Earlier, when I equated the fashion industry with a deadly disease, did you think I was proselytizing a bit too much? Well, maybe I was (surprise!), but I wasn't wrong.
Take a look at yesterday's Times article on New York City's modeling scouts, and then tell me with a straight face that fashion and the ring of shitty predators in its orbit aren't ravaging young people, both directly and indirectly.
Some people see models all the time. They recognize these creatures despite their oversize sunglasses and disheveled hair. They can look past baggy shifts and mismatched patterns, beyond gaudy makeup and cheap earrings. These people are called model scouts, and their numbers include Roman Young of Elite Model Management, who chose Union Square as his hunting ground one Saturday in May.
“See her?” Mr. Young asked as he pointed to a tall, narrow-framed girl with slightly protruding hips. “She’s too big.
“That one, over there by the hot-dog stand, is cute,” he continued, “but she’s too short and, eh, bad skin.”
…
At 5 feet 7 inches, Mr. Young barely grazes the chins of some of the models he scouts. But he claims that his height, combined with the fact that he is gay, gives him an advantage. “The physicality of a scout counts for a lot,” he said. “You don’t want to be a perceived threat to their safety.”
…
The week after his visit to Union Square, Mr. Young attended a teen night at Columbus 72, a club on the Upper West Side that was packed with some 400 teenagers. The boys patrolled the dance floor while the girls gyrated to the music with their hands in the air, their skirts barely reaching their upper thighs. Purple and red lights flashed spastically as a rap song pulsed: “Baby, where’d you get your body from? Tell me where’d you get your body from.”Mr. Young moved through the dance floor, stopping every so often to scan a cluster of teenagers.
"You don’t want to be a perceived threat to their safety." Oh, but you are, Mr Young. You are.
Editor
EATING is dangerous- the worst!!! I live in LA and have not eaten a full meal in fifteen years.
I'll eat after i retire to another city. Like porkland, or.
I was a modeling scout once, then I decided to ask for my soul back and find a new profession.
that cop looks like jonesie on reno 911.
I haven't eaten since 1974. A crisp daling. A crisp.
I took a sociology class in college called "Murder and Our Killing Culture". Something the prof talked about that will always stay with me is a project she worked on that surveyed print ads featuring women who looked either dead or abused. It totally opened my eyes to this disgusting style of marketing. Take a look for yourselves the next time you open a magazine…it's truly startling.
This video made me think sometimes it's scarier being a dude: http://youtube.com/watch?v=tKKxPtP6XjQ
Fucking weirdest video of all time. Poor Eli.
Is that Audrina Patride?
NO NO NO NO NO! Violence against women is not cool, glamorous or ok.
I love high fashion, but these ads need to stop.
Same old same old. This image, in its multiple forms, has been used for decades (remember the Rolling Stones billboard in LA for "Black and Blue," depicting a battered, beaten woman?). Why is it still okay? Why does it still pass breezily by ad writers and copy editors and all those folks? And why does anyone give a shit what Vogue (Italian or otherwise - read the caption) prints? But beyond the image is the fact that several staples of the gossip rags/blogs are (female) models - Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss - and other celebrity staples have 'modeled' - Sienna Miller, Paris Hilton, Santa Angelina. What accompanies this world? Drugs, self-abuse, vapidity, cigarettes, alcohol abuse, vapidity, money spent on cloth, buttons, and zippers. I think it's hard to be made into a desirable object whose primary job is to sell someone else's vision of what kind of cloth/buttons/zippers they think people should be donning. How alienating.