As the ’90s bled into the ’00s, a new kind of “girl” emerged. She combined the mainstream appeal of baby-faced American femininity with the subversive lure of the alternative. She was pitted against the popular crowd in sexually-charged teen horror films like Ginger Snaps and The Faculty. She was seen writhing around in a hot tub and pillow-fighting in Marilyn Manson’s video for Tainted Love. And she was the lifeblood of SuicideGirls – a once-omnipresent online community that gave burlesque pin-up photography a heavily tattooed twist.

A siren of an era that saw MTV air interviews with Britney Spears and Nine Inch Nails back to back, she was part villain, part nameless backing dancer. She was the hinge between the hacker- adjacent fashions of cyberpunk and industrial goth and the sticky-looking Paris Hilton era of Juicy Couture and heavy eyeshadow. And she was immortalised in a lurid image of a fictional character, known alternately as the “Butterfly Girl” and “Little Lolita”, as seen on the cover of the debut album The Gift of Game (1999) by one-hit-wonder rap-rockers Crazy Town.

With a name evoking a pick-up artist’s handbook and song titles like Only When I’m Drunk and Lollipop Porn, The Gift of Game is, to put it kindly, a time-and-place record. The majority of the songs are live-fast tales of sex and drugs and sex on drugs (sample lyrics: “I got a lollipop porn bitch, dead on arrival / A hardcore sex bitch turned suicidal”), with the first two singles failing to chart. In February 2001, almost a year and a half after the album came out, the band released Butterfly, the Red Hot Chili Peppers-sampling banger that hit number 1 on the Billboard charts, helped boost the album towards multiple Gold and Platinum certifications, and had pre- teens around the world singing about nipple piercings. And as the band were catapulted from unknown hopefuls to nu metal staples, so, too, was the image of the Butterfly Girl.

The Butterfly Girl is a hyper-manufactured fantasy of female sexuality. She’s seen on the album cover from the chest up (it’s implied that she is naked), with her dirty blonde hair in pigtails and her pierced tongue’s tip touching a lollipop. She’s covered in tattoos, is wearing a studded neck choker and matching wrist cuff, and is adorned with both an angel’s halo and devil horns. The name of the album, rendered in green and running vertically like a neon sign in a dodgy neighbourhood, casts a seedy light on her silhouette. Inspired by lyrics peppered throughout the album, mostly in reference to frontman Shifty Shellshock’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Cynthia Mittweg (who appears as a more innocent version of the Girl, dressed in pink, in the video for Butterfly), the Butterfly Girl is depicted as simultaneously sweet and evil. A “pretty little thing” who appears in a man’s life like a vision, with the express purpose of driving him sex-mad.

To me, the Butterfly Girl encapsulates the essence of alternative culture in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Her infantilised pose taps into the same porn-sick male gaze that underpins everything from teen sex comedies like Road Trip and American Pie to Eurodance music videos, while the punk signifiers code her as trouble. Different, but dominant. Like a femme fatale for guys who are regularly booted out of dive bars, or like Megan Fox. From one vantage point she’s a hypersexualised dream girl and from another she’s a self-possessed destroyer of hearts. (It should go without saying that these are not legitimate categories that real people fall into, but we are, after all, talking about a cartoon girl on an album cover.)

Naturally, she was designed by a team of men. Bob Lee Hickson, who has created album art for everyone from Bootsy Collins to Electric Light Orchestra, is credited with the illustration, while Shellshock is credited as art director alongside his father Rollin Binzer, a former art director for legendary blues label Chess Records. However, it’s women who seem to have responded to her most keenly. Around the time Butterfly was released, Kerrang! ran a competition asking women to send in photos of themselves dressed up as her, with the winner going on to meet the band and appear on posters for their UK tour. The Butterfly Girl has since appeared on the virtual racks of popular Instagram T-shirt bootleggers Mobshity, in the pages of the Daily Mail when models dressed up as her for Halloween and was revived by the band – acknowledging how intrinsic the image is to their “legacy” – for a modern revamp (i.e. they put her in a black hoodie) on the cover of their 2015 comeback album The Brimstone Sluggers.

The appeal of the Butterfly Girl is rooted in aspects of goth aesthetics, which continue to provide a throughline for most alternative subcultures from nu metal to hyperpop. Dark and provocative, goth culture has long been utilised by artists and performers as a way of reclaiming sexual agency and playing with gender. In the mid-’70s, Siouxsie Sioux – largely considered to be the godmother of goth – integrated the glam gleaned from her love of Bowie and bondage style derived from time spent around the Sex Pistols into her image as a way of saying “don’t fuck with me”. At the age of nine, Sioux and a friend were sexually assaulted by a man at a sweet shop in her hometown of Chislehurst, Bromley (in 1986 she would write a song about it called Candyman). The incident, which was ignored by her parents and the police, combined with her father’s alcoholism, would lead to a discomfort around men and an attraction towards the theatrical, the flamboyant and the Soho gay clubs where masculinity didn’t pose as much of a threat. This overlap between punk and queer culture, with all its leather and lace, would inspire Sioux’s sartorial foundations. She made herself bolder, dying her hair colliery-black and backcombing it. She painted her face like a 1920s flapper, taken to extremes, wearing rubber, PVC and hacked-up fishnets. A form of armour. Self-defence through difference. “Her music was unique in the way that it matched her style,” Santigold said of Sioux in an 2010 interview with The Fader. “The freedom of experimenting with this dark place that doesn’t have a place often in modern music.”

Her aesthetic has always dazzled. A Guardian interview from 1995 recalls Sioux attending a party wearing only a plastic apron and holding a leather whip. In another anecdote, she boards a bus in Bromley in a see-through shirt, demands a half fare, and gets one. It’s a confrontational and self-actualising approach to dressing that’s been echoed in comments made by Julia Fox – a more recent proponent of heavy eye make-up and fetishwear – about looking deliberately “dirty” and no longer caring about being “desirable” to men.

Placebo frontman Brian Molko, who should be credited for bringing goth into the pop-indie zeitgeist amid a 1990s Britpop landscape defined by parkas and football shirts, also toyed with fashion in a similar way. Opting for a pale face, jet-black hair in a bob, black nail polish and soft eyeliner that feminised his already androgynous appearance, Molko and his bandmate Stefan Olsdal dressed to question rather than shock. “We were trying to challenge the homophobia that we’d witnessed in the music scene,” as Molko put it to Kerrang! in 2017. “I wanted anybody who was slightly homophobic in the audience to look at me and go, ‘Ooh, she’s hot. I’d like to fuck her’, before realising that ‘her’ name was Brian, and then [they’d] have to ask themselves a few questions about, shall we say, the fluidity of sexuality itself.”

While the Butterfly Girl is far from androgynous or revolutionary in her appearance, she is a caricature of femininity so exaggerated – so close to a “perfect” male fantasy – that she has become threatening. These themes of power and sexuality come around again and again whenever fashion flirts with the gothic. For their SS23 offering, Versace paid tribute to the “Dark Gothic Goddess” with a collection full of leather and lace, purples and blacks, and spiky tops paired with low-rise mini-skirts that collapsed the categories of “punk agitator” and “Y2K princess” (the show was, incidentally, closed by Paris Hilton, who wore a very non-gothic hot pink, sparkly minidress). “I have always loved a rebel. A woman who is confident, smart and a little bit of a diva,” said Donatella of the collection. “She wears leather, studs and frayed denim, and she has enough attitude to mix them with chiffon, a jersey and a tiara!” The same sartorial tensions are there in the construct of the Butterfly Girl and the many real people who dress like her: high-femme purity disrupted by hard metal and ink. Stare at her for long enough and she kind of looks like a kid in Year 9 graffitied over a photo of Taylor Swift.

As an avatar that reflects the same simplistic “we fuck, we argue, repeat” view of women presented on The Gift of Game, it’s funny that the Butterfly Girl has become one of the most recognisable emblems of a nu metal landscape in which women were mostly invisible even when they were present. When she was forged in the flames of objectification at the end of the last century, the Butterfly Girl was intended to become synonymous with Crazy Town; her cool, sexy status was bestowed upon her by virtue of being an extension of the band. Now – to me, at least – it’s the other way around. While Crazy Town’s only UK hit remains locked in a millennium time capsule alongside Pop Idol and getting a free toy with your crisps, the Butterfly Girl endures. An entity spoken into existence and, as seen through the ebbs and flows of fashion, one that will keep gazing coldly into the void, smiling.

Text by Emma Garland. Taken from issue 21 of 10 Magazine Australia – ROMANCE, REBEL, RESISTANCE – out on newsstands now.

@emmaggarland