Kristen McMenamy | Tim Walker | LOVE Magazine #7 S/S 2012 | 'The Origin of Monsters'

First I gasped, then I wept when reviewing LOVE magazine’s ‘The Origin of Monsters’. Kristen McMenamy is always known for taking risk, but I hadn’t viewed Tim Walker as equally provocative. Katie Grand, I complimented yesterday, as a preeminent fashion mind, a woman willing to REALLY press the envelope. Only a few come to mind: Katie, Carine and Franca. Am I missing someone who is truly influential?

Many @Annes come to me now, a profusion of compliments and support for the unique style and voice behind the websites. ‘You’re becoming famous,’ some write. Our traffic is up almost 50% the last 3 mos, so I must be doing something right.  My goal is to raise the intellectual mindset of our industry around the question of ‘intention’, when the subject is images and messages to women and men, too, around the female experience. It comforts me to know that so many of you ‘get it’, at a time when women are fighting for our lives and ‘selves’ around the world and here in America. 

When I saw these Tim Walker images I did start crying and then fired off a heartfelt email to my Catholic monk blogging partner Bro. Dennis. Three weeks of news, the big Komen Breast Cancer Foundation/Planned Parenthood fight has left me raw. Republican candidates are running around the country promising to reevaluate contraception for American women. Fox News calls women like me totalitarian feminists for fighting back for women’s rights — any rights that women will have left when the Republicans are finished with us.  I listened to a Catholic bishop in the Philippines explaining that there’s no problem with women having 12 children. It’s the world’s challenge to learn to feed them.

If you look and listen carefully, the concept of the women or woman as ‘self’ and not an incubator or breeder of fetuses is never commented on. We’ve become the cogs in the wheel, the machines that make babies and we must be controlled like a Maytag. Just keep us running, say the social conservatives.

Then these LOVE magazine images appeared, and the damn broke for me. I could cry, write down the words and articulate the nightmare for readers. Anybody who says that fashion images have no impact on women is full of crap. That’s why I raise the issue of intention. When you can make fashion as art — ‘The Origins of Monsters’ being a perfect example — why wouldn’t you?

On a related note, our recent front page story on ‘Queen of the Sun’ and experience artist Sara Mapelli’s dance with bees, coupled with the latest research on why our honey bees are dropping dead like flies, is a welcome respite from my fashion to flogging analysis. Her video is pretty damn profound. Anne

via TFS