terug
Little women
Little women |  | ||||||||
| By Katherine Knorr | |||||||||
| 1 | PARIS - When Calvin Klein was criticized last | ||||||||
| month for an ad featuring small children in | |||||||||
| underwear, it wasn't just more of the outrage | |||||||||
| that has greeted so many disturbing fashion | |||||||||
| images - notably skeletal models in tiny undies. | |||||||||
| 2 | The marketing of clothes - some of them pretty | ||||||||
| raunchy - to children and pre-teens raises all sorts of | |||||||||
| issues about what clothes "mean" and about the | |||||||||
| influence of the vast network of popular culture | |||||||||
| salesmanship. It is ironic that, as fashion enters | |||||||||
| the third millennium, clothes for grown-up women | |||||||||
| have become positively genteel, with the twin set | |||||||||
| seeming ubiquitous and even the bad Brits toned | |||||||||
| down. It seems the real fashion victims now are | |||||||||
| Lolita's age. | |||||||||
| 3 | Fashion is so self-referential and its cycles are | ||||||||
| so short that a lot of the "content" of fashion has | |||||||||
| disappeared; nothing today has the political impact | |||||||||
| of '60s near-nudity, or shirts made out of the | |||||||||
| American flag. Bra burning? Huh? | |||||||||
| 4 | Fashion no longer tells us women are becoming more | ||||||||
| independent or men are getting in touch with their | 10 | IF CLOTHING has lost its "guild" breakdown - if it no | |||||||
| inner child. | longer separates the blue and the white collars, the ghetto | ||||||||
| 5 | And fashion, dipping into the world of uniforms | and the country club - it has not lost its power to disturb | |||||||
| and utilitarian clothing, blurs class lines in a | when it blurs the line sexually. The decadent pictures of | ||||||||
| dizzying way: expensive ready-to-wear drawn from | willfully androgynous models, of anorectically thin and | ||||||||
| ghetto threads; sportswear morphed into evening | sickly young models, of "heroin chic" - none of which has | ||||||||
| clothes; Casual Friday vs. the suit. And of course | gone away despite lots of noise to the contrary - seem to | ||||||||
| middle-class teens dressed in their own sad rags | have paved the way toward breaking the ultimate taboo: | ||||||||
| uniforms: think back to the farmboy look, which | children. | ||||||||
| horrified so many American parents in the late 1960s | 11 | This isn't selling Barbie dolls, this is selling the | |||||||
| and early 1970s, who had grown up on Depression- | Barbie doll look to girls in grade school. At the same | ||||||||
| era farms and fled them for college degrees and | time as Barbie herself turns 40 and is being reissued | ||||||||
| serious desk jobs, and could not understand why | with a more realistic body, we're remaking little girls | ||||||||
| their children started wearing baggy overalls and | into disturbing erotic figures. | ||||||||
| baggy T-shirts and looking pretty much like the | 12 | It's difficult to judge how much of this tacky | |||||||
| Beverly Hillbillies. | costume party is harmless, just more of the waves of | ||||||||
| popular culture that we can't, after all, do anything | |||||||||
| 6 | ALL THIS makes sense in societies with soaring | about. | |||||||
| stock markets where the social fabric is money. | 13 | There is an argument that the reason only adults | |||||||
| In fashion the social fabric is just that, fabric. | are shocked by these things is that kids have an | ||||||||
| All of us in this way invent ourselves like Jay | elaborate but complicated relationship with truth and | ||||||||
| Gatsby, with, one hopes, better results. In that | fiction that allows them to put on faces and costumes | ||||||||
| sense, fashion helps to create some kind of melting | without absorbing the associated behavior. They can | ||||||||
| pot. | play cowboys and Indians without becoming killers | ||||||||
| 7 | When it comes to children, however, what fashion | and they dress up as showgirls just as they would dress | |||||||
| "means" does become more prominent. An 11-yearold | as princesses. | ||||||||
| wearing come-hither clothes isn't in the same | 14 | Maybe it is, after all, just the old game of putting on | |||||||
| position as a 25-year-old. She is being used, in what | Mom's clothes - except it's hard to believe Mom | ||||||||
| would seem the most cynical way, to sell not only | would ever wear these clothes. | ||||||||
| clothes but synthetic popular music groups and gooey | 15 | Once upon a time, before the sexual revolution and | |||||||
| animated movies. | the Me Generation, school uniforms or smocks served | ||||||||
| 8 | The only real customers for the extraterrestrial | laudable purposes: they protected street clothes, they | |||||||
| floozy look of the Spice Girls or the irredeemably | made children look studious (this is actually useful, in | ||||||||
| commercial tie-ins of those movies are little girls. | a clothes-make-the-man kind of way), and most | ||||||||
| Clothes catalogues sell skintight two-piece outfits (bra | important perhaps, they avoided keeping-up-with-the- | ||||||||
| and pedal pushers) advertising the boys band 2 Be 3 (the | Joneses clothing competitions.As fashion recycles the | ||||||||
| Chippendales for the pre-teen set) to 10-year-olds. The | greatest hits of the last 50 years, it's high time for a | ||||||||
| boys in the band are barechested. The little girl models | comeback: Call it the Return of the Nice Kid. | ||||||||
| strike alluring poses. | |||||||||
| 9 | Marketing to little people is nothing new, of course, and | KATHERINE KNORR is a deputy editor of the | |||||||
| Saturday morning American TV early on specialized in | International Herald Tribune. | ||||||||
| telling children to tell their parents what to buy. But | |||||||||
| the marketing of clothes is something else. | 'The International Herald Tribune' | ||||||||