As a proud member of the little piglets – the name I just invented for the Miss Piggy fandom – my trotters are up at the news she is heading back to the big screen. 

Speaking on the Las Culturistas podcast, Jennifer Lawrence recently revealed that she is co-producing the film with her friend Emma Stone, with comedian Cole Escola on board as a writer. Details remain thin on the ground (although Lawrence said she came up with the idea during the pandemic, thinking how funny it would be if Miss Piggy got “cancelled”), but it sounds promising. Personally, I’m hoping for a sombre drama like The Last Showgirl, a melancholy study of femininity, glamour and the terrible price of fame. I want to see Piggy staring out at the New York skyline from her penthouse apartment, a My Bloody Valentine song ebbing in the background as she thinks about everything she’s lost. I want her to win an Academy Award.

Having made her debut in 1974, Miss Piggy has been a public figure for over half a century now. If linear time affected the Muppets, she would be well into her seventies. And with the greatest love and respect, she hasn’t been in anything truly great for a while now (the 2011 Muppets reboot and its sequel were enjoyable enough, but 1992’s A Muppets Christmas Carol was their last masterpiece.) And yet far from fading into irrelevance, she is as beloved as ever, a seemingly eternal icon of American culture.

Maybe my social media bubble is particularly Piggy-obsessed, but I see people posting pictures of her all the time; admiring her outfits (“she looks soooooo good here!”) and using her face as a reaction meme to convey everything from haughty defiance to abject sorrow. She seems so real to me that I find it difficult to wrap my head around the fact that she doesn’t actually exist, that she is multiple felt puppets held in museums and storage facilities, and not out there somewhere right this second, bickering with Kermit or lounging in a mud bath at a luxury spa. Why do people still love Miss Piggy so much? With the help of some Piggy scholars and fans, let’s dive in.  

SHE’S A FASHION LEGEND

Because she’s been around for 50 years, and because her team of stylists have always been responding to the cultural trends of the moment, there are some incredible looks in the Miss Piggy archives. “Her inability to reinvent – while retaining her unique Piggy essence – is utterly unique,” writer and editor Hannah tells Dazed. “She’s a pig for every era!”

Her style hasn’t always aged well – I could do without her early-00s jeans era – but many of her looks wouldn’t look out of place today in a fashion editorial in Dazed‘s very own pages. Whether it’s the timeless elegance of her black jumpsuit, the oversized suit and sunglasses in her downbeat, androgynous homage to Annie Hall, or the space-age body armour she wears while straddling a motorcycle in a shoot from the 1970s, Piggy remains a rich source of fashion inspiration. She’s so hot. And as a curvy lady who loves her own body and makes no apologies about it, Piggy has also been claimed as a plus-size icon.

SHE’S A DIVA

“She’s the diva, and of a kind that simply doesn’t exist anymore,” says Hannah. “She’s a star in the classic mould – an Elizabeth Taylor, a Marilyn Monroe, a Joan Crawford, a Greta Garbo.” This is a kind of celebrity which can no longer exist, Hannah suggests, thanks to the effects of social media, which makes everything banal and relatable. Piggy soars above these constraints. “She’s not relatable – she’s who you want to be,” Hannah adds.

Perhaps the most aspirational thing of all about Piggy is her unwavering self-belief. She hasn’t let the fact that she’s not that good at singing and has only a rudimentary grasp of French grammar stand in her way. She sees herself as the most beautiful woman in the world (pig or not), and by sheer force of will turns what might have been delusion into something close to the truth.

Miss Piggy isn’t just a star because she’s a piece of intellectual property owned by the world’s largest media conglomerate; she’s a star because she says so. “She’s such a confident lady, she’s super glam and she’s mean – kind of a feminist icon,” says Dazed’s Halima Jibril. Acting like Miss Piggy in real life might be a short ticket to alienating all your friends and being diagnosed with a personality disorder, but from time to time, we would all do well to channel her spirit. 

BUT SHE’S ALSO VULNERABLE

Underneath the brash exterior, there’s a fragility to Miss Piggy. She has a big heart and it’s easily broken. More than the glitz and the glamour, she wants desperately to love and be loved by one person alone, a frog too stupid and arrogant to realise he’s been punching the whole time. She’d trade it all for Kermit, and the tragedy of her life is that he views her, for the most part, as an irritation, a nagging voice, a problem to be managed. Miss Piggy is a martyr to love, the patron saint of anyone who has ever wasted beautiful feelings on someone who didn’t deserve them.

SHE’S COMPLEX

It’s time to discuss the elephant room: the allegations of domestic violence which plagued Piggy for years, starting in 2015 with a vicious takedown in the New Republic. It’s true that she has an unfortunate habit of karate-chopping Kermit and spends much of The Muppets Take Manhattan stalking him, neither of which are behaviours we condone. The obvious rejoinder is that she is a felt puppet of a pig and it’s not that deep, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. When you look at the dynamic at hand, it becomes clear that the “Miss Piggy is an abuser” narrative is a gross oversimplification.

“It’s nonsense. Woke gone mad,” Hannah says. “I’m sorry but Kermit deserves it — and you can quote me on that!” While that may be taking it too far, it’s true that Kermit has repeatedly toyed with Piggy’s emotions and publicly humiliated her in the cruellest ways possible, announcing his intention to marry her and then only months later denying he has any feelings for her at all.

“Piggy and Kermit’s relationship dynamic is very familiar – I see it all the time with my straight female friends who are constantly dating avoidant twinks,” Dom McGovern, a stand-up and Miss Piggy acolyte, tells Dazed. “Kermit is an avoidant twink. He keeps her around at his whim but when she asks him to commit to her verbally, he runs away, which is why she’s always trying to trick him into marriage. It’s not great behaviour, but I understand why she’s been driven to it!”

None of this excuses violence, of course, but hurt pigs hurt people. And even if Piggy has a dark side, doesn’t that just make her more compelling? Or are we still afraid of difficult, messy and complicated female characters?