Let’s start with a bit of fashion news. Vogue will publish a photo spread of Stormy Daniels.
Have you noticed that the editors of Vogue somehow bypassed featuring the former model and now former First Lady Melanie Trump, save for the cover when she posed in her expensive ($100,000) wedding dress way back when…when Trump was a TV star and not a Republican candidate or President? Is my judgment way off, or is she not model material? “Sorry, babe, time to look for a real job, maybe something in the service industry.”
We all know that like fashion, beauty is a passing fancy. Chubby (Am I allowed to say that word?) women—scratch that; body-positive women—were en vogue when Peter Paul Rubens was looking around for models. But then, it was a time when plagues and food shortages made populations gaunt, slimness being a sign of sickness and infertility. Being body-positive was a sign of good health. Plumpiness was en vogue for that reason.
Fashion is a silly and fickle business as we all know. Here today, gone before midnight because a new view breaks with every dawn stitched across haute world. “You’re not wearing that, are you?” Or “Is THAT what you’re wearing?” Those are two questions no fashionable lady (Am I allowed to say that word?) wants to hear before making a public appearance. Dolts that men are, they ask, “Why can’t you wear the same dress you wore last year?” Every new party, every new event, requires a new dress, and not just a new dress, but a “fashionable dress,” one that bespeaks the times, from shoulder pads to bare shoulders, flared to straight, bare-back to bare—or almost bare—front.
As fickle as fashion, the editors at Vogue embrace another fashion: “We choose only models whose better side is the left.” In fact, ideology is virtually intubated into the bodies that grace the pages. Nothing looks good on a right arm, regardless of the arm, affixed to either a Rubens’ model or a former model associated with a conservative viewpoint.
Margaret Hungerford’s oft-repeated line, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” has been parodied in “Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder” because alcohol clouds the beholding. But it isn’t just alcohol that does the clouding. It’s also ideology. Thus, a left-leaning woman (Am I allowed to say that word?) or one who is perceived to be left-leaning (like Melanie Trump in her pre-First Lady days) can grace the cover of a fashion magazine whereas a right-leaning woman can’t. And because ideological fashion, like haute couture, changes with peer pressure, Vogue, which is the model of fashion publications, keeps up with the ephemeral times. Call Vogue the ideological barometer that responds to the higher pressure of Left-leaning ideology. Want to know the dominant or apparently dominant ideology of a country? Check out the fashion pages in newspapers and magazines.
So, here we are in the spring of 2023, a time of violent tornadoes that alter lives, and Vogue has elected to run a spread on Stormy whose spread some destruction of her own across the political landscape. She’s a fashionable topic, but is so by virtue of being an anti-conservative topic, specifically by virtue of being an anti-Trump topic. The “model” for women (again, that word) is now an adult film star (sorry, actress), just as the temporary model for men was the convicted extortionist Michael Avenatti whose multiple appearances on a Left-leaning network made him fashionable in eyes that can behold beauty on the Left, but not on the Right.
These aren’t, however, strange times. Fashion always changes; ideology also changes with time. So, even though the ideology of the Left with its cancel culture appears to dominate the public consciousness at this moment, it will probably morph just as fashions change though there seems to be an inertia of thinking in the mainstream which currently a stream of consciousness with only one bank, the left one.
If Rubens were alive in the late twentieth century, he might have been on the lookout for the svelte; but as recent covers of many magazines attest, if he were alive in the twenty-first century, many of his models would look the same as they looked when he was painting Susanna and the Elders, Morning Toilet of Venus, Boreas Abducting Oreithyia, and The Three Graces. Plumpiness (Am I allowed to use that word?) was not en vogue in the century of Jane Fonda exercise tapes, nor was it en vogue at the beginning of this century. A law passed in France and now in effect attests to a change: France bans excessively thin models. The French fashion photographer now says, “Turn around; I need to see your bum, and, by the way, I also need by law to see your BMI?” The pendulum of fashion has swung. Rubens would be happy. Models don’t need to risk anorexia in France; but they do risk their livelihood when their ideology isn’t fashionable in America. And ideology is virtually all that matters.
The time when fashion magazines were fashion magazines and not political statements has come and gone. Maybe fashion magazines will someday return to their obsession with ephemeral designs, but for now they are manifestations of an ideology driven by incessant pressure to make fashion—and even beauty—secondary to haute ideology.
Yes, beauty is a judgment conditioned by culture as trends from chopines to lotus shoes to crakowes and from panniers to hobble skirts all reveal, but it now appears that the editors of Vogue are more concerned about what lies in the brains of models than in what covers their svelte or plump bodies. Body style is now irrelevant. Fashion isn’t fashionable unless it is worn by someone who thinks in the accepted fashion.
“Mrs. Roosevelt, what will you be wearing for our cover shoot of first ladies--sorry, first spouses?”
Have you noticed that the editors of Vogue somehow bypassed featuring the former model and now former First Lady Melanie Trump, save for the cover when she posed in her expensive ($100,000) wedding dress way back when…when Trump was a TV star and not a Republican candidate or President? Is my judgment way off, or is she not model material? “Sorry, babe, time to look for a real job, maybe something in the service industry.”
We all know that like fashion, beauty is a passing fancy. Chubby (Am I allowed to say that word?) women—scratch that; body-positive women—were en vogue when Peter Paul Rubens was looking around for models. But then, it was a time when plagues and food shortages made populations gaunt, slimness being a sign of sickness and infertility. Being body-positive was a sign of good health. Plumpiness was en vogue for that reason.
Fashion is a silly and fickle business as we all know. Here today, gone before midnight because a new view breaks with every dawn stitched across haute world. “You’re not wearing that, are you?” Or “Is THAT what you’re wearing?” Those are two questions no fashionable lady (Am I allowed to say that word?) wants to hear before making a public appearance. Dolts that men are, they ask, “Why can’t you wear the same dress you wore last year?” Every new party, every new event, requires a new dress, and not just a new dress, but a “fashionable dress,” one that bespeaks the times, from shoulder pads to bare shoulders, flared to straight, bare-back to bare—or almost bare—front.
As fickle as fashion, the editors at Vogue embrace another fashion: “We choose only models whose better side is the left.” In fact, ideology is virtually intubated into the bodies that grace the pages. Nothing looks good on a right arm, regardless of the arm, affixed to either a Rubens’ model or a former model associated with a conservative viewpoint.
Margaret Hungerford’s oft-repeated line, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” has been parodied in “Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder” because alcohol clouds the beholding. But it isn’t just alcohol that does the clouding. It’s also ideology. Thus, a left-leaning woman (Am I allowed to say that word?) or one who is perceived to be left-leaning (like Melanie Trump in her pre-First Lady days) can grace the cover of a fashion magazine whereas a right-leaning woman can’t. And because ideological fashion, like haute couture, changes with peer pressure, Vogue, which is the model of fashion publications, keeps up with the ephemeral times. Call Vogue the ideological barometer that responds to the higher pressure of Left-leaning ideology. Want to know the dominant or apparently dominant ideology of a country? Check out the fashion pages in newspapers and magazines.
So, here we are in the spring of 2023, a time of violent tornadoes that alter lives, and Vogue has elected to run a spread on Stormy whose spread some destruction of her own across the political landscape. She’s a fashionable topic, but is so by virtue of being an anti-conservative topic, specifically by virtue of being an anti-Trump topic. The “model” for women (again, that word) is now an adult film star (sorry, actress), just as the temporary model for men was the convicted extortionist Michael Avenatti whose multiple appearances on a Left-leaning network made him fashionable in eyes that can behold beauty on the Left, but not on the Right.
These aren’t, however, strange times. Fashion always changes; ideology also changes with time. So, even though the ideology of the Left with its cancel culture appears to dominate the public consciousness at this moment, it will probably morph just as fashions change though there seems to be an inertia of thinking in the mainstream which currently a stream of consciousness with only one bank, the left one.
If Rubens were alive in the late twentieth century, he might have been on the lookout for the svelte; but as recent covers of many magazines attest, if he were alive in the twenty-first century, many of his models would look the same as they looked when he was painting Susanna and the Elders, Morning Toilet of Venus, Boreas Abducting Oreithyia, and The Three Graces. Plumpiness (Am I allowed to use that word?) was not en vogue in the century of Jane Fonda exercise tapes, nor was it en vogue at the beginning of this century. A law passed in France and now in effect attests to a change: France bans excessively thin models. The French fashion photographer now says, “Turn around; I need to see your bum, and, by the way, I also need by law to see your BMI?” The pendulum of fashion has swung. Rubens would be happy. Models don’t need to risk anorexia in France; but they do risk their livelihood when their ideology isn’t fashionable in America. And ideology is virtually all that matters.
The time when fashion magazines were fashion magazines and not political statements has come and gone. Maybe fashion magazines will someday return to their obsession with ephemeral designs, but for now they are manifestations of an ideology driven by incessant pressure to make fashion—and even beauty—secondary to haute ideology.
Yes, beauty is a judgment conditioned by culture as trends from chopines to lotus shoes to crakowes and from panniers to hobble skirts all reveal, but it now appears that the editors of Vogue are more concerned about what lies in the brains of models than in what covers their svelte or plump bodies. Body style is now irrelevant. Fashion isn’t fashionable unless it is worn by someone who thinks in the accepted fashion.
“Mrs. Roosevelt, what will you be wearing for our cover shoot of first ladies--sorry, first spouses?”
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