Monday, April 16, 2007

Maybe we want to look like aliens?

The article 2007: A Face Odyssey in NY Times did a very interesting and thorough analysis on our socieity's ever-evolving standard of beauty and our extreme pro-youth anti-aging obsession, and our love affair with the uber-technology and our increasing desire to treat our bodies as an instrument to be modified to look humanoid rather than human.

"The faces I’m referring to seem to have arrived here by spaceship from some silent lunar landscape, rather than by the bawling and bloody process by which ordinary mortals enter the world. The Platonic ideal of beauty is now as it never was: more humanoid than human, more the product of an art director’s digitalized pastiche of desirable features than a naturally occurring phenomenon. The reasons for this include our increasingly sophisticated techniques for airbrushing flaws or imperfections out of the picture; our fascination with self-invention and technosexuality (also referred to as robot fetishism); our ever more phobic attitude toward aging and dying; and our worship of young, blank, unlived-in faces that resemble the baby-faced characters in Japanese animation films. Thanks to these influences, our aesthetic standards have mutated into an eerie image of female attractiveness that, if not unprecedented, has been relatively uncommon until now."

I'm fascinated with these fantanstic photographs. Perhaps we shouldn't take it too far in our real lives. But in our fantasy world we need fashion more as an art than just the practical clothes that we wear.
Celestial body Emporio Armani patent-leather shoes, $400. At select Emporio Armani stores. Syren.com latex suit, gloves and rubber hood. Fashion editor: Elizabeth Stewart.


A little bubbly Hussein Chalayan in collaboration with Swarovski plexiglass bubble dress. To order at Via Bus Stop, 172 Mercer Street. Pierre Hardy metalizedcalf and patent-leather platform wedge shoe with ankle strap, $995. At Neiman Marcus, Los Angeles.

Droid rage Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière copper-mesh Birkenstock pumps, $2,100. At Balenciaga, 542 West 22nd Street. Tod’s mirror bag, $1,395. At Tod’s stores.


Marc Jacobs python bag with gemstones, $12,000. At Marc Jacobs stores. Miu Miu high-heel Mary Jane shoe, $430. At select Miu Miu stores. DeMask latex stocking.








Bionic sphere Versace patent platform bootie, $1,130. At select Versace stores. DeMask latex stockings.

2 comments:

S. said...

BIRKENSTOCK pumps!!! Do not even jest about that. No Birk can ever be equated with sexy footwear. I demand a remame now. That is not funny!

Moi said...

LOL!!