Saint Laurent S/S14: The waif chic look has gone too far

There's a point at which the banality of seeing size 0 models on the catwalk goes too far; when it stops being banal and starts being a cry for help. For me, that point came when flicking through the images of the Spring/Summer 2014 Saint Laurent (the brand formerly known as YSL) collection by Hedi Slimane.

Slimane, it's fair to say, loves the waif chic look through and through; he champions Pete Doherty, grunge and the faux-punk rebellion of the over-hyped Cara Delevingne, and he's previously created a book of rock photographs in his spare time. However, whilst I'm willing to accept the flannel shirts and rock 'n' roll attitude he brings to the brand, I am not at all comfortable with the aesthetic that his models are simultaneously bringing to the table. 

[Images via Style.com]. The Saint Laurent look for next season: worryingly thin.

The skeletal figures are not only upsetting, but they're also distracting, to the point where I can barely see the clothes because all I can picture are the jutting collarbones, alarming thigh gaps and paper-thin arms. I know that these models have walked other shows this season, that they look like hundreds of others on the circuit, but I've never seen their shape - or lack of shape - emerge quite so disturbingly from the catwalk before. This is not femininity or girl power; it is plain and simple deprivation.

Perhaps it's the slimline aesthetic of Hedi Slimane's designs, with the deliberately skinny ties and the asymmetric tops and dresses designed to highlight the shoulder and the collarbone? Whatever it is, it's not making me feel good about fashion or the health of these poor girls. Yes, they lead pressured lives and may 'accidentally forget to eat' sometimes or 'have a really fast metabolism', but at some point shouldn't the people around them intervene for the sake of their wellbeing?

Somebody please take these girls aside and give them a hug.

Besides the lack of professional concern for the models' physical and mental health, what concerns me is that these girls will be seen by the fashion world, and everyone interested in it, as perfectly normal, right down to the pre-teens who idolise them. Surely there is something wrong with the message being sent out here.

Considering the legacy of fashion shows past, I guess it shouldn't even be shocking to see such emaciated figures strutting down the runway, as the size 0 phenomenon has stayed with us since the 90s and shows depressingly little sign of disappearing. Maybe I was naive to hope that we'd get a bit more diversity in modelling in the 21st Century, with the healthier figures used by Mark Fast and, most recently, championed in the form of step dancers at Rick Owens' S/S14 show. But change is what we need, before we really do get stuck in a rut of terrifying proportions for the next generation of women seeking beauty validation from the catwalk.

Whatever Slimane might think, I do not believe that these girls should be modelling and I do not believe they should be part of his look. I really hope this show isn't the shape of things to come.

The fashion loop: what's so radical about A/W13's high street buys?

I bloody love Autumn/Winter clothing collections; it's no secret that I normally find them more exciting and creatively diverse than Spring/Summer, when pastels, neon and all things 'cute' come out of the woodwork with ritual predictability. But this year I've found that the bigger ritual and the feeling of being stuck on repeat has come from my first glimpses of A/W13 on the high street.

That pink coat could have been bought last year, but it's a new Zara offering.

[image via Company.co.uk].

Whilst I loved the big trends of A/W12, with the burgundy and the khaki and the navy, the continual appeal of leather trousers (which have been knocking around for a few years now), the quirky squirrel and owl motifs on jumpers, the punk nail art, the fake fur and mohair in crazy colours, the dark florals, the tartan prints, the pale pink coats, the spaghetti strap silky camisoles and slip dresses, the houndstooth and the metallics and the faux-leather midi skirts, I've found them to be coming around again with very little difference in what's being offered. 

Clearly retailers know when they're onto a good thing, and we obviously all bought up the stuff last year, but how much of it - realistically speaking - needs replacing (apart from my faux-leather trousers, which need yearly replenishment as the knees always go)? How many trends are we going to buy into for the second or third consecutive year and not even bat an eyelid, dampening the impact of the really unusual trends for this coming season, like Celine's bag lady chic and Stella McCartney's oversize pinstripes? In amongst all of the recycling, the Celine and Stella tributes aren't given the edge that they need to stand out against the repeated failsafe hits.

 Brocade for A/W12 from Marks and Spencer [image via Telegraph.co.uk].

Brocade comes back again for A/W13 [image via Telegraph.co.uk].

It just feels oddly like a huge case of deja-vu as I walk round the shops and browse the internet, seeing the same tartans, the same kooky jumpers, the same punk luxe and grunge pieces. In fact, currently in the Zara sale you can pick up a faux-leather burgundy pleated skirt, which looks remarkably like it could work for the upcoming season, so just buy it now and save it for a month or two and you'll be ahead of the game... or just wondering if it's a ploy to make you need the inevitable newer and shinier version that they're bound to bring out. 

Of course, people may have missed out on certain key purchases first time around, and I'm all for getting the items I should have put in my basket in 2012 (pale pink coat, please), but there's honestly very little at the moment that feels distinctly new or innovative to make this feel like a new season. Maybe the retailers are afraid to take a risk and they feel safer picking up the trends that have been recycled by designers again and again; maybe it's down to the trend forecasters looking to street style photographers and hipsters, who are all looking at each other, and we've just run out of ideas? Has there been a saturation point? Or can we expect a sudden injection of originality in September and October, when the real hardcore winter fashion starts to hit home?

 Shearling meets leather for A/W12 at Zara with this short jacket [image via Look.co.uk].

Here it comes again, with the 'combination cropped jacket' for A/W13 [image via Zara.com].

If you think I'm catastrophising, I'd ask you to go into any high street fashion retailer - Zara, M&S, H&M, Primark - and check out their early A/W13 drop right now. Look at the items carefully and try and picture them in light of what was on sale a year ago. Does anything feel like it's too new, design-wise, to be something you could have bought in 2012? I challenge you to find five items that are definitely from this year's Autumn/Winter collection and couldn't be mistaken for last year's, or 2011's. Let me know if you're successful. The best examples I could track down were some rather brilliant furry winklepickers and slipper shoes from M&S - pure fun, but I need more like this in order to feel confident that retailers aren't getting lazy.

19 years on, Prada has cast another black model... yes, this is the 21st century

It feels weird writing about momentous news when it doesn't sound quite as momentous as it should be. I am so glad that Prada has decided to cast a black model in its ad campaigns for the first time in 19 years - the last lucky lady was one Naomi Campbell, when we were in the age of the supermodel, back in '94 - but how on earth has it taken so long? Why has there been no black model deemed suitable in the interim? Unless I'm mistaken, the past two decades haven't exactly been devoid of candidates. 

 Malaika's high-profile ad for the upcoming season [Image via Jezebel.com]

Malaika Firth, the stunning British Kenyan model used in the Fall 13 campaign alongside famous Chinese model Fei Fei Sun, has now broken barriers in the fashion world for marking the turning point in this designer's campaigns. Miuccia Prada, whilst being a supremely talented woman, hasn't exactly done much for diversity in the past (see Jezebel), until she brought Jourdan Dunn onto the runway in 2008, which was seen as a revelation; please bear in mind, this was 2008, not 1908 - it should not have had to be a novelty. We should have been stamping down inequality on the catwalk decades ago, not just letting it slide because it's the done thing. There's making a trend, and then there's being narrow-minded.

Naomi's 1994 campaign, shot by Steven Meisel [Image via Fashionbombdaily.com]

In case Prada wasn't sure who would have been good to hire between 1994 and 2013, here are a few suggestions for potential ad campaign stars:

• Sessilee Lopez
• Chanel Iman
• Joan Smalls
• Arlenis Sosa
• Liya Kebede
• Alek Wek
• Nyasha Matonhodze (I know she's not as high profile as the others, but I think she'd make a great Prada girl - did you see her cover for Love Magazine?)
  

Basically, as amazing as it is to see Malaika and Fei Fei being given the nod by Miuccia, I think it's really sad that they've had to wait that long for the tide to turn. How can it be that 19 years is allowed to pass, during which we can assume non-white women don't wear Prada, buy into its branding or worship its designs (and, if they do, they're left feeling alienated and ignored)? This has to stop. 

P.S. If you want to read more about my writing on the catwalk's lack of ethnic diversity, check out my blog series. For more on body shapes and equality on the catwalk, click here.

Vogue US Hits 916 Pages With September Issue

Lady Gaga works it on the cover. 

[Images via Fashion Gone Rogue, one of my favourite sites].

Vogue US is considered by many slaves to fashion as the Bible, and it'll be even harder to shake that reputation with their ground-breaking September issue, totaling a massive 916 pages. I can't speak for the content because it's not out here in the UK yet, but by the sounds of the cover descriptions then it's going to be going for all-out style worship, creating a retrospective. 

Who better, then, to grace the front page than Lady Gaga? Arguably she knows about going stratospheric, considering her legions of fans and the uber-cool Haus of Gaga at her disposal to create outfits. Here she's styled by the legend that is Grace Coddington and photographed by Mert & Marcus, inside the shoot.

 

 

I can't say that I actually buy Vogue US that regularly (maybe once a year, if that, as it isn't half as good as its Italian counterpart, though I always skim through it and look out for any shoots featured on Fashion Gone Rogue) but I'm definitely set to buy this issue. If a magazine can churn out that many pages then I'll be keen to see top quality interviews with top designers, editors and creatives, as well as working out whether the advert-to-content ratio is worth their 'biggest ever' page claim. 

 

Another interesting proposition is 'Fall Fashion for All' - I'll have my politically correct radar going off for that one, as it'll be worth seeing just how diverse this gets. Will we see tokenism or actual genuine inclusion of women outside the 'white, size 0, very young' category? I really hope that 'for all' means what it says.

As for the 'Hair is the New Make-Up' feature? That's surely one for the Neophiliacs column in Private Eye magazine...

Has Vogue Italia's Black Issue Changed Anything? Part 3: Views on 'Blackface'

If you've been following my blog posts about the need for diversity in the fashion world, you'll know that it's time for the third and final part of the series (and those of you who've not seen part 1 and part 2 can quickly catch up!). Now it's time for some more analysis, with help from Jezebel.com, Sola Oyebade of Mahogany Model Management, and academic Carol Tulloch.

Models on the catwalk, and how this is inextricably linked to editorial content

It is also vital to consider the impact of catwalk shows on editorial content, because models that are frequently booked for the catwalk will also be used heavily in magazines, particularly those crowned ‘the next big thing’. Fashion shows are a great place to analyse the industry’s attitude to racial inclusion, especially as the designers themselves decide who will walk and who has the right look of the season. It is therefore unsurprising, in light of what I have previously discussed, that few designers actively support racial minorities on their catwalks and most are reluctant to discuss why this should be the case.

The website Jezebel has painstakingly analysed New York Fashion Week’s models in terms of ethnic origin and has written profusely on the findings. It transpires that non-white visibility has always been incredibly low and makes only small increases each season. By looking at the diagrams for the Spring/Summer 2011 shows provided by Jezebel, as seen below, it is easy to analyse the scale of the problem in the modelling industry. 

 [Image via Jezebel.com]

As the image depicts, Spring/Summer 2011 was still a heavily Caucasian affair, with 81.8% of show models belonging to that racial category. Catwalk reports revealed that many shows shared the same non-white models, so their figure of 18.2% could be even worse than previously suspected as the number of non-white models hired will not be as great as 18.2% in total. The accompanying graphic proves to us that the use of non-white models is not improving year by year, as the media would often like us to believe, and indeed it seems to fluctuate. Obviously with black models occupying 4.9% in Fall/Winter 2008 and 8.4% in Spring/Summer 2011 then promising results can be achieved, but this is not to say that the statistics will not decrease next season. There is no sure sign of improvement to be seen in these statistics and no way of predicting the racial diversity of the Fall/Winter 2011 shows in New York, or indeed any other fashion capital, because there are no guarantees here. One could have easily predicted a sharp rise in the number of models of African descent following Barack Obama’s electoral victory at the beginning of 2009 (looking at the Fall/Winter 2010 statistics compared to those of Fall/Winter 2009), but the increase here was only 0.5%. New York Fashion Week designers clearly have no great desire to jump on the Barack Obama bandwagon in terms of genuine ethnic visibility. 
 

Britain is not immune to such racial discrimination regarding its models, and several modelling agency C.E.Os have stood against the grain and campaigned for change. Two of these would be Carole White, of Premier Model Management, and Sola Oyebade. Sola, the founder of Mahogany Model Management, based the company around the motto ‘Injecting colour into mainstream fashion’. Mahogany aims to properly represent people of colour in the modelling industry and Oyebade has also become affiliated with the annual Top Model of Colour awards. He has protested against London Fashion Week’s lack of ethnicity, saying that the organisers ‘refuse to put a fair proportion of models of colour on the catwalk... London Fashion Week & the British Fashion Council are blatantly open about the "industry Apartheid" they are practising’ (2008). In response, a spokesperson for the British Fashion Council (BFC) suggested that it is a designer’s responsibility to choose their own models and the BFC has no control over ‘the aesthetic’ of a show. However the BFC offered to write to the designers ‘to remind them of the culturally diverse community we live in when casting models for their shows and ensuring that those models truly reflect that diversity’. They also reminded Oyebade that ‘Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards 2008 went to Jourdan Dunn, highlighting the role she is playing in increasing the profile of black models’ which, though a brilliant achievement for Dunn, hardly indicates a seismic shift in the attitude of the fashion industry as a whole. 

Meanwhile, Carole White has been working as a modelling agent for many years and ‘after a brief golden age in the Eighties and Nineties, Ms White's analysis suggests that fashion show designers and the industry media have regressed to an earlier, more blinkered approach’ to black models (Sharp, R., 2008). 

What are the detrimental effects of white dominance in fashion?

The fashion industry plays a vital part in the economy and is highly effective at reaching out to consumers and influencing their lives. The clothes we choose to wear every day can often be carefully considered and millions of people consult fashion magazines for advice or inspiration, most notably young women. So what happens when this main audience is presented with racially biased content on a weekly or monthly basis, and it becomes alien to see a non-European face within editorial content?
  
Carol Tulloch, a research fellow in Black Visual and Material Culture at the V&A, believes that ‘young black people will not struggle to find role models if there are none in fashion magazines, as they can use other outlets. These days there’s YouTube, internet forums and all kinds of music channels which will give them a chance to learn about black culture.’ However, she admits that ‘black women are under-used in fashion’ and greater visibility would be a positive change (to Polly Allen, 2010). 

Even one of the most prominent and successful black models, Naomi Campbell, is little-used in fashion magazines and her personal problems often overshadow her working life. Whilst Campbell appeared on the cover of Interview magazine and the key fashion shoot was staged around her, the narrative of this shoot detracted from the positivity of her prominence. Interview magazine chose to show Campbell as a dominatrix, subjecting her male companion to violence and humiliation, which seemed to painfully echo her real-life reputation as an aggressive woman who has been frequently accused of physically abuse her own staff. This overshadows Campbell’s position as a role model to many non-white women, which was discussed in the accompanying interview by Tony Shafrazi, along with her humanitarian work. 

 Naomi Cambell for Interview Magazine, 2010, shot by Mert & Marcus. 

[Image via Fashionbombdaily.com]

Carol Tulloch, like many other academics specialising in black culture, believes that ‘Naomi Campbell broke barriers – I know it’s a bit of a cliché to say that, but she did such a lot for black women, especially when she worked with photographers such as Ray Petri, who used black models when not many others would’ (to Polly Allen, 2010). The photo shoot in Interview magazine does not present Campbell as breaking any barriers beyond those of taste.  

What conclusions can we draw from this? 

As the journalist Nell Frizzell questioned, ‘Will the recession make publishers, advertisers and editors even more wary of having black people in their magazines?’ and it is honestly difficult to tell. Publishers are genuinely suffering in the recession, but knowing the success of the Black Issue, maybe greater non-white visibility would gain readers for a magazine as well as media exposure and revenue. However, there is the opposite risk of magazines using the recession as an excuse for not using black figures, leaving them to “play it safe” with Caucasian-filled pages. 
    

The way forward, as I see it, would be to start with the catwalk and then magazines will follow accordingly. Robin Givhan, blogging for the Washington Post, admitted that ‘Sure, it would be nice to have a veritable United Nations on the runway. But this is fashion and it's all about personal vision, not we-shall-overcome’ (2008). If the designers begin to see non-white people in their creative vision then our fashion magazines will be the first to jump on that particular trend. Yet model aesthetics do not change as rapidly as the seasons of fashion; Supermodels held court for the 80s and 90s until the waif look arrived with grunge, and that malnourished look has remained popular for the majority of catwalk stars ever since. With every attempt at differentiation on the catwalk, waves of scandal have followed, so it’s hardly surprising that ethnicity will not be embraced overnight. 

In the words of Sessilee Lopez, ‘I’m hopeful that one day the industry will see that black — in all its shades — is beautiful’ (Blay, 2010). In light of Vogue Italia’s Black Issue, it is evident that using non-Caucasian models does not damage circulation figures in the slightest, and consumers are clearly supportive of diversity in fashion magazines and on the catwalk. There is no real excuse not to take a leap of faith and give the public what it deserves, which is a fashion industry that won’t just take the money of ethnic minorities, but will represent them and acknowledge them as fashionable too. Homogenous content is unremarkable and incredibly lazy in an industry which defines itself on being inspirational and creative, and it is time to move on.  

What do you think - is it time for things to change? Let me know.