Subversive shots of Catholic schoolgirls in ‘80s New York

In 1984, photographer Andrea Modica hopped on the subway to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to visit her old school. It was a Catholic school for girls, mostly filled with Italian American students who lived in the area. She had attended it a decade earlier, between 1974 and 1978, and had scheduled a visit with her former art teacher Len Bellinger, but when she walked through the gates, the students around her really grabbed her attention.

While the party-led grooves of Saturday Night Fever and the amped up guitars of rock & roll had dominated pop culture during her years at the school, a new form of music – led by hard-edged distortion and an anti-establishment attitude – had begun to emerge, and with that, new looks for the schoolgirls. “I attended the school [between] 1974 and 1978 and took the photographs in 1984,” Modica says. “The change that interested me was how music was influencing the way girls expressed themselves. We had been interested in rock and disco, with a big schism – my group of friends in the late ‘70s was listening to rock – by 1984, punk was prevalent.”

That change was found all over their clothing, hairstyles and makeup, and despite being under the directive of a school uniform policy, they found ways to express rebellious styles of the moment. “The rules at the school had to do with good scholarship, critical and ethical thinking and adhering to the uniform,” she says. “It’s the latter that interested me the most – in the ‘70s we were ‘bending’ the rules with the uniform, and when I returned a few years later in my ‘civilian’ clothes, I was delighted to see how the girls were still finding ways to express their identity within the confines of those rules. Music and fashion continued to be intermingled.”

Top to bottom:Left to right: © Andrea Modica, Catholic Girl, Brooklyn 1984, courtesy of L’Artiere © Andrea Modica, Catholic Girl, Brooklyn 1984, courtesy of L’Artiere

Their unique forms of self-expression soon led Modica to start photographing the girls, at the school and at another Brooklyn-based Catholic girls’ school, where she found the students sporting similar looks. Now, over four decades later, the photographs have been published in her new photobook Catholic Girl, which showcases the intricate, sometimes subtle, sometimes bold forms of individuality and subversions of the dress code that the students chose to follow.

While certain aspects of the uniform were canon, the schoolgirls found ways that they could break out of identikit, to-the-line looks through areas where the written rules didn’t quite reach. “The skirt and shirt were a staple,” she explains. “Most of the expressions were through hair and makeup, jewelry, sweaters, jackets, and sometimes shoes and socks.”

From slicked-back mullets to dark eyeshadow and lipstick, the black-and-white portraits – taken mostly in schoolyards and playgrounds – form a survey of youth fashion of the moment, while packed with Reagan-era angst. One portrait sees a girl sporting a thick chain while wearing black lipstick, standing next to her sister, who sports a church cross dangly earring, a particularly memorable photograph for Modica.

Although the styles were different to the previous decade, the attitude behind the girls’ styles reminded the photographer of her own years at school. “The shoes had to be navy blue or black,” she recalls of the dress code from her time at the school. “But nobody said anything about marshmallow platforms, Frye boots, Chukka boots or Earth shoes. I remember lots of oversized sweaters, fringe, bandanas, denim, corduroy and suede. Striped stockings – I got scolded for that one.”

Despite being confined within the school walls of a pair of educational establishments in Brooklyn during the ‘80s, Catholic Girl is relatable across nations and eras. “I was hooked by photography’s conceptual potential, that it seems to convey something truthful, but, in fact, it tells a very convincing tale,” Modica says. “This is still what motivates me as a photographer.”