Violence Against Women Disguised as ‘Fashion’ [View all]

[redqueen]

http://jezebel.com/5916650/fashions-ongoing-violence-against-women/

Bulgarian fashion magazine 12 just published an appalling editorial containing nothing but portraits of models with horrific injuries. It's a "beauty" spread — the kind of feature that normally highlights a makeup artist's skills and aims to sell the "new" eyeshadow color of the season —but it isn't very beautiful. There are models with Black Dahlia-style Glasgow Smiles, models who've been strangled, models who've had their earrings and facial piercings ripped out, and models who've been mutilated with acid. It's all special-effects makeup, but it's still sickening. These photos give you an idea the nature of the spread. And it's hardly the first of its kind.

It'sa given that fashion magazines— like other forms of mass media —often aim to shock. Because they like the attention. Because they like the ad dollars. Because they like the rebellious reputation that shocking us squares confers. But it's still worthwhile to examine the means by which they achieve that shock value. The high-fashion world in general loves to think of itself as contrarian, élite, and boldly at odds with the tastes and mores of the wider public. It likes to think that it, in fact, leads those tastes. But much of the imagery the fashion industry uses to communicate its messages at best echoes and at worst reinforces some of the wider culture's most negative ideas about women and girls. As we all know thanks to Joan Didion, "it ispossible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level." Fashion, in all its contradictions, is great evidence of that.

The history of fashion is rife with depictions of and references to violence against women. Historically, photographers including Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin had a particular fascination with bloodied, bruised, or dead models, whom they often depicted in sexualized positions (a vein that contemporary fashion photographer Steven Klein continues to probe). The "dead girl" is such a trope of ladymags that it was imitated on America's Next Top Model— five years ago.

As Margi Laird McHue wrote in her 2008 book, Domestic Violence: A Reference Handbook, this kind of imagery is highly problematic.

...