Fashion & Controversy

I LOVE my special topics (a.k.a. DDR) class. We read philosophy, look at fashion magazines, and have discussions about what it all means. Most of the time we are pretty hard on the editorials or ads we look at. We’ve discovered that every Alberta Ferretti campaign seems to involve four emaciated women (we’ve decided they are sisters) who are too weak to stand and seem to be in some unsafe location. Their favorite hangouts include a windy manor house, various subway cars, and a mysterious institution with lots of black drapery. What is the message of these ads? Should we be worried about these women? Why is it that somewhat unsettling images seem to sell clothes?

This week however, we spoke favorably about an editorial that elsewhere had caused outrage. I’m talking, of course, about Vogue Italia’s “Water & Oil” spread in which the tragedy of the gulf oil spill was retold with a model and several thousand dollars worth of designer clothes (go here to see the pictures). The many angry responses to this shoot boiled down to three main points:

-It is disgusting to glamorize an ecological disaster

-It is appalling that they are using the oil spill to sell clothing and make money for the magazine

-How dare fashion get above itself and attempt to tackle a real world issue

Here is what we discussed:

Point one: It is disgusting to glamorize an ecological disaster

Okay, take a close look at the images from the shoot. Forget for a moment that you are looking at a fashion editorial and just think about what kinds of thoughts and feelings the photos convey. Do you think it is glamorous? Does the model look chic and fab? Do you imagine someone looking at that haunting shot of her face covered in oil and saying, “ooh! Where can I get that look?” No. The images are dark and disturbing. Fashion photography does not always equal glamour.

Point two: It is appalling that they are using the oil spill to sell clothing and make money for the magazine

Again, this photo shoot really isn’t about making readers covet the model’s look. The clothes look dirty, torn, and grey—unlike the Alberta Ferretti ads in which the women may be ill but the clothes still look expensive and alluring. So if it isn’t to sell clothes, what is the point? If this is “art” then why use designer clothes at all?

That was my question, but as my professor pointed out, the clothes help tell the story. The model is made to look birdlike by wearing feathers, or seal and fish-like by wearing shiny fabric that looks wet. Other pieces echo the natural forms of the rocks or the seaweed. Some of it simply looks frail and torn. “Fashion is the perfect metaphor for death,” my prof explained. “It is ephemeral and replaceable, with new trends burying the old. Fabric, like the body, is fragile and easily broken.”

People make money off of tragedy all the time, but in those other contexts we assume that the intent is honorable. For example, someone in Hollywood makes a movie about the holocaust just about every year. Have you ever heard people rail against how disgusting it is that someone is profiting from murder of six million people? No, because we believe that the movies have something to teach and that the profit made by the studios is just part of how the system works. Which brings me to the next point…

Point 3: How dare fashion get above itself and attempt to tackle a real world issue

As you can imagine, we get very defensive about this. There is a widespread perception that fashion is completely frivolous, has no meaning, and isn’t something that anyone should actually consider important. It never has anything to say about politics, economics, or society and it shouldn’t try. People have worn things to cover their bodies since the beginning of time, yet everyone sure that there is no connection between clothing and the human experience. How dare it get mixed up in the “real” world.

Yes, fashion is part of a capitalist system—but as my prof put it, fashion is “sort of like the angsty step-daughter who is happy to bite the hand that feeds her.” Where did these high-end clothes come from? What sort of energy went in to making them? What sort of energy went into making the clothes that you are wearing? BP may deserve the bulk of the blame for the spill, but aren’t we all part of a system that created the need for an oil industry?