Chanel’s iconic designer Karl
Lagerfeld staged a mock feminist protest Tuesday at the close of his Spring/Summer
2015 ready-to-wear collection runway show in Paris. He
had an entire Parisian neighborhood constructed inside the Grand Palais, with
the audience lining a “Boulevard Chanel No.5” complete with pedestrian crossing
and shimmering rain puddles beneath towering 19th century apartment façades. Celebrity
guests included The Great Gatsby director
Baz Luhrmann, who said,
“His shows are great opera.” Indeed. But in addition to the fake boulevard and
fake apartments, the feminism felt fake as well.
At the end of the show, all the
models marched down the boulevard alongside budding supermodel Cara Delevingne
and ultramodel Gisele Bundchen leading a protest chant with quilted, Chanel-monogrammed megaphones
(because fashion). Some models carried placards with bland slogans in French
and English like “Be different,” “Make Fashion Not War,” and the perplexing “Free
Freedom.” A few signs bore a feminist theme: “Ladies Rights Are More Than
Alright” [sic] and “Ladies First,” for example. A couple of them took equality
to a rather dubious extreme: “Boys should get pregnant, too” and “Divorce for
all.”
But even the self-absorbed glamour
crowd was put off by the shallowness of the faux protest. In a review entitled
“Chanel’s ‘Feminist’ Protest Wasn’t All That Great for Women,” the fashion
website Refinery 29 declared that “This season’s show presents protest as pure
product, the irony of which we suspect Karl is both aware, and presides over
with a provocative, Warholian glee.” That site also called
the “empty” event “an oddly jovial fashion circus more than a statement,” and
reported that the “attendees didn’t seem to know how to interpret it.”
Jezebel.com was less forgiving, describing
the finale as “cynical, money-grabbing” “tokenism” and “empty marketing.”
How feminist can an industry be
that hinges upon a never-ending parade of very young women serving as largely
anonymous, voiceless, walking clothes hangers? The French word for model, after
all, is “mannequin.” Sure, those models are well-compensated, but for every Gisele
Bundchen, who is on
track to become a billionaire, modeling eats up and spits out innumerable
eager-to-please young girls who don’t end up so much with a lucrative career as
an eating disorder and a smoking addiction. Women aren’t even the most
successful fashion designers. This is not to say that fashion can’t put forth a
feminist vision, but fashion is not the real world.
Fashion isn’t serious. It’s fantasy,
fun and style. Certainly clothes can be empowering for both men and women, but fashion
fails when it takes itself too seriously, or attempts inevitably heavy-handed
social statements, or waxes pretentious with artsy creations that cannot
possibly be worn. Lagerfeld may have intended to set his colorful collection to
the beat of the times – like the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and the
climate change march in New York – but his playfulness was out of sync with the
real world.
It’s hard to blame Karl Lagerfeld, he
of the trademark dark glasses, snowy ponytail and starched collar, for a lack
of perspective. The concerns of real women protesting real issues are not his. He
is the highest-paid fashion designer in the world, having earned
$58 million in the last twelve months. He inhabits a fantasy universe far
removed from mere mortals like the women protesting government violence
in Venezuela, or sexual violence
in India, or a
law permitting men to marry nine-year-olds in Iraq – and they are doing so
without a quilted, monogrammed megaphone in sight.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 10/3/14)