‘It’s not just about abusive photographers’: fashion and feminism in the world of #MeToo

The Saturday afternoon of London fashion week saw Christopher Bailey’s final show for Burberry, after 17 years designing for the label. The scene outside was post-apocalyptic – the flyovers of White City in west London looming over the aircraft hangar where the show was held, as maybe 100 people protested against fur. It was quite a slick demo – loudhailers and rhyming slogans, abattoir noises blaring from a speaker. It seemed, to someone who was alive in the 80s, vividly nostalgic, like a civil war recreation. A young man ran through the barriers brandishing a ticket, wearing a fur-lined hood. “Compassion is always in fashion,” called another guy with eyes red-splashed to look as though they were bleeding. “It’s not even real fur,” muttered the man in the hood.

I’ve been to the fashion shows before for personal reasons (in the 90s, I was in charge of bringing a designer’s dog to the front row for the finale), but have never had the beat professionally or asked what this nest of predominantly female creativity says about feminism, because it’s very erudite. Its statements are bold but not obvious, its messages arrive in layers and contradictions, over time, and its most interesting minds are often not very interested in verbally articulating ideas whose visual impact is charged by their ambiguity. Yet, plainly, neither fashion nor feminism lives under a bell jar. If fashion doesn’t speak plainly about its feminist agenda, that doesn’t mean it says nothing. The same controversies that have arisen in the rest of the culture – #MeToo, most recently – have exploded in fashion, this week seeing allegations of abusive photographers that were foreshadowed but by no means encompassed by the uncomfortable existence of Terry Richardson, the open secret of his behaviour and the fact that he as good as kept a public visual record of it, over years. Debates about diversity and body image have arisen but have never been resolved.

Your garden-variety feminist bystander has the same problem as the fur protesters: it’s hard to ask a political question about something when you’re never quite sure what you’re looking at; impossible to ask a question about feminism along any of the normal lines. If you could see a woman’s bum at a darts match or a bankers’ dinner, it would be objectification, pure and simple. A woman could walk down a catwalk as good as naked and titillation would be the acres away from the point.

Source: theguardian