At Courrèges, Nicolas Di Felice covered the faces of many models, in an otherwise elegant show inspired by the idea of the sun and rising temperatures, and shielded them from view. But even if the shades were meant as protection, the suggestion that a woman would need to hide was problematic....
Hide from the sun?! Is the sun sexist? I spend my life hiding from the sun — going for walks before sunrise or in the shadiest woods. I had a childhood full of sunburns, and the calendar of my old age is studded with dermatology appointments. I'm averse to the ritual of slathering sunblock goo all over. I prefer protective clothing when I can get it. And to me this Courrèges thing is fantastic.
It's not like the other things pictured at the link, e.g. "Arm-trapping 'cocoon' bodysuits at Alaïa, and mouth guards that stretched the face into rictus grins at Margiela."
Here's the Vogue article about the Courrèges show:
They’re bound to read as veils in the pictures, but the five face coverings at the beginning of the Courrèges show don’t have any religious origins—they are in fact functional UV blockers. Nicolas Di Felice was explaining this backstage before he sent out the collection he named “Blinded by the Sun.” He’d seen this sort of product for sale when he was traveling in Thailand, he told us. In his redesign, the fabric is attached to peaked caps, draped across the face and then tucked onto the waist band of an A-line miniskirt in the same fabric.
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46 comments:
…so many diacritical marks- looks like Church of England
The couture stuff is usually intense then dialed back for customers but where do you go with all the opaque mosquito nets? I don’t know…
I’ve seen that Thom Browne ensemble at the airport a few times. Beats checking a bag…
Yah, burka,
Yah, niqab,
Once again, Islam, as Sam Harris noted, is the mother lode of bad ideas.
This made me think of Camille Paglia. She's a huge fan of fashion and cannot believe what the feminist critics say about it. I'm looking for that piece she wrote. In the meantime, I found this...
The word “person” captures a concept so fundamental to Westerners that it can be jarring to discover that it once had a different meaning. Etymologically, “person” comes from the Latin word persona, which means “mask.” To be a person is to wear a mask, act out a role—what people today might call being fake.
But to Camille Paglia, the dissident social critic, a mask does not conceal a person’s true nature; it helps reveal it. This is why Halloween was her favorite holiday as a child. It was “a fantastic opportunity,” she told an interviewer recently, “to enact one’s repressed and forbidden self—which in my case was male.” When she was five, she dressed up as Robin Hood; at seven, she was a Roman soldier; at eight, Napoleon; at nine, Hamlet. “These masks,” Paglia told me in Philadelphia recently, “are parts of myself.”
…the horse ran a bit wide and the rider took down the jump marker?
Durka durka… Mohammed… jihad
Rictus grins is right. Fashionable.
Arms don't sunburn?
I also tend to prefer covering up to constantly reapplying sunscreen however it seems to me that if you can see through the fabric then light is getting in so the UV protection factor is pretty low. A wide brim hat is probably as good, maybe better.
So I'm with gspencer. That's totally not a burqa /s
I still cannot find that damn article. But here is Paglia influencing The White Lotus.
What's wrong with a parasol?
Parasols are great! They give all sorts of options for gorgeous displays of fabrics ... and tassels too if you really want to go for it.
Ann: That blue is just not you.
Fashion is so cool! “You can’t see my face but check out my side boob!”
“Unfazed by rats….”
As others have noted the act of covering up doesn't always mean the same thing. Covering up to stay warm, avoid the sun, or even to fulfill your own sense of style or modesty is fine, but covering up because you fear receiving fines or even beatings from the Ministry of Vice and Virtue is another matter.
I think this article and others like it reflect a larger phenomenon where folks on the left are noticing that the culture is shifting away their expected lefty cultural norms to a more conservative or just non-lefty direction. I think it feels to them like we've passed an inflection point where, to their estimation, the first order derivative has shifted from positive or at least neutral to negative, and there is no visible endpoint of this new direction. Some quotes from the article that I think reflect this phenomenon:
"But even if the shades were meant as protection, the suggestion that a woman would need to hide was problematic."
"The size inclusivity that fashion once embraced has almost entirely disappeared from every runway save for that of Matières Fécales,"
"“I don’t want to get political because it’s a dangerous thing to do nowadays,” Duran Lantink said "
"Perhaps because aprons themselves still represent both economic inequality and the rise of the tradwife movement, uneasy subjects for very expensive fashion."
I think there is a broad and growing feeling on the Left that the world they hoped for is slipping away. It feels like they are losing and this contributes to a sense of malaise and anxiety. This is seen in some of the negative reactions to Taylor Swift's new album and in the Left-wing violence. Both are reactionary pushbacks, of very different degrees, to a changing culture. Similarly, I recently saw a YouTube short of two middle aged, millennial men decrying that Gen Z was trying to dress like frumpy (and racist) Republicans.
These coverings make you uncertain, are you sure you're looking at a woman or ...which is also very Thailand.
My plan now is to go to the dermatologist as infrequently as possible so I end up with really big scars. At my age I am irredeemably ugly so I might as well make the most of it.
Female fashion starts out as a low-risk way to stand out. If you are different, you might get more attention or attention from a better mate. You can instantly and easily be "special." If it doesn't work, it's easy to undo. Haute couture is how rich people do this, only because they are rich.
Fashion also becomes rigid or irreversible, such as piercings, tattoos, and the odd fixation on hiding the female nipple at all costs (ranging from bras to pasties to Janet Jackson's metal stars).
When fashion fuses with cultural traditions, it morphs into stuff like Thai brass neck rings, African lip and ear discs, Chinese foot binding, French bonnets that smushed the skull, and more.
I like to see and I like to breathe so this fashion trend would not be for me.
Plus sneezing and coughing would require a change of clothes. Ya… no.
Fashion is about how to get more power and performance out of what you got. It's the female version of customizing your car or truck. Men look at car and truck magazines. Women look at fashion magazines. They both want to turn heads and to enjoy the ride.
Does the sun really cause skin cancer? Are we sure it's not caused by Tylenol? What does RFK say?
Just asking questions.
The dog abuser is out of control
@ wild chicken
That's what the mouth guard is for. It makes it hard to take Tylenol.
A hijab or niqab looks better than those clumsy attempts at concealment. The shredded mosquito net doesn't allow any part of the face to be seen, so is uncomfortable for everyone else.
That wind screen dress seems designed to vex the wearer. Imagine going out to dinner in that thing. After eating your Whopper, you get home to find ketchup and pickles stuck to your tits.
Leftist Trust Fund chic
We have too many empoyees doing little useful work
Leftist Trust Fund chic
It really does look like what could be driving it. That fashion house known for reflecting the trends of 60s radicals. Beyonce loves them, too…say no more.
I went straight Bob Boyd instantly.
Problematic. I hate that millennial nothing word.
Visual saltpeter.
Unfazed mudface
It is from her article, Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders (page 41)
Last year, I attended a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania given by a prominent visiting Ivy League feminist. It was a dreadful experience, and I'm afraid I behaved rather badly. A small, frail, drably dressed but obviously very nice woman with a pale voice showed slide after slide of gorgeous ads and pictorials from fashion magazines and proceeded to demolish them with an ugly, ponderous, aggressive, labyrinthine Lacan machinery that surely not three people in the audience fully understood. Brutal language of "mutilation," "decapitation," "strangulation," "bondage," and "enslavement" filled the air. I began to writhe in my seat with pain; I could not stifle, to the annoyance of my neighbors, muttered cries of "oh!", "awful!", and "give me a break!" At the end, I waved my arms around and made an agitated speech, most graciously tolerated by the lecturer, denouncing the feminist inability to deal with beauty and pleasure, to which gay men have made such outstanding cultural contributions. Every young woman in the audience, intimidated by incomprehension into thinking she was hearing something brilliant, was intellectually oppressed by that lecture and that approach to life and thought. Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores.
Yeah, I'm paying the price now for 35 years of sun worship in South Florida. I'm on a first name basis with the staff at the dermatologist.
And Vault Dweller, few things make me happier than witnessing Leftists gain a sense of malaise and anxiety.
Vault Dweller at 659 - Nice analysis. Bravo.
I've never read Lacan, and boy, I really do not want to. As Paglia says, "It is positively idiotic to imagine there is no experience outside of language."
Brought to you by the people who say there is no biological sex, there is only gender, gender, gender.
Lacan writes a book and decades later, a boy gets castrated in a doctor's office.
That blue outfit is not about "sun protection". To me it signals "don't look at me" - period. "High fashion" industry has a strong taint of misogyny, whether extreme uncomfortable and/or unflattering clothing, underweight bony teen models as supposed paradigm of "high-class beauty", mistreatment of those underage models and debauched lifestyles of many fashion brand designers (St Laurent, McQueen, Jacobs, Halston, Valentino, Versace, Gaultier, Galliano. And yes, John Fairchild of WWD, who endorsed and promoted that blatant misogyny.
""mutilation," "decapitation," "strangulation," "bondage," and "enslavement" filled the air."
It's like the saying that a liar thinks everybody is a liar and a cheat thinks everybody is a cheat.
“You can’t see my face but check out my side boob!”
I think it's sexy.
Fashion is all about hiding and revealing. I want to undress her, so it works for me.
I also like the Sexy Handmaid's Tale costume that has already been removed from the universe.
I agree that this look has clearly been influenced by the burka, but I don't actually think they are sucking up to Islam with this. There are many countries where you would not want to wear this out on the street. And the artists are lying about their influences. Probably because they don't want to be decapitated or blown up.
But I was reliably informed that the Piker the Dog Tormentor was the left's answer to Joe Rogan, the latest thing, political salvation. You mean he's actually just another vapid, phoney, empty leftist sadistic twerp?
Well, that was interesting, and a bit scary. I was going to make a similar remark as Vault Dweller did about the drift away from non-traditional dress.
On another note:
"But the designers, Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, did not serve their purpose by putting those bodies in shoes that seemed so tortuous and ill-fitting that the models could barely walk."
What is with the platform high heels?! I imagine those must be murderously difficult to operate. Are broken ankles a feature of these productions? I certainly don't find them attractive, in any way, so, what is their function?
I can remember when everyone "Sun bathed" and being out of doors with a healthy tan was the ideal. No one had heard of "SP ratings". Or talked about skin cancer.
I the main not a great deal is lost by covering those faces. An ancillary benefit: It prepares us for sharia law.
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