Sunday, August 26, 2012


FASHION FETISH

Browsing through the newst/ latest fashion films. I always take a look at showstudio SHOWstudio - the home of fashion films.


Between March 22 and June 1th of this year, SHOWstudio decided to offer an EXHIBITION made up of exclusively women artists looking at sex and nudity - examining a woman's version of a woman and asking how it differs from a man’s.

Titled provocatively - and philosophically – SELLING SEX it examines the 'self-other' relationship by featuring all female artists and examining their unique relationships to sex and the female nude. As it is a well known fact that the majority of images we consume are created by men. Only 8% of the work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art is created by women, that the Tate’s female holdings amount to a meagre 15%, and that the statistics are similarly bleak in commercial galleries, it's a pretty shocking state of affairs. What's more, this imbalance doesn't only exist in fine art. In FASHION major campaigns are predominantly shot by top male photographers. And it's in film, where women hold only 33% of all speaking roles and only 7% of all directors in Hollywood are women.  And there remain only three industries in which women earn more money than men - pornography, prostitution and modeling. What does that tell us? 

Alongside the 2012 SHOWstudio Shop exhibition Selling Sex, SHOWstudio launches a unique project under the provocative title Fashion Fetish. Created entirely by women working in fashion - including Ruth Hogben, Daphne Guinness, Liberty Ross, Rei Nadel, Asia Argento, Aimee Mullins and Dasha Zhukova of Garage magazine - these fashion films, performances and multi-media pieces make a comment on the fusion of fashion with fetish, a contentious and provocative subject. One piece will be released each week for the duration of the Selling Sex exhibition, and beyond.

If, historically speaking, a fetish is a manufactured object which has magical powers, or one that people are irrationally devoted to, fashion is a veritable fetish-factory of 'It' shoes, 'Now' bags, and garments that magically propose to make your life indefinably better. On a less abstract level, fashion has been obsessed with sexual fetishism for centuries. The subtle constraint of the corset, the snugly-gloved hand, a shiny boot of leather - all staples of the well-dressed man or woman, and equally the well-equipped Sado-Masochist. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Pandora's Box of fashion fetish was blown apart - from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's proposal of 'rubberwear for the office' in their seminal London boutique SEX, to Gianni Versace's sanitised 'Bondage Chic' of 1992, to the power of John Galliano's 'Sado-Maso' haute couture collection for Christian Dior in 2000, designers articulated the sexual peccadilloes of a select few across the international catwalks. It's fetish as fashion.

Coinciding with the display of her 'Armour for Prostitutes' in SHOWstudio's 'Selling Sex' exhibition, latex doyenne, Japanese-born Atsuko Kudo provides a lesson in dressing for pleasure. Slowly enveloping a nude model in layers of rubbery fabric live on camera, Kudo offers a unique, and subversively fetishistic, exploration of the dialogue between clothing and empowerment.

I like the way she wants to show how latex can look and what it can do to as many people as possible. As she talks about superwoman. I like the complete picture which is more like Catwoman then Superwoman to me. As I still can remember the Movie Batman and Catwoman. And Michelle Pfeiffer as catwoman, dressed in the most tighter then tight catsuit made of latex. Which also happens to be also the first time not to have any resembles of cheap outfits made by latex. And more fashion related the cover the `Magazin the FACE Phoebe Philo (now headdesigner of Celine, just to know for the few not knowing) wearing sunglasses by Sophia Kokosalaki a model of Catwoman.
As this movie is quite long and pretty slow, it might be the subject, I don’t know, but it kept me watching it, till the end…




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