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.
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…
