POP 330 Monday 28 June 2010

Today's POP is Daniel, who is in a pensive mood.

I’ve always felt there is a very libertarian and libertine streak to fashion, at least that is the caricature, as evidenced in all the Cruella de Ville characters in cinema and fiction. But lately we’ve all seen evidence of the contrary, a battle, one might say, between an old view of fashion where style trumps ethics and a new idea – though revolutionary it might not be – that morality is greater than art.

What else are all these debates about? Size, age, weight, skin tone, sexist stereotypes –we’ve soon been through them all.

In 1988 it wasn’t a problem for a 12-year old Milla Jovovich to grace the cover of Lei magazine and only right-wing groups protested that she was too young. Today the protests are coming from all directions. Australia’s Youth Minister Kate Ellis revealed a voluntary code of conduct and a “body image friendly” logo on Sunday according to

WWD, urging the industry to become more ethical:

No ultra-thin models, no overly muscular male ones (bye-bye David Gandy), no models under the age of 16 in grown-up clothes, more diversity and no retouching were among the guidelines.

No one can object against people trying to do good, and maybe this is a matter of the fashion industry having become a true businessrather than a handful of creative people showing in Paris, but we should also be aware that when artistic endeavours are controlled and regulated we also run the risk of making them less interesting, as we’ve seen over and over through history.

It would be one thing if the restrictions came from the fashion creatives themselves. The French literary movement OULIPO believed that creative freedom were to be found in the setting up of voluntary constraints, the most famous examples being George Perec’s Life: A Users Manual and A Void.

Any of the ethical rules currently being discussed could potentially spur someone to create great art. But coming as they are, from the outside, they certainly risk making fashion less adventurous and diluted.

So here is the dilemma: Do we abandon the trade-off fashion has favoured for so long where we accept a few Cruellas for the sake of great fashion? Or do we run the risk of cementing fashion’s abuses by refusing to address them?

I mean, I definitely don’t believe morality trumps art, but to me it just doesn’t seem very modern when you get off the diverse Paris streets and end up with an all-white model cast at an old bourgeois fashion house. I just don’t understand where that reluctance is coming from.

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