FASHION WEEK AND MANUFACTURED SILHOUETTES
Fashion Week: welcome to the aisle of luxury bimbos and ignoramuses of every kind. Every Fashion Week, the same show comes back with the regularity of a Lidl promotion: young women stripped down to the bare minimum, perched on “Louboucatin” stilts, their faces frozen in an expression that seems to hesitate between deep boredom and existential constipation, parade in front of a crowd of minimum-wage workers, most of them on the dole, who give their opinion on everything, but above all their opinion.
We are told these new muses are the icons of tomorrow. Fine. But icons of what, exactly? Fashion? Beauty? Femininity? Or simply of the formidable power the luxury and fashion industry has to turn a human being into a two-legged billboard?
Because you have to give the system credit for a certain efficiency. Take a very hungry young woman, give her a few centimeters of fabric, add an outrageously priced handbag, two spotlights, three hysterical photographers and a handful of PR people capable of turning any pair of legs into a “Pagès-style manifesto.” And there you go: you have a muse.
The most fascinating part is the ability to sell us the art of nudity in gift wrapping. A nearly naked woman in the street would be vulgar. The same woman dressed in a metro ticket with a luxury house’s logo sewn onto her backside suddenly becomes a “bold statement” for the oh-so-delightful Frontanel, former coffee-fetcher at ELLE. All it takes is adding a brand or a name for vulgarity to graduate from the Beaux-Arts, a little nod to my friend Alex, my favorite resident Russkoff.
As for me, sorry, but it does nothing for me, absolutely nothing: no standing to attention under the covers, which is probably for the best if I want to avoid police custody, since these women, after teasing you outrageously, call the police. Not the slightest spark of fascination in front of these manufactured silhouettes, yet we’re told it’s sublime, modern, transgressive. Well, no!
The tastiest part of this story is that this aesthetic, built on a mountain of luxury, nudity and provocation, ends up in the hands of Russian propagandists who dream of proving that the West is in full decadence. We produce absurd images, sell them as the pinnacle of modernity, and then certain regimes parade them around saying: “Look how far they’ve fallen.” And that’s how an overpriced dress, three meters of leg and an ad campaign can end up becoming a geopolitical argument.
All this to sell a handbag! Perhaps it’s time to stop taking us for fools, because beauty doesn’t need a press release. Desire doesn’t need an art director, and a woman certainly doesn’t need to be turned into a human display stand to justify the price of a collection.
By dint of trying to manufacture desire, fashion sometimes ends up manufacturing exactly the opposite: indifference under spotlights. And when an industry spends millions to convince us that we should find something magnificent, it may be time to ask ourselves whether we truly find it beautiful… or whether we’ve simply learned to applaud this storytelling in high heels. As for me, Fashion Week is over, and some will be glad that I’m going back, like an old bear, to hibernate in deepest Brittany.
FM