Creatively speaking, limitations can empower you. It is indeed often the case that the best things (from articles to artworks, from films and fashion designs to videogames...) end up being produced in times of adversity, while going through budget constraints, or even when somebody tries to boycott you or to bar you from reaching your goals. Think about it: you want to do an investigation into the world of fashion? As an outsider you may come up with amazing discoveries and quotes, but you will never unveil any truths or, if you do so, you'll be reluctant to reveal them if you're close with some key figures in the industry.
This truism perfectly applies to Ben Stiller's Zoolander 2: while the first film was a light and silly comedy that took the piss out of a fashion industry too busy looking at itself in a mirror to realise there was an entire world outside it, this new installment has so many cameos by real-life fashion people (Anna Wintour, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Karlie Kloss, Valentino, Alexander Wang, Tommy Hilfiger, just to mention a few ones...) that you may be wondering if you're watching a film or sitting at a fashion week.
Sadly, the cameos aren't instrumental to the narrative flow, but they are used in the same way a drunk may use a lamp-post - for support. The weak plot revolving around Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) and Hansel (Owen Wilson) looking for Derek Jr and investigating the murders of the most beautiful young people in the world, all killed leaving behind a "Blue Steel"-inspired selfie face, seems indeed like an excuse to make all the obnoxious famous fashion characters (who pretend they love self-parody) fit in. So, rather than taking the piss out of people who take themselves too seriously or think they're too cool to mix with ordinary people (rather than criticise ridiculous garments seen at fashion shows or the use of incredible technologies to produce bland designs), Derek and Hansel join them as they did at the end of Valentino's A/W 2015 runway, almost to say "if you can't beat the snobs you used to scorn, well, team up with them".
Somewhere else, on the pages of the March issue of Harper's Bazaar, artist Cindy Sherman has attempted to play around with fashion. Sherman twisted her conceptual portraits such as her "Untitled Film Stills" created between 1977 and 1980 and portraying her representing many different female stereotypes using various disguises, and came up with an entirely new alter ego – a sort of street-style icon clad in the latest fashion designs happily and cheerily floating on a pink cloud outside catwalk show venues and smiling to street photographers.
The result was a series of satirical portraits, collectively nicknamed "Project Twirl", because, as Sherman states on the fashion magazine, she loved the description of these people "These characters who go to the fashion shows - and twirl, as you talk about."
Sherman is not new to the fashion world: she did a series of postcards for Comme des Garçons in 1994; starred in campaigns for Marc Jacobs and M.A.C., and collaborated with brands such as Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton, while she has been often mentioned as an inspiration by designers like Raf Simons.
The artist employs clothes, accessories and make up to transform herself in her portraits, but this photoshoot was mainly meant to show the clothes from the current collections.
Sherman poses in some extremely expensive designs by Prada (she actually looks a bit like Miuccia in her Prada portrait...), J.W.Anderson, Marc Jacobs, Dolce & Gabbana, Miu Miu, Gucci and Chanel (designs include a Marc Jacobs coat that may set you back $10,000; a Prada dress costing $6,790, and a Gucci jacket, around $3,990), but she, at times, looks like she may be on the set of Absolutely Fabulous, or genuinely taking the piss out of the bizarre characters you bump into during fashion weeks, endlessly posing as they carry expensive bags and clutches, stare at their smartphone screens or wear sandals in freezing temperatures and massive and cumbersome fur coats in Summer.
Sherman is among New York's richest artists and would easily be able to afford what she's wearing in the pictures (in 2011 one of her works, 1981's Untitled #96, sold for $3.89 million at Christie's; in 2013 the same auction house sold for $6,773,000 a collection of 21 black and white images from her Untitled Film Stills...).
Yet the artist manages to satirise the street style icons in a credible way, maybe because she researched her models and checked some of the Instagram accounts belonging to the most famous "twirlers".
"I was physically repulsed after looking at some of these accounts," she commented on Harper's Bazaar, "thinking how this person travels with hair and makeup and a photographer and is just going to visit her sister in L.A.? (…) They're not even selfies; they're setups. Then some of them get paid to wear the clothes? I guess it makes sense - it's business, but there's just something dead about the whole thing. It's so self-involved."
So Sherman provided via this shoot and her quotes some much-needed ironic anti-fashion (or rather anti-twirlers...) comments, shame the photo shoot is all in favour of selling fashion. Sherman's original artworks for Harper's Bazaar appear indeed also on the covers of five limited-print March issue subscriber editions that can be bought at random for $5.99, or as a collector's set of all five for $29.95.
So are irony and humour really missing in action in the fashion industry and where will we turn for some genuine fashion satire? Try going maybe for Disney Animation Studio's Zootopia directed by Byron Howard. What has this tale of anthropomorphic animals living in city-like environments, but reverting to their wild status got to do with fashion?
Well, the animals are pictured in the film posters in a sort of Times Square-esque crossing, surrounded by adverts that lampoon real brands, so you have Bearberry (Burberry), Lululemmings (Lululemon), Just Zoo It (for Nike's slogan Just Do it) and the hilarious DNKY (for DKNY) with a sexy donkey in a pink mini-dress or Preyda (Prada), an accessory brand promoted by cool pop star Gazelle.
Mind you, if it's left in the paws of some cute animals to satirise our marketing strategies and fashion obsessions so well in an animation film, maybe we've truly hit rock bottom when it comes to fashion satire...
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments