28 May 2024 |
The actress, of Japanese, Filipino, Cheyenne, and Scot-Irish descent, broke barriers with her distinctive look.
With her perfectly coiffed bouffant, iconic high-waisted jeans (belted, of course) and subversive skin tight striped dress, few have managed to maintain such a personal style on screen as Tura Satana. The statement-making actress best known from Russ Meyer’s 1965 cult film “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” (a sort of camp sexploitation flick without nudity) broke barriers as one of the few women of color working in the movie industry at the time. Born 1938 in Hokkaido as Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi to a Japanese father and Filipino mother with Cheyenne Indian and Scots-Irish heritage, Satana epitomized the radical bombshell aesthetic of the midcentury, but through her own unique lens. “I took a lot of my anger that had been stored inside for many years and let it loose,” she famously said of the film, which would go on to inspire John Waters and Quentin Tarantino.
As a former burlesque dancer turned actress, Santana made headway as an actress that often pulled from her own background and experience. She also survived tragedy — living through a Japanese relocation camp in California during WWII and was attacked as a child in Chicago. When her attackers were let off the hook (she was sent to reform school for the crime of “tempting” her attackers), she trained in martial arts and took justice into her own hands, reportedly taking revenge on each one of them and also forming a tough girl gang group. She said that she was essentially playing the role of herself as the infamous Varla–the leader of a Go Go dancer gang on lawless adventures and murderous rampages in “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”.
Santana passed away in 2011 from heart failure. Today, in honor of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’re looking back at her impact on screen as an unexpected style icon.
The Color Black
“Ladies and gentleman, welcome to violence,” the narrator famously announced in “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” Breaking though all the delicate, soft, coquette candy cotton aesthetic look popularized by the likes of other famous female actresses at the time (Brigitte Bardot, Sharon Tate, Claudia Cardinale) Satana gravitated towards powerful silhouettes with a subversive edge. She often wore all black, particularly in her most well-known film. Think: a skinny belted black pair of jeans and plunging back t-shirt which mirrored a catsuit, styled with boots rather than the saccharine pastel dresses and kitten heels popular during this era of cinema. “Belted, buckled and booted,” the promotional poster for “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” proclaimed.
Satana reportedly contributed ideas to the wardrobe of the film, based on her own favorite look of trusty black leather jackets. Additionally, her martial arts training and on-the-fly dialogue contributed to making the film what it was. Through her style on screen and her role as Varla, she broke down old Hollywood bombshell stereotypes, particularly as one of the few Asian actresses at the time. When she later starred in “The Doll Squad” (1973) about a group of cool girl spies (which foreshadowed “Charlie’s Angels”) she reclaimed the cat suit silhouette once again in the form of a structured forest green jumpsuit with a white belt and matching piping.
Radical Beauty
With her extreme black cat eye liner, severe blunt bangs and illuminated red lipstick, Satana stood out as a powerful symbol of femininity from a woman’s point of view. Much like her costumes in her films, Satana came up with her own makeup look in “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”. She wore her jet black, raven colored hair in a thick, high beehive during the time she was dating Elvis (he was rumored to propose to her and she rejected him). In “The Doll Squad” her beehive bouffant was paired with dramatic, overdrawn arched eyebrows, pale matte white eyeshadow and a nude peachy lipstick. Her look was not soft–it was extreme, verging on performance art and standing strong as timelessly iconoclastic.
Fashion as Authenticity
Satana really came into her own as a style icon in “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” through her mostly inky black wardrobe, but even before, she injected real world autobiography into her characters. In “Irma la Douce,” directed by Billy Wilder, she wore the aforementioned bodycon black and white striped dress with a wide red belt and a strappy pair of heels and nipple tassels you almost had to look twice to see–a nod to her burlesque dancer background. Shirley MacLaine played the lead role in the film, but Satana had just as many costume changes as MacLaine, proving her fashion influence.
When Satana did wear color–like the little blue bikini, hot pink shift dress and green silk mini dress covered in a sea of pearls in “The Doll Squad,” it was with conviction and camp. Even in her appearance on the TV series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” in 1964, she wore a black and white cow print coat and little black gloves with a rockabilly pouf of hair–her signature eyebrows extended. In her daily life, she maintained the all-black vamp look, serving as the real life Varla. “I got the feeling she had dressed the way her fans wanted,” John Waters once said. Through her style on film, she delivered a vision we’ll never forget.
