Peng Chang in 'Heat Wave' by Zhong Lin for Vogue Taiwan January 2022

Peng Chang in 'Heat Wave' by Zhong Lin for Vogue Taiwan January 2022 AOC Fashion

Model Peng Chang covers the January 2022 issue of Vogue Taiwan’s new sustainability issue. Zhong Lin [IG], who previously lensed Vogue Taiwan’s September 2021 issue cover story , captures Peng Chang in ‘Heat Wave’. Joey Lin is in charge of styling — and the clothes are not sustainably made, as part of the fashion story presentation./ Hair by Miley Shen; makeup by Sting Hsieh

AOC has referenced previously sustainability-focused fashion stories that channel ‘Water & Oil’ , lensed by Steven Meisel for Vogue Italia and featuring model Kristen McMenamy.

‘Heat Wave’ is no exception. In AOC’s opinion, it’s the first environment-focused fashion story to have equal visual impact . . . and perhaps more than ‘Water & Oil’.

The difference to AOC between ‘Heat Wave’ and ‘Water & Oil’ is ironic, within the larger issue of a profound analysis I read on the New York Times this morning. Nicole Lee writes about the January 2022 ‘Heat Wave’ story for The Vogue Taiwan website:

"A person who knows how to think about the beauty of the earth will get the concentration of power from it. As long as life continues, the power will never stop. In the constant recurrence of nature, it will bring infinite healing power-the dawn will finally be seen after the dark night , Always spring after the cold winter.” Rachel Carson said in "Silent Spring" released in September 1962. She used poetic narrative and rigorous research to introduce the concept of environmental conservation to all living beings in the most gentle way, and even realized it before our eyes like an oracle. The irony is that you and I are all beings who have not escaped, and live the days when they are responsible for themselves.

When AOC first saw the new ‘Heat Wave’ fashion story, the ‘poetic’ visual approach by the creative team was the most startling difference between it and Vogue Italia’s ‘Water & Oil’. I’ve written about Steven Meisel’s images on multiple occasions.

Nicole Lee continues:

The gloomy smog sky, the coastline full of waste, the stranded mermaid princess tail is covered with industrial oil, the water is full of dark foam, and the popsicle on the girl's hand is a mixture of sewage and garbage. This visual shock does not only exist in imagination. If you and I continue to ignore environmental issues, such a scene may not be far from the reality of the future. When the earth becomes a huge greenhouse and seawater gradually invades our life scenes, even in the foreseeable future, we all need to develop the skills of an amphibian in order to survive in the flooded country of Zee.

Two fashion approaches to the reality of environmental degradation. Top: Zhong Lin ‘Heat wave’ for Vogue Taiwan January 2022. Bottom: Steven Meisel’s ‘Water & Oil’ for Vogue Italia, August 2010,

The two fashion stories are dealing with nearly identical material and visual symbolism. Note that AOC is NOT suggesting that Zong Lin’s images are less worthy because of Meisel’s earlier ones. NOT for one moment is this a message we wish to convey.

What intrigues me, as it relates to my morning reading about ‘disgust’, is the reality that Meisel’s ‘Water & Oil’ images scream revulsion and disgust overall. Lin’s do not.

Both editorials seek to raise our consciousness around our global environmental peril. But they take very different visual approaches.

While I have embraced Meisel’s images as being of epic relevance, they also repulse me in a way that Zhong Lin’s do not.

Admittedly, I initially read ‘How Disgust Explains Everything’, with a feminist patriarchal analysis. The connections between disgust over women’s body and functions is a defining fact of human thought patterns. Psychologists who study disgust go deeper, calling it a primal emotion the defines — and explains — humanity.

“Part of disgust is the very awareness of being disgusted, the consciousness of itself,” the scholar William Ian Miller wrote in 1997. “Disgust necessarily involves particular thoughts, characteristically very intrusive and unriddable thoughts about the repugnance of that which is its object.” Think of women being considered unclean while menstruating and sent to live for days in cold, shockingly barren of comfort huts, so as not to contaminate men and the larger society.

I’ve taken ‘disgust’ tests over the years, and like so many liberals, we register lower on the disgust scale than conservatives. In a 2014 study, participants were shown a range of images — some disgusting, some not — while having their brain responses monitored. With great success, researchers could predict a person’s political orientation based on analysis of this f.M.R.I. data.

The research has not concluded why liberals are less impacted by disgust than conservatives. People typically attribute the difference to cultural upbringing, but the science has not confirmed that assertion. We know that the more education people have, the more liberal they become.

Nevertheless, plenty of easily-disgusted, Ivy-league educated conservatives exist. Many are now serving on the US Supreme Court.

Returning to the relevant discussion at hand, a simplistic overview of both Steven Meisel’s and Zhong Lin’s imagery commentary about environmental peril is a perfect, real-world study on theories of disgust and their relevance in political persuasion. I have no answers, but this is very fertile territory for image-makers to explore. ~ Anne