NEW YORK (Herald de Paris) - A few years ago there was an interesting article in the
NY Times about fashion designers called: “In Fashion, Who Really Gets Ahead?”, by Eric Wilson. Without bringing up a whole lot that many of us didn’t already know about the fashion industry, that it is an industry dominated by gay males, the article did manage to draw a thinly veiled indictment against the leaders of this industry, namely that they perpetuate an institutional bias against women and straight men.
The article brought to memory a somewhat comical situation involving a friend who I worked with years back at the Metropolitan Museum in NY. It was a job guarding priceless artifacts for little more than the minimum wage salary that most of us desperately needed as we worked our way through college. We were hired together as there had been something of a purge of the “old guard” because of a rash of complaints against the grizzled and ornery security officers who had long patrolled the stately corridors having made careers out of guarding artwork, and whose social skills (and personal hygiene) had obviously suffered for it.
We were young and broke and full of energy and suddenly plopped into this massive labyrinthian complex filled with the most beautiful artifacts on the planet overrun for 8 to 16 hour intervals by the haughtiest patrons this side of Madison avenue. Individuals who would not even acknowledge you as perhaps something approaching human, who would stop in front of you and without even looking at you simply say “bathroom” and wait for a response. We were put on rotations of 3 guards each with one relief guard and we would rotate through a section of the museum during the course of a day. I was lucky enough to get Impressionist Galleries, a sky lit section full of life and light and sunshine. We were all about the same age and stuck in the same aircraft carrier sized art boat so we became fast friends quickly. One of my first really good friends was an art student I will call “Antonio”. Antonio devised a hilarious response to the “bathroom” people (who seemed to have forgotten the proper grammatical form for a query), he would very enthusiastically begin a game of word association with them. To “bathroom” he would open his eyes wide point and say something like “kitchen” — quite hilarious — granted you had to be there. Sometimes he would very politely offer a definition or brief etymology of the word “bathroom” as if these visitors had simply stopped by to discuss the meaning and nature of “bathroom”. The patrons would usually turn their noses up and walk away in a huff. Sometimes they would simply walk away puzzled.
I liked Antonio right away because he had guts and he was funny. We’d hang out together and go out for smoke breaks in Central Park. Eventually Antonio introduced me to some of his friends (also guards) and one in particular, lets call her “Susan” gained my interest immediately. Unfortunately she didn’t seem to reciprocate my affections and I soon became discouraged feeling she was perhaps out of my league, even though Antonio insisted she appeared to be interested in me. I got up the courage to ask her out and she confronted me with a puzzled look, “I thought you were gay?” I was pretty surprised as I’ve always imagined myself on rather the opposite end of the spectrum so i replied in kind … “What? Why would you think that?”, “well,” she said, “you know … you and Antonio”, to which my jaw dropped. “Antonio?” I said, “Antonio isn’t gay.” I said. “Yes he is.” She said. “No he isn’t.” I said. “Look,” she said. “Why don’t you ask him?” So I agreed to find out and even managed to get a date with Susan. The interesting thing about all this was that Antonio wasn’t gay (he in fact had a girlfriend he kept hidden out in Queens). He was as straight as could be, but he admitted to me that in certain circles he allowed himself to come off as “kinda gay”. I was baffled, “kinda gay? Why?” was my response. “Dude,” he explained, “you almost have to be, I need to sell my paintings, you have to come off a certain way if you want to get in with the right crowd, to get a showing, these galleries down in Soho, they look for a certain kind of artist you know what I mean?” So essentially Susan’s friends, who had perhaps seen a side of Antonio that I hadn’t, had been correct, Antonio would switch codes for lack of a better term. He’d talk the talk and walk the walk, and when in Rome he’d do as the Romans (or at least pretend to). I found the whole thing to be pretty funny, like something you might see in a situation comedy or an episode of Will and Grace, but as I read through the
NYT article it occurred to me that this wasn’t all that funny … this was actually discrimination.
My mom used to work for a fashion designer. She toiled for years in the basement of the Ralph Lauren “castle” on Madison avenue sewing button holes for people like
Princess Diana and Tom Seaver and Frank Sinatra (who she said actually had a guard specifically watching a set of diamond studded buttons she once had to sew onto one of his jackets). She even told me a story about how Barbara Walters once made a work associate of her’s cry. The money wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great either. She’d been lured to the castle from Paul Stewart and although the money was better she regretted it because she felt the people weren’t as nice. I visited her once and was immediately accosted in the incredibly ornate showroom by a spiffy fellow in a bright red Polo jacket and a nifty brown pair of loafers with plaid socks who explained to me that i should use the “side entrance” when visiting my mom, looking at me up and down as if to say “what were you thinking coming in here dressed like that???” I pretended I didn’t care all that much, after all I liked my black army jacket and my running shoes and faded jeans, but it was the sort of experience that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, it made me feel the way the “bathroom” people made me feel.
The very same Ralph Lauren who I imagine must now be in his seventies is in the news yet again as his empire is under attack and he is the beneficiary of some nasty litigation by one of his very own models, Filippa Hamilton. The
NY Daily News reported that Filippa Hamilton is suing Ralph Lauren for a rather embarrassing photoshopped picture of Filippa which was published in one of Ralph Lauren’s adds after she’d been fired for being too fat. The altered “thinner” Filippa was unfortunately so thin she didn’t really look human, rather more like a Bratz doll that had been run over by an SUV. Filippa, unaltered, is by all accounts a knockout, a stunner, the kind of woman who makes men drool and mumble incoherently. Yet here she was, fired for being fat, at 120 lbs and 5’10” (which incidentally is clinically underweight), and has her picture replaced by her post-alien-autopsy double. It kind of makes me wonder what planet this body they linked to Filippa’s head to came from and how they could possibly consider the eviscerated Filippa to be more attractive than her full figured self (which is actually quite skinny by most standards). I’m baffled, confounded, perplexed beyond any understanding … i just simply don’t get it.
Couple of years back Karl Lagerfeld got into a nasty little tiff himself with
Brigitte magazine because the magazine decided to ban thin models and go with “real women” in their pages after a number of people had complained about the unrealistic portrayals of the human female anatomy and its effect on impressionable young women. Lagerfeld was quoted in the news magazine
Focus, as saying those who might criticize models for looking bony or anorexic were “fat chip eating jealous mummies” going on to say, “no one wants to see curvy women. You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of their televisions and saying that thin models are ugly”. Now as a chip eater myself I take great offense to this, and am left even more baffled as I really fail to see the beauty in the emaciated sunken eyeball “on the verge of starvation” look.
As before, the issue, while perhaps funny on the surface, is really not funny at all when you consider the thousands of young women who die of anorexia every year. At any given time you can perform a search of “anorexia” on YouTube and witness one gut wrenching tribute after another to young women lost to this disease.
I don’t know whether it’s possible to make sense of this trend or whatever it is. You sometimes get the feeling that a lot of these fashion designers don’t really appreciate the female form, or that they perhaps even willfully try to distort it to fit their own perceptions of beauty. You hear a lot of crude talk from crude individuals who accuse the fashion industry of glamorizing the “waif” or the heroin addict or even worse, that they reduce the female figure to what appears to resemble that of a thin pre-adolescent boy. You wonder whether Eric Wilson back in December of 2005 wasn’t onto something when he accused the industry of institutionalized discrimination, mentioning at one point that from 1986 to 2005 the Perry Ellis awards had been given to 8 women and 29 men (20 of them openly gay). You wonder if the problem might not be somewhat more sinister than the flippant tone of most reports commenting on the Filippa Hamilton story.
From that
NYT article there is even this astonishing quote by Michael Vollbracht, the current designer of Bill Blass, who said he believed that gay man are demonstrably superior at design, their aesthetic formed by a perception of women as an idealized fantasy:
“I come from a time when gay men dressed women. We didn’t bed them. Or at least I didn’t. I am someone who is really pro-homosexual. I am an elitist. I am better than straight people. Women are confused about who they want to be. I believe that male designers have the fantasy level that women do not.”
The industry is leaving itself open to all manner of criticism, in essence facilitating the notion that it has become a self perpetuating art form that has moved past its utilitarian roots and is simply its own medium operating under its own specific parameters and its own criteria. That the creative impetus of high fashion is controlled by a select and a closed coterie and that the art form itself can only be accessed and judged within the confines of its own very specific and very distorted referents … all in the spirit of high innovation, the avant-garde. The question may even touch upon freedom of expression, and whether willful distortion of the human figure is a kind of bad video game. Should there be warnings on fashion magazines like you have on rap CD’s: “Warning: content may distort self image and result in the potentially damaging pursuit of unrealistic and unattainable bodily appearance”. I mean it’s obvious to most of us that heterosexual males are more interested in the playboy model than the heroin addicted waif, so the industry is operating within its own self imposed criteria without regard to the masses who wouldn’t know haute couture from a cheese sandwich, employing its very own vernacular and creating an art that only the wildly eccentric and supremely eclectic members of this exclusive club might appreciate or even comprehend. To the ordinary fellow on the street, they see crazy outfits on crazy skinny women wearing crazy make up and walking with that crazy runway walk. Its like some sort of huge private joke.
Only like the “bathroom” people, and the flustered preppy in the Polo jacket who shooed me out of the Ralph Lauren showroom, it isn’t really funny if it is in reality the picture of an industry perpetuating systematically exclusive practices. It is in no uncertain terms, institutionalized bias. It may even be un-American. If we can mandate the hiring of minority teachers to work with predominantly minority student populations, if we can rationalize moving more women into leadership roles, then we might want to think about hiring and promoting a few more women and a few more straight men to work in the fashion industry.
The curious case of Filippa Hamilton and Ralph Lauren | Herald de Paris
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