Cathy Horyn, the fashion critic of the New York Times, wrote about the Raf Simmons collection for Jil Sander on 2/22/06 by starting out like this:
" Tom Ford, in his salad days at Gucci, once said his female ideal was someone who looked like she 'would pour hot wax over her lover before straddling him.' It was a memorable line, and its forced note of aggression -- the woman on top -- tingled with a suspicion that he, like many designers, was interested only in selling an image; he didn't actually know anything about women.
The cold contemporary truth is that women don't need the respect or love of men. They lead lives of exceptional dignity and exceptional aloneness, a quality you see in the work of artists like Katy Grannan, Rineke Dijkstra and Eija-Liisa Ahtila, whose subjects, by virtue of being stripped down and free of props, seem to us not merely real but more perfectly alive."
Is that really 'the cold contemporary truth'? Is exceptional dignity excluded from love- that head-over-heels-madness-rush-of-blood-to-the-head/heart/nether-regions? It strikes me as rather sad, and yet... understandable. Things that are elegant (such as I perceive 'exceptional dignity') are simple and graceful, in a clear and effective way. It's wonderful when love is like that, but oftentimes its not. (God knows i've done some very silly and horribly undignified things in the name of love.) Obviously, the Sander aesthetic is very different than Gucci's. But I love them both, so I guess I'm somewhere between 'hot wax' and 'exceptional aloneness'. And I think most people are, which would make us all quite perfectly alive.
Now my curiosity has been piqued and I see museums and galleries in my near future.
Posted by Mary at February 23, 2006 01:37 AM