This dossier introduces and examines the concept of\u00a0gaze laundering<\/strong>: the deliberate appropriation of a female-coded visual language, built by a woman, for women, encoding an ethics of empathy and reciprocity, and its redeployment as a propaganda wrapper for content that operates on opposite values. The\u00a0Euphoria<\/em>\u00a0case is the cleanest contemporary example of this mechanism in operation. Photographer and director Petra Collins built a specific, pre-existing aesthetic vocabulary rooted in intimacy, interiority, and the female gaze. That vocabulary was extracted, institutionalized, and attached to a show whose authorial logic belongs to Sam Levinson, a male creator whose body of work critics have consistently described as invested in the aestheticized humiliation of young women. The result was a propaganda structure in which the emotional contract of Collins’ images lured young women into trusting a world that did not share the ethics that made them trust it. When Petra’s aesthetic receded in season 3, the spell broke: the show’s Rotten Tomatoes score dropped from 80% to 42%, fans called it “empty spectacle” and “fetish slop,” and the misogyny that had always been present was suddenly visible.<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Gaze laundering<\/strong>\u00a0is a form of aesthetic propaganda in which a male-controlled media product appropriates a female-coded visual grammar, typically one with an established ethical reputation, a specific authorial identity, and a trusted relationship with a female audience, and uses it as the surface layer of content whose underlying gaze is hostile, voyeuristic, or exploitative toward women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It differs from generic aesthetic influence or stylistic borrowing in three critical respects:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This mechanism places gaze laundering squarely in the territory of propaganda: it is not accidental persuasion but a designed system in which the emotional payload is deliberately separated from the ideological content so the audience absorbs the ideology before they can evaluate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The psychological foundation of gaze laundering is well established in cognitive science under the name of the aesthetic\u2013usability effect<\/strong>: the documented phenomenon in which people perceive aesthetically pleasing designs as more trustworthy, more functional, and more morally coherent, regardless of their actual underlying content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First demonstrated by researchers Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura at Hitachi in 1995, the effect<\/a> shows that users who find a design attractive are consistently more forgiving of its flaws, more likely to assume it is well-designed, and less likely to engage in critical evaluation. The visual appeal produces a positive emotional response which then functions as a pre-approval: the brain effectively says\u00a0this is safe and trustworthy<\/em>\u00a0before any content has been evaluated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In propaganda, this mechanism is weaponized deliberately. Propaganda works by exploiting emotional triggers, fear, belonging, desire, recognition, to bypass rational scrutiny before it has a chance to engage. When people are preconditioned by a trusted emotional signal, the brain produces responses that bypass the prefrontal cortex and go directly to associative, feeling-based processing; the more the signal is repeated, the more hardwired the trust response becomes. In the case of gaze laundering, the emotional signal is not fear or anger but\u00a0recognition and belonging<\/strong>: the feeling of a young woman seeing her own interior life reflected back at her in an aesthetic vocabulary built specifically to encode that interiority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why Petra Collins’ visual language was such an effective vehicle. Her work is not generic “pretty aesthetics.” It is a precise system of signals, grainy film, colored gels, glitter tears, soft and melancholic girlhood, that over years had established a specific affective contract with young women:\u00a0this sees you, this is for you, this comes from inside the experience rather than watching it from outside<\/em>. Attaching that contract to\u00a0Euphoria<\/em>\u00a0gave the show a pre-built emotional credit with a demographic that had not yet developed defenses against this specific form of manipulation.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Gaze laundering in Euphoria<\/em> operated simultaneously on three interlocking levels, each reinforcing the others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young women did not merely watch Euphoria<\/em>; they wore it. The show’s early aesthetic birthed makeup trends, inspired TikTok fan edits, and became a full identity system. When an aesthetic becomes identity, criticism of the work is experienced as criticism of the self. The fan who wears glitter tears to embody Euphoria<\/em> cannot evaluate Euphoria<\/em>‘s misogyny without implicating her own self-expression. This is not an accidental outcome; it is how identity-based propaganda insulates itself from critique. The audience becomes, in effect, a human shield for the content.<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Petra Collins’ ethical reputation as a maker of work genuinely\u00a0for<\/em>\u00a0girls transferred to\u00a0Euphoria<\/em>\u00a0by visual association, even though she had no authorial control over how the show treated its female characters. When Levinson’s show deployed the Collins aesthetic, it was borrowing not just an image palette but a moral reputation, the implicit assurance that the person who built this look cared about the girls inside it. That assurance was false from the moment she was removed from the process, but it remained operative for audiences who did not know her story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The visual grammar of early\u00a0Euphoria<\/em>\u00a0coded the show as raw emotional drama made with empathy, the tradition of female-authored teen experience work, rather than what critics now describe it as: male voyeur fantasy with a glitter filter. This genre misclassification was essential. Had\u00a0Euphoria<\/em>\u00a0presented itself in its actual genre, stylized female humiliation for a male gaze, the same demographic would have been far less likely to embrace it, defend it, and integrate it into their identities.<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The specific sequence of events in the Petra Collins case is important to state precisely, because it removes the “coincidence” defense entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Levinson approached Collins through her representation and, by her own account, told her explicitly that he had written\u00a0Euphoria<\/em>\u00a0after being inspired by her photographs and wished her to direct the show. Collins moved to Los Angeles, worked with HBO for approximately five months, participated in casting, and built what she describes as “a whole world for it” under the assumption, entirely reasonable given the stated terms, that she was directing season one. At the end of this process, HBO informed her she was “too young” to direct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Collins’ visual vocabulary was already publicly documented and specific before\u00a0Euphoria<\/em>\u00a0began production. Critics and viewers have pointed to her work from the mid-2010s, including her 2015 “Boy Problems” music video for Carly Rae Jepsen and her “24hr Psycho” exhibition, as carrying near-direct visual precedents for the promotional imagery and tonal register of\u00a0Euphoria<\/em>‘s early seasons. This is not a case of stylistic similarity between contemporaries. It is the case of a specific authored system appearing in a show whose creator admitted, in writing, that her work was the source.<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Petra Collins has said publicly that the most damaging consequence was not financial but authorial: “This is the aesthetic I had built all my life, and now I have to change it because it entered the mainstream and it’s been taken away from me. The worst thing was when people were unknowingly saying, ‘The show looks like your photos.'” She eventually changed her visual practice to escape the association, an extraordinary cost to pay for someone whose only mistake was trusting a professional representation.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The “too young” phrase deserves its own analysis. Collins was not a student or an untested beginner; she was an established working photographer and director with a recognizable body of work, a reputation, and representation. She was old enough to originate the look, source the cast, and build the world. “Too young” was therefore not a description of her professional readiness. It was a euphemism for the actual situation: she was young enough not to have sufficient contractual, institutional, or financial leverage to stop the extraction once it was complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The core mechanism of gaze laundering is not simply theft. It is inversion<\/strong>: the stolen aesthetic carries a set of ethics embedded in its formal choices, and those ethics are discarded while the surface is retained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Laura Mulvey’s foundational 1975 essay<\/a> “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” articulated what distinguishes a female gaze from a male gaze in visual media: the male gaze positions women as passive objects for erotic contemplation by a male viewer, while a female gaze positions women as subjects with interiority, agency, and an active perspective on the world that looks at them. Collins’ work operates explicitly within the female gaze tradition. Her images of young women, however dreamy or intimate, are constructed so that the girls inside them appear to be experiencing their own lives rather than being observed experiencing them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Levinson deployed this visual language, he retained the surface codes (softness, intimacy, glitter, youth, melancholy) while replacing the structural logic: his camera is repeatedly identified by critics as voyeuristic, fixated on female suffering as spectacle, and organized around male desire rather than female subjectivity. This inversion is what makes Euphoria<\/em> a case of gaze laundering rather than mere stylistic borrowing. The aesthetic says female gaze<\/em>, but the camera operates as male gaze<\/em>. The look signals this is for you<\/em>, but the structure delivers you are for this<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nDefining Gaze Laundering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nThe Propaganda Mechanics: How Aesthetics Neutralize Critical Judgment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nThe Three Layers of Laundering in Euphoria<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Identity Laundering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Authorship Laundering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Genre Laundering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nPetra Collins: The Documented Case<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nThe Aesthetic\u2013Ethics Inversion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n