Judith Butler would have a field day with this story. It’s all about the performance of gender — the scripts we follow, and the ones we make for ourselves. This is, obviously, a professionally styled and shot editorial for a magazine — it’s not real life, though the choices of the stylist and the photographer are clearly intended to represent something about “real life.” Some of these models are, well, models: they take on new identities in the pages of magazines because that’s their work. Some of the other people pictured in this spread are not models repped by agencies: there are nightclub performers, assistant stylists, and other assorted fashion folk. How everyone is portrayed is really interesting. Are the models just playing a role? Are the “real people”? To what extent are we all playing roles?
Those shoes; they give me palpitations every time I see them. Alexander McQueen has created a shoe that negates the objective reality of the human foot. (This is troubling.) And I fucking love it.
On the left there is Elle King, a singer-songwriter who I’m not gonna pretend I’d heard of before, since I’m desperately uncool and I never go to Brooklyn, but whose voice just blew my mind, a little.
How rad is it that the girl who commands all the attention here is actually a man woman who performs as a drag queen? Ladyfag, take a bow.
Really, this is how it should be. Here are a bunch of people who embody very different kinds of beauty, in a single story, all working it hard. Now why can’t we see something like size-blind and race-blind casting in more fashion magazines? If the ladymags sacrificed just one inane tiny-model-jumping-against-a-greige-background shoot apiece, per issue, and really put on their brainstorming caps, I bet they could find a way to replace those stories with something refreshing, something diverse, something different.
V Love U Just The Way We Are By Terry Tsiolis [Models.com]
V Magazine [Official Site]
