Fashion week in New York! The latest and greatest: runways! Really important now looks, garments that make irrefutable forward statements! Gossip – designers up and designers down, business bad, ars longa, deals brevis! And models! Beautiful, lithe young women, ideals for starry-eyed teens, radiating confidence, health and … wait a minute.
I thought they fixed that a couple of years ago, but no, it was just a bunch of cynical PR bullsh*t. The clothes are draped on cadaverous, sick, sunken-eyed creatures whose elbows and knees are the widest part of their limbs. I don’t mean fashionably thin, I mean pathologically skinny, sick girls; they don’t just have no body fat, they have no muscles and their bones are sticking out. Parading these creatures around on display is a freak show, not an art form, and even worse than what circuses used to have in the sideshow tent because no-one chooses to have a genetic abnormality, but these models have willingly sold their health and their self-respect (granted they’re young enough to have fairly undeveloped executive function and often poor and uneducated enough to have few choices), and the promoters and designers are pimping the spectacle out with complete and abject cynicism. At least the victims aren’t smiling.
The presenters’ motivations are clear: there’s money and reputation in an exploitative morality-free professional zone to at stake. But what kind of people, especially women (customers and journalists), will sit in an audience for this? How can you sit beside a runway watching an unbroken parade of malnutrition and illness and write about the clothes? I haven’t made a deep study of the press coverage, but I haven’t seen a story or an opinion piece pointing the finger much less raging against the spectacular, shameless misogyny of this trafficking, and the blatant backsliding; when they went all apologetic and confessional a couple of years ago, they didn’t mean a word of it.
If you wear so much as a scarf from these wretched people, you have a piece missing, undernourished someplace a lot more important than your hips; (even if you’re a moral cripple, why would you want to wear something designed by someone who evidently wants you to look like an invalid or a self-destructive psychotic?). If you drive a Mercedes in public, you deserve to get it egged at every stoplight. And if you’re a fashion ‘journalist’, you’re a phenomenon simply beyond my comprehension.