Masks Are Fashion, Masks Are Heroic - Supergirl

This is the 8th entry that I've posted in this series featuring "red carpet" takes on superheroes in costume with masks to promote the pro-social & pro-health practice of mask wearing during a pandemic.

Supergirl is a very well-known superhero. She's Superman's cousin who was sent by her parents to protect baby Superman when he got to Earth, but her spaceship ended up going off course and arrived several years after Superman's own ship did. She awoke from her suspended animation to find that baby Kal-El was no longer a baby, but a full-grown Superman...and now she's kinda living in his shadow as a real refugee on the planet Earth.

There were some specific references that I wanted to hit and elements that I wanted to use in my depiction of Kara Zor-El, Supergirl, for this series. I wanted to emphasize her being younger than characters like Wonder Woman by getting away from the long gowns while still keeping a red carpet element to the look. The dress was inspired by Kryptonian crystals and the dress that singer Lisa Loeb wore in her music video for the song "Most of All." The hair was inspired by a couple of looks Taylor Swift donned in her music video for the song "Look What You Made Me Do." It was very important for me to take inspiration from performers whose music has a stong following with female fans and whose work is very feminine-positive.

That also lead to another major design aspect that I felt was very important to use: the color pink. It is very bizarre to me the way that the character of Supergirl has been curated for decades, of being a character that should ideally appeal to girls, but seems to be terribly frightened of scaring its boy audience away by leaning to hard on the "girl" half of her name. Supergirl has sported many different looks throughout the years, and to me, there seems to be a very conscious bias in the tones of red used in costume designs for her. The blue can run the gamut from light to dark, but the reds seem to be forbidden from ever being too light to be misconstrued as pink. (In fact in the weeks of anticipating writing about this, I could only come up with two superheroines in the DC Universe who had pink in their costumes - Crush, daughter of Lobo and a member of the Teen Titans, has a punk design and her pants are maybe magenta, sometime a dark hot pink; and the character Looker from the 1980's Batman and the Outsiders comic, who I think was eventually turned into a vmpire creature of the night, so no more "girly" pink for her either.) It is bizarre to have so many teenage heronies in their universe and for there to be what comes across as an absoulte fear of using pink in their designs at all. As if a color could keep them from being tough or strong. So yes, my Supergirl incorporates pink into her costume, maybe more of a dusty rose, but certainly not "red." She wears "ballet" slippers inspired from her 1970's costume design, and just because she's wearing pink doesn't mean that she's isn't Kryptonian strong. I hope to see these false definitions of strength challenged in the near future in actual canonical depictions of this character. It's one thing that I strive to do in my work.

Thank you for taking a look! 
"Masks Are Fashion, Masks Are Heroic - Supergirl" by Kevenn T. Smith
Pencil, Ink, Photoshop
©2021 Kevenn T. Smith
Supergirl ©DC Comics