Fashion

I was bored and found myself cruising Tumblr.com blogs. These are interesting in that allow you "reblog" material from other people's Tumblr sites. It makes for an unusual form of social network in that like-minded blogs tend to link to one another. Fans of, say, photos of World War II fighter aircraft post each other's images. With a few clicks you are enmeshed in an entire community.

On this particularly day I somehow drifted into a linked collections of blogs dealing with high-fashion photography. People were scanning or downloading photos from Vogue, Elle, W Magazine, Town and Country, etc., and loading them to their sites for various reasons.

It had been years since I'd actually looked at a women's fashion magazine and I did so now mostly out of a professional curiosity. I am, after all, a former magazine writer and an aspiring publisher.

But, as I looked at the photos, I realized I was becoming more and more uncomfortable. They seemed odd somehow. At first I thought it was just because the women were so very thin. They had that concentration camp look that nutritionists and feminists so often decry.

Then I thought it was just because they were, well, creepy. The modern fashion model is not made up to conform to any traditional conception of beauty (and certainly not a heterosexual man's). Their skins were deathly pale, cosmetic bruises could be seen under eyes on cheeks, expressions were stern to the point of murderous, and there was way too much leather and lace.

Next, I thought that what bothered me was the age (or the seeming age) of the people involved. There were two sorts of model on display: thin, boyish women made to look very young, and girls…girls between the ages of 11 and 14. Both groups wore the same very suggestive outfits, clothing which concerned almost nothing (even though there was very little to conceal). Both were posed in positions that I can only call erotic, as though they were inviting the viewer to join them in bed, or as if they had recently shared one another's beds and we were there as an audience, peeping through keyholes, spying through windows.

It felt, well, perverted. I felt that I was supposed to be seeing children…highly sexualized children…girls, or even boys in drag, offered up for my voyeuristic pleasure, and suggesting that I cultivate a certain pedophilia.

This I found revolting and it was with a real feeling of illness that I left off browsing for the day.


*

The following morning, I took the dog for a walk. As we strolled through the sunlight of a New Mexican morning, I considered again my reaction to those photos. For a time, I believed I finally understood why they'd made me feel quite the way they did. I thought I was reacting as a father, someone who has a child (even if my son is now grown), and who was distressed to have these images floating about, possibly influencing the real behavior of real children. (Pre-teen girls do read this kind of magazine.) And, worse, possibly influencing the behavior of adults in their relations with children.

But just as we came around the corner down by the school, I realized that there was still more…something else was troubling me.

I recalled one picture in particular. It showed a girl of maybe ten. She was heavily made-up. She stood in some urban location and gazed at the viewer with an odd expression that seemed to combine disinterest and erotic availability. Though she was a child, she held a cigarette in one hand.

I later discovered that this picture was in fact "inspired" by much more famous images by much more famed photographers. There is, indeed, it seems a whole genre of them: the child presented as an adult, performing acts which are hazardous at best, and which are therefore somehow infinitely more alarming when they are done by someone so very young. So very vulnerable.

And it struck me. There is something here that is genuinely unhealthy. Something indicative of a sickness at the very heart of our culture.

But that sickness isn't in the threat it represents to children…or, rather, not just in that threat.

It is in what these photos say about our adults.


*

Consider, who is that child with the cigarette supposed to be? Who does she genuinely portray?

Well, there is a theory we humans prefer photos of things that resemble us. Confronted by a collection of strangers' images and asked to pick the most attractive, we select the men and women who most look like us…either our exterior self or our internal reality.

If so, then the images in the fashion magazines are in fact those of the adults who read, write, and publish those journals—our fashionistas, our Devils In Prada, our setters of style and makers of trends. It these people whose souls and whose inner-most selves are presented on the shiny pages.

These are powerful, powerful people. They are among the mightiest of our civilization has to offer. What they decree to be fashionable will determine the purchasing of millions, and the labor of millions more.

And who are these people? What do we see when we turn to their images in the glossy magazines?

Answer: a person who has all the superficial characteristics of extreme youth…but whose reality is vastly different.

That reality is exhaustion. It is corruption. It is the Bordello Madam somehow concealed within the body of an ingénue as she smokes her cigarette and contemplates heroin chic.

In other words, there is much in this child-hag to remind one of the corpse. Cunningly embalmed. The very picture of peaches and cream.

Even as the decay sets in.