Jezebel on Beyonce | Mark Pillai | African Queen | L’Officiel Paris March 2011 AOC BBC
Anne doesn’t know what to make of Jezebel’s Dodai Stewart skewering Beyonce for wearing a painted face in her new editorial for L’Officiel Paris’ March 2011 issue celebrating African Queen.
Stylelite is downright condescending, writing ‘The magazine that convinced singer Beyonce Knowles to paint her skin a darker shade of brown for a photo shoot says she wasn’t in blackface, but in ritualistic African face covering.’
The politically correct American blogosphere doesn’t even give a grown woman like Beyonce — more successful than all of us wrapped up together — credit for having her own mind in a fashion shoot. Now that’s equally politically incorrect in our view. Hmmm.
Did a white woman write that comment? Rubbish! This entire fiasco is one more reminder that Americans are culturally provincial beyond description.
Is Gawker Dialing for Traffic?
There is the possibility that Gawker’s plunging web traffic is behind the story. Jezebel and all of Gawker’s other blogs have lost enormous traffic with their new website design — which is terrible in our opinion.
On February 18th, Tech Crunch wrote that traffic had nosedived from a high of 561,000 to 257,000, citing Quantcast data. Gizmdo’s numbers declined from 746,000 to 420,000. (Note: the format is obviously being changed today.)
Maybe Nick Denton asked writers to juice up their posts in a big way. Watever the reason, Anne believes the entire controversy is nonsense.
Fashion Misogyny | Is It Real?
What isn’t nonsense is Amanda Platell’s accusation that the fashion industry is misogynistic. In an articulate, biting essay for Daily Mail, Platell writes that fashion’s obsession with Andrek Pejic is the final nail in the coffin of an industry that has transformed the ideal female body into a rail thin, breastless, hipless cariacature of the female body.
Simply stated, writes Amanda, many fashion designers wish women would just go away — except for buying their clothes, of course.
Anne has shared her same concerns on this topic but links Amanda Platell’s observations into the larger cultural landscape of trying to control women’s bodies in America. She includes Alexander McQueen’s forniphilia table — women as furniture — and the new revelations that he called Eva Herzigova a f*cking b*tch, screaming at her in a fashion show moment.
Indeed, fashion has a complex relationship with women’s bodies, female sexuality and empowerment, a common theme at AOC.
Amanda Platell Says Some Fashion Designers Are MisogynisticAOC BBC
