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communistconsumerist · 9 months ago

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Vampiric Vulvas: How Galliano's Margiela Beleaguers Womanhood Through the Body

Whether inanimate or alive—the vulva, once genital, has been fashioned into a grave. Stripped from all its hair and shorn to be skin, the sex has become its independent entity, akin to sterile textile. As if it were a memento mori of its wearer, it has been soldered to the cadaver and turned into a fetish.

Since its materialization, the bush has become a stationary object—a merkin, seducing scenes of cadaver-seeking flies with its scent and hiding the “true” sacred object with it. Nudity below the waist is fatal to factuality. Snipping and shaving the cooze of its organicity has made the chunk an unbroken whole again. For as soon as a shaving razor presses itself down a woman’s lap, her pubic area gains movement and meaning through the blade’s murdering of her body. It sinks its whetted teeth so far down the skin that its traces leave behind a thousand configurations of life.

Bareness is like lace, then—dead if it cannot suck the blood that bubbles through a woman’s lumps and bumps and grant them viability. The razor cannot defend the rights of the corpse if the body remains immaterial. It should always kill.

Then comes Galliano—erstwhile fired from Dior, now the creative director of Margiela—divinizing the dirt of womanhood, in all her flesh and musculature, in his Artisinal Collection for Paris’ week of haute couture. Known for its mania for the material, couture season calls for its darling, daring designers (the likes of Galliano and all) to tokenize the body more than they are allowed to during any other season. They are called to inaugurate voyages by accentuating abundance. Yet where his wasp’ed waists and wadded hips ravel in tulle, Galliano embroiders hair into cunts and cloth into curves—both ceramic. Pressing his models’ intestines together with corsetry that is sanctified to shape the bowel into an hourglass, Galliano makes nominal the dress—not the body. Through staging a Parisian nightlife consonant to Brassaï’s, the designer calls attention to the theatricality of life, where complete conformity and sterile subordination embrace enlivened femininity.

In this scene, fibers—munched by moths and draped over Galliano’s dolls—are wedged within carefully molded confines of busty bodices, clothed in nakedness, bare in their bedizen. Paris awakens to puppets here, stumbling over the catwalk with legs, slanted, as if controlled by a puppeteer. As the evening wears on, all cutlery for flesh, who are made cloth but not objects—or the porcelain-skinned ceramics that are swathed in muted colored lace and linen, and are bare beneath all curvilinear lines of embroidery and ruching—morph into girdles and draping less artificial. Orange, teal, and violet, in all their sheerness, work as second flesh for the Venus von Willendorfs that look out of place between all enamelware. Voile is fastened to their flesh, cascading off of their thighs like a stream of solvents, the solute—the lace corsets and linings of coutil—almost rejecting the musculature the other die-casted bodies marshal. Instead of a striptease, like Frolov’s heart-shaped cut-outs and even Robert Wun’s carmine mannequin—emerging from the model’s waist, holding the strap of her dress, and nearly revealing her breasts—Galliano dresses the female (gendered) body in all her fullness. It is not often that designers, or fashion fetishists, content themselves with entire women, often pining for what’s minced instead—whether tits or waist, clumps or curves. Yet within the realm of couture commodification and its consumption of indecorous cunts, Margiela celebrates womanhood as existing. Gone is the fetishized vampire.

It all comes down to material—the dead. As the likes of Sigmund Freud and Louise Kaplan argue: without a fetish to ease that way, the phallus finds itself refusing to enter the vagina that needs a substitute penis strapped onto it to satisfy the little boy that lives inside the phallus (one that has been inculcated by papa patriarchy). This oscillation between the animate and inanimate ultimately finds itself bearing fruit within the fashion industry, where Versace’s 2013 A/W peek-a-boo jumpers—with cut-away detailing—are dicks, deriving their strength from the orgastic affirmations of the model’s participation in wearing these phallic phantasies over her now-cadaver (the phallus substitute). Galliano’s color-washed, mummified bodies—faceless and smothered with scrappy netting, wearing merkins as if they were to be Renaissance sex workers—may look anything but alive. But they are desiccated to perform sex as defined “biologically”. It is the kind of depiction you find in books that medicine students pay for.

Flesh and bones. Hair.

Teeth and eye-sockets. Skull.

Modern medicine, however, is full of fiends—full of couplings between organism and material, conceived as coded devices but labeled to be “real”. Within its thin layers of powdery pages, the undead pretends to be alive, as if the fields of pathology, biology, and sexology were to be the fields of fashion. Margiela rehabilitates the “sex” from its sepulchre. Its tousles of moss hang from the bush, which has historically been deemed hideous.

Phallically unpleasant.

Unpretty.

History shifted the moment priests stopped kneeling at Christ’s feet and stopped kissing Him on His curio lips. The moment priests stopped adorning Mary Magdalenes with golden lac and stopped making her skull shimmery. The moment priests stopped vivifying women and stopped caring about their being. All she is now is deceased. The consumer object has become a staple now for spurious gratification—alienating the mammary gland from the organism, baring her skin from all her hair, and constructing a bodice out of her body. Fashion has always followed this in the same manner as doctors have—claiming names are normative and performances are real life. Galliano plays the performance up and stages femininity to be an act in the actual. In his show, the Brassaï-esque woman—one that needs to go out and step out of the house—materializes herself into china—with cracks of ceramic gathering themselves around her waist and singing it. Once the night is set and the party is over, all she is, is fiber and fabric. She bares herself to reveal her paleolithic sensuality—all her hair and all her musculature. The vagina as antagonizing the penis.

She reveals her sex—enlivened.

The merkin, made material to prevent lice in the 16th century and revelation in 20th century blockbusters, is not the point of attention in Margiela’s dress that covers the body (for once, not straight-size) in its entirety. It does not reveal itself as a pubic wig either, but blends into the fabric as its thatch. What has been made unsexy in the bedroom—a naked woman—has been made into a performance of biological sex.

What is being modeled is skin as it is. As it exists.

When daytime arrives, a gendered performance follows—one akin to the first. It is performing one, either in hiding (the blazer a censor bar of the body, parted into objects), or in delftware (the woman turned object, joint after joint, a phallic phantasy). It is clear that Galliano stages the fashion show within his fashion show. The vulva is a grave, and the model is a vampire. We are once again at the cemetery, burying the vagina. Maybe the disease Galliano’s merkin intends to prevent within the night scene, then, is one of gendered dominion. One of conformity within a collective space, theatricalized.

Where normativity slips within consumer culture, the cunt—once crucified and made into a cross—lets out a breath.

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Works referenced:

Kaplan, L. J. (1990). Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA21304991

Rose, L. A. (1988). Freud and Fetishism: Previously Unpublished Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 57(2), 147–166. https://doi.org/10.1080/21674086.1988.11927209

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Related readings:

Hanssen, B. (2006). Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472547842

Illouz, E. (2021). The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations. John Wiley & Sons.

Miklitsch, R. (1996). The Commodity-Body-Sign: Toward a General Economy of “Commodity Fetishism”. Cultural Critique, 33, 5. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354386

Steele, V. (1996). Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA2664017X

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#womenswear #fashion week #menswear #margiela #margiela artisinal collection #john galliano #Evaluating The Arts #review #feminism and fashion what a wonderful match #sxfashionfeminism #Vampiric Vlvas

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communistconsumerist · 9 months ago

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The S in S&M Stands for Surveillance: How #Girlboss Feminism Thrives Through the Sex-bot

Sell your sex, doll—be dynamo! Encased in Thierry Mugler’s “superrealist” masterpiece—metallic in its conception, Hajime Sorayama-ified in its eroticization—Zendaya’s techno-Venus seems to scream just about that and nothing more. Blood diamonds, reaped and gathered by Congolese children, trickle down her plexiglass body, smudging all that is silvery about her skin with streaks of success. The actress seems to have superbly #girblossed her way into fame. Hence, she can embrace her sexuality now like never before! It is clear: She is the Standard—a fem-bot that has “made it”. Sans the stripper-bot facade that the model in Mugler’s ‘Cirque d’Hiver’ (as Thierry "Manfred" Mugler titled his couture collection) performed on the catwalk, however—wearing the same bodysuit underneath a dress, torn off in haste, plaguing peepshows through terrorizing binaries set between human and artifice—Zendaya’s 2024 reconstruction of the sex-bot falls into the consumable traps of conforming eroticism.

Traps Mugler’s winter circus refused to replicate.

Yet, times have changed since then, and sex dolls have become the new feminist sexy. Consent is king, and participatory pornography is liberating. Screening the hot and hustle of womanhood through fashioned surveillance has made of clothing new confinement.

At first sight, Mugler’s clothed cyborg may not align with Donna Haraway’s—author of A Cyborg Manifesto—illegitimate robo-offsprings of papa patriarchy. These successors reject the marital exchange of bestiality in favor of hybridizing the machine and the organism, eliminating essentialist understandings of humanness, and mediating translations of sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies. Thus, they are removed from the sciences and technologies that thrive in their ardent reproductions. Ardent reproductions, in the sense that medicine is dependent on military power, which is dependent on the government, which is dependent on the media, which is dependent on fashion—all of which are controlled by papas (also: the phallus). Mugler’s robot has transparent windows—the flesh underneath being her nipples and breast fat, her stomach and legs. Her chest cherries are furthermore circled with metal, adding extra emphasis to the lactiferous ducts once necessary for breastfeeding, now simply sexy.

Unlike Haraway’s genderless cyborg, the she-bot is a wearable prosthetic—a femmed up version of hypervisible femininity. A depiction of classic womanliness made shiny with Sorayama-varnished lac. A fetishized She, wearing windows for the scopophile.

Yet Mugler’s she-bot moves. She poses.

Where Sorayama’s sex-bots display themselves to be looked at—merely appearing, not acting—Mugler’s she-bot mimes the magnetism of the stripper next door, imbued with the intention to attract attention of the phallus while simultaneously policing it. Distinctly mechanical, her striptease unsettles the divide between artificial intelligence and “biological” desire, unsettling the papa and killing the boner. Instead of giving the she-bot a second, Mugler foregrounds her performance of the fashion piece instead. She disrobes herself—subjects herself to being ogled—and prostitutes her body to inorganic materialization. To the likes of Walter Benjamin, this has always marked fashion’s relation to the body, yet the she-bot's sex-appeal succumbs to that of a different inorganic than peters buoy up from. Her mechanical frame has another raison d’être, rendering visible the performance of fashion and its close kinship to materializing the female body and its various transformations—making the She an object, triumphing over Her death while actively defying Her mortality. She gazes in reflection and looks back.

Much like feminist theorist Craig Owens sees the peep show to be an inversion of the patriarchal Panopticon, Thierry Mugler’s couture shifts “the gaze” and steers surveillance. The designer was known for transforming his women into insects and robots of various kinds, forging breast plates out of molded plastic, and creating stilettos out of steel. He would exaggerate the femaleness of his models with exoskeletons—similar to that of the she-bot—attaching handlebars to bustiers, and turning models into multitasking motorcycles and motorcyclists. As long as he had bodies to work with—those that could act out his grotesque imageries—the designer would play the role of a playwright. He would sculpt shapes that were infernal in their inauguration—consistently becoming, downgrading, and regenerating. His theatrics would embrace drag artists as well as “the overweight” and “elderly”. Individual identity is absorbed into cloth, after all!

The essence of Mugler body lies not in its surface, but in its heights and cavities—a body that is becoming, as Bakhtin would put it. In Thierry's collections, women's sexualites are performed rather than made innate. These performances are ones of “untrustworthiness” that stage the surveillance camera opposite to the sex-bot, capturing the peeping Tom instead of patriarchy’s prostitute.

In ‘Cirque d’Hiver’ she emphasized the staged-ness of sold sex. Now, on the sand-covered red carpet, she swims upstream the patriarchy and sells her sex on the socking great stage.

Blood rushes through the penis once again. The women have won!

So has Zendaya, clad in Mugler’s metallic robo-armor, whose sheer plexiglass inserts ever-so teasingly unveil another bodysuit. Stepping into the premiere of Dune: Part Two, re-engineered with prostheses, the actress is physically pruned into the role of sand warrior Chani, personifying the #girlboss said character represents. Because as much as she appears in the phantasies of the phallus, Paul—around whom the narrative of Dune is strap(ped)-on—she is a fighter, a strong independent woman, who happens to be perplexing and peculiar enough to the extent she can be desired, and made into a fellow’s porn-tasy. Such independence is interlaced within the actress' selfhood as well, who has now stepped out of the image Disney once set out for her, covering her bareness with concrete cotton and conflict diamonds she has worked her way up for to pay. She can finally take charge of her sexy!

...We have yet to let go of the phallus.

Next to her co-star Anya Taylor Joy—whose character is inspired by matriarchal cult leaders, as Catholic as they come—it becomes even more evident what image of womanhood is deemed to be congestible these days. Nobody desires a nun whose selfhood is pinched within the precincts of tradition (even if she is wearing archival Dior). Yet where Zendaya does not bare herself to mislead the phallic gaze into a performance of staged sex, she sells her sex as an individual act of liberation—one that does not operate against Owens’ Panopticon, but rather Sorayama-ifies itself to become a fetish. Her necklace, shimmering shinily against her silver frame, only highlights how alienated the superstar is from her erotic capital. One she has staged to be economic and social. Where being an individual has centered itself to be of most importance when it comes to self-formation—as opposed to Dior’s veiled marking of an agency that regulates itself within a collective conceptualization of devout femininity—sexual emancipation has reorganized the fashioned body into a consumer practice. A practice based on individual action, or so they say (the papas). Yet this “action” has sprung out in the minds of surveilled subjects who have disciplined themselves to internalize their own hypervisibilities. Minds that are ever-so aware of the gaze, ever-so traditional.

Where Zendaya’s sex operates around a type of self-branding—in which eroticized clots of cutis are framed within individual parcelization—she is ultimately hustling! Within this scopic regime, her tinman body is removed from its perfomative context and once again made to-be-looked-at. All she is, then, is plate pieces of metal—to be sold in a market that thrives on erotic evaluation, and to gain. The cracked chunks of children's cuticle, and the droplets of sweat within her diamonds may be as segregated from her sympathy as her girlbossism is, given her self-sexualization thrives on bodily competition and corporeal commodification. Both are situated in a consumer system where women’s difficulty to stabilize their symbolic and economic value is solved through sexual self-value—made individual, but catered to the cock. Objectifation, made feminist, only benefits the Shes that gain and are successful.

Ultimately, the only winner is the man.

Startling as this is—Mugler’s she-bot has both defied and acquiescenced, shriveled the phallus and made it swell. Ultimately, she marks the template sadomasochist—both in her positionality within the panopticon, and with her sexed performances of the self (in all its organicity and artificiality). Time will tell if she manages to break out of her current surveilled confinement, but in the meantime she will continue to stage herself with all her silvery sheen. What Zendaya’s resignification of this boundary breaking She has come to show then, is what #girlbosses do best! To thrive within the patriarchy is to challenge the phallus—only when defiance sells.

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Works referenced:

Ekardt, P. (2020). Benjamin on Fashion. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350076013

Greer, K., Kane, L., Leonard-Rose, M., Morrison, M., Staveski, C., Freeburg, R. S., Couch, N., & Bench, H. (n.d.). Spectacles of agency and desire: The grotesque body. Spectacles of Agency and Desire: Dance Histories and the Burlesque Stage. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/spectacles-of-agency-and-desire/the-grotesque-body.2

Haraway, D. (2013). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Century. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203955055-16

Owens, C., Bryson, S. S., & Watney, S. (1992). Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA21071736

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Related readings:

Illouz, E. (2021). The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations. John Wiley & Sons.

Morrison, E. (2016). Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance. University of Michigan Press.

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#review #evaluating the arts #feminism and fashion what a wonderful match #womenswear #thierry mugler #zendaya #anya taylor joy #surveillance theory #cyborg fashion #The S in SM Stands For Surveillance #sxfashionfeminism

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communistconsumerist · 9 months ago

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Loving Lingerie! | How SKIMS Reiterates Consumable Conceptions of Phallic Love

How scandalously sweet! Libido gets a helping of edible candy in SKIMS’ newest Valentine’s Day collection! The model—Lana Del Rey, the epitome of female submissive sexuality within the music industry—morphs into a cherub. Arrows pierce her embroidered breasts as they embellish her skin with wisps of white, adorning her frame where husbands would like to touch their wives. The Blue Velvet singer almost looks edible, lying in a pastel blue heart-shaped box, indeed wearing blue velvet—or, as SKIMS likes to market it, a 'Velvet Lace Teddy in Periwinkle'.

What the scandalously styled singer and the CEO of SKIMS, Kim Kardashian, have crafted together ever-so carefully is a dulcet dream. In this dream, even when the cherub’s body is covered up, silk and lace hang onto the "female" body in a Kafkaesque manner, painting the portrait of a "woman" that only exists within the constructed confines of a draped frame. This image sags like a worn knicker, and it is painfully obvious that it is trying to prevent the sagging of the opposite—a worn phallus. The veil Del Rey wears only works as a reminder of what SKIMS is trying to sell—a woman’s expression of (bodily) Love.

God has long disappeared to pass demur onto the phallus that lay opposite of this periwinkle phantasy, seeing that nowadays it is through secularity that sexuality can slip within the sphere of immaterial labor. Del Rey’s erotic capital shows no dissension to this notion. The singer’s “creative choices” and career based crusades have cleverly worked as a set of intangible skills and competence her discography helps to vindicate. They have landed her the most prestigious position there is for a "woman" when February’s cold has to be soothed with a perfervid calefaction of paucity—marketing lingerie on the day of Love.

Understanding Del Rey's cultural coding in relation to her role in this ad campaign is vital, if one takes into account how eroticism has snowballed within the musician's lyricism ever since the release of her first album. The singer is famed for having “questioned the culture” that deems the sexuality she lays bare to be a romanticization of abuse. Yet while sex is no longer sacrilegious and ‘naturally’ infertile, her performance of eroticism blends all too well with body-smothering Valentine’s campaigns that blossom when the season of Love is nearing. As the likes of Eva Illouz would put it: objectification, during its course, provides a sense of empowerment and subjectivity. It enables a generation of economic value from the body—a self-objectification that ultimately reduces women’s voluntary participation in this “lingerie-ed self-loving” to a false consciousness that fails to account for the mechanisms of valuation contained in the marketed cloth. In this cloth—much like that of SKIMS’—all that is organic lies in the meshwork that cups the mammary gland of the woman. This organ is no longer productive for a child but is instead commodified by men.

Or pornified. Patriarchically extirpated. Made phallic in its conception.

Even though the aforementioned culture-questioner has spoken up about her “sometimes submissive or passive roles detailing my [Del Rey’s] sometimes submissive or passive roles in my [Del Rey’s] relationships," it has become hard to argue in favor of her dismissal for “setting back women a hundred of years." She is such a “right” fit for this Valentine’s campaign, after all!

Yes, it might be that Del Rey has not draped her chest in the collection's heart-shaped candies—comestible as they come, confining the tit within a triangular frame, its strands of sweets functioning as a net. Neither has she worn its minimum-coverage throng and bralette—trimmed within its creases, embellished with heart-shaped rhinestones, making sure the teats and cucci spill out. Instead, what commodifies Del Rey’s selfhood is how the perfectly-placed cuts of her photographed bodysuits pass as an evaluation of Love, conducted on the basis of visual appearance. Here, the fashioned body—a commodity—is situated in a market of similar and competing commodities.

It is no surprise then, consumeration finds that it proliferates best through heart-shaped cut-outs in Frolov’s Love-themed FW23 collection as well. As silk shimmies and swirls around the models' exposed stomachs and loins, stripteases unfold over their cloaked bodies, almost as if they are asking their audience to play-act the revelations of groins. It just so happens to be a coincidence that the hearts’ spikes—signifying Love—point towards the wearers’ reproductive organs! Likewise, Mirror Palais’ campaign for the 14th—dubbed ‘Forever Yours’—makes sure to accentuate the chest (again) with embroidered ribbon-ery. This ribbon-ery belabores bareness through material, ignores the wearer, and braids the camera’s lens to drop to the point where the elongation of a woman’s physique is eroticized.

Whether through a bird’s-eye view or a worm’s—Mirror Palais makes it clear that on Valentine’s Day, a woman’s personhood should be traded for consumable erotica!

SKIMS and the aforementioned brands have something in common, then—something Lana Del Rey does best. They sell submission as value, as erotic capital, in a Love market that generates uncertain returns. Lana del Rey is a victim, however. It is men who have dominated this visual-sexual industry, after all. Their eyes are embedded within every mediated depiction of what womanhood should be—whether we speak of her eternal devotion (fashioned through lace and veils) or her professions of love (fashioned through opportune bareness and whites). Their notions of docility and dominion are veiled within a marketed materialization of a body that asserts its independence through having its necessary product catered to be “for the woman”—not for the phallic gaze. What is campaigned as an “act of love” is a scandalously sweet scam. One promulgated to be made by choice—hence the use of ‘for her’ in all the campaigning.

Or ‘forever yours’ as labeling.

SKIMS’ campaign ultimately presents a careful construction of this submissive sexuality, where cuts are placed neatly in one’s clothing to evoke a dynamicity that will appeal as striptease to a customer’s partner (akin to the male gaze). Lana Del Rey’s cultivated image of a compliant lover only exemplifies this—as well as the blue box of “chocolate” she looks so edible in. It is as if the brand is not even trying to hide that on Valentine’s Day—when skimpy bodices eat the flesh of the female and wrap it in craft paper, ever-so cute and cloying—the carnivorous phallic-phantasies that are being created through “leaflet and flyer” are culturally passable. It all shows that when push comes to shove—sex commodified, is Love sold.

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Works referenced:

Illouz, E. (2021). The end of love: A Sociology of Negative Relations. John Wiley & Sons.

Lana Del Rey – Question for the culture. (2020). Genius. https://genius.com/Lana-del-rey-question-for-the-culture-annotated

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#review #SKIMS #Lana del Rey #Mirror Palais #Frolov #Valentine's Day #Lingerie #Consumer Culture #Eva Illouz #critical sociology #sxfashionfeminism #evaluating the arts

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