Can't Help But Feel Partly Responsible

Before, I just (!) thought fashion designers and promoters were idiots. Now, I think they're sadistic:

...17-year-old model Ali Michael ... looks wraithlike, with a still-developing body and a 23-inch waist. But this season, after gaining five pounds, Miss Michael was told by casting directors for the runway shows that her legs were too plump....

And I don't mean simply cruel: I mean sadistic, with all that that implies. And through the public attention they get, their sadism is parlayed into sociopathology:

Nobody here has been talking about last year's skinny-model cause célèbre ... after the starvation deaths of several models. This year, the models are just as thin — if anything, they look thinner.

Just like the Neocons, the business world is perverting postmodernism. Postmodernism provided tools for explaining aspects of culture that are resistant to other tools; but Marx is still right: the point is not to understand the world, but to change it. The business world, through contemporary marketing and branding practices, coöpts social and environmental problems in order to make money. The oil companies do this, and now fashion designers are doing it:

Issey Miyake's show was an eerie ode to love in an apocalyptic age — he blended jeans, made on special looms that weave fabric to look spray-painted, with fine black suits, run through with understated platinum and gold thread.

Mr. Miyake is right: War, famine, drought and global warming trouble us; we need look no further than the spring flowers blooming in February in Paris to know that change is afoot.

They aren't even speaking to problems, they're exploiting them. And, in some sense, they seem to know this; they seem to be aware that they, or at least what they do, is deplorable:

the show ended with wild laughter over the sound system — the huge wicked laugh of a madman.

The fashion world's exploiting environmental degradation for profit might be less destructive than the oil companies' (though all of the global travelling the Metro-trash do four times a year can't be good) is, but it isn't primarily an environment-related industry, it's a social one:

As any parent of an adolescent girl can tell you, fashion magazines become dog-eared as girls study them for beauty tips.

And though those girls may see

...several models of color...

they also see

...models who are "just suitable for our clothes," he repeated several times.

So we have bodies being formed to fit clothes, rather than clothes designed to fit bodies.

Sociopathic.

I dislike Jackson Pollock's "art." But I'm starting to hate fashion designers and promoters.

[More below.]

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None of this is to say that they aren't still idiots. But on the part of the designers and promoters, it seems to be deeply rooted in psychology. Fashion writers, on the other hand, seem merely to be addicts:

AT least twice a year, a fashion reporter will write an article about “The New Modesty,” declaring that clothes are finally returning to well-constructed tailoring of subtlety and restraint. Then, in the same publication, you will see a fashion spread of an impossibly chiseled man in a python codpiece straddling a Russian supermodel wearing a bikini made of pink dental floss, and you wonder (1) what that writer was on; and (2) if humanity will ever be sophisticated again.

Well, dear reader, I may be about to make the same mistake....

They know they have a problem, they just can't help themselves.

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1945 on the left, and 2007 or 2008 on the right.

Granted, the girl is complicit in her own starvation. But on the other hand, as the start of this post indicates, it's a job requirement.