanding my faith through someone else’s perspective. Cone was famous for his book which drew parallels between Jesus’s death on the cross by Roman crucifixion, and the deaths of many Black men by lynching in the American South. Cone stopped me in my tracks, making me rethink a key symbol of my faith. He said this:

“The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks. Rather than reminding us of the “cost of discipleship,” it has become a form of “cheap grace,” an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission. Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”

It won’t make it into a Vogue editorial anytime soon– but maybe that’s the point.

A faith-based belief in justice comes with challenges. It can feel tiring to face a troubled history of racism in a religious institution. Existing in diverse, faith-based communities brings everything from awkward cultural differences to true and genuine disagreements. The global Anglican communion faces tension between white, liberal progressives in the UK who want to celebrate gay marriage in the Church of England, and an assemblage of Christians of colour in the Global South who maintain strong convictions about traditional views of marriage and gender. Our faith in Christ is the anchor that holds us together. But these are real disagreements; they’re not trivial, and there’s no easy way forward.

It’s easier to flip through beautiful images and call it a day, than to be a part of real, diverse communities. And this is why we can’t rely on people like Anna Wintour to form our vision for the future. As nice and important as it is to promote diversity in models, photographers, and designers, ultimately Vogue will be shaped by what its editors and publishers think will sell on the newsstand.

This is my plea for us all. Let’s not let the shifting tides of any company– Meta or Vogue– decide our ethical convictions towards justice. Let’s rely on something stronger.

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