It is often said by critics of the fashion industry that a young woman on the catwalk provides a bad role model in allowing herself to be commodified as a hollowed-out object, trading on her looks.
But perhaps woman-as-beautiful-object has found a way to turn her own emptiness and reification not only into something that works to her material advantage, but ultimately provides a symbolic form of resistance to the phallocratic order, by subtly exposing how all notions of essence, truth, and identity are based upon deceit and delusion.
For the supermodel is neither an ideal being, nor a natural phenomenon. She is, rather, an artificial creature born of mirrors and make-up, whose mask-like face expresses neither sensitivity, nor true feeling. On the contrary, "her presence serves to submerge all sensibility and expression ... beneath the ecstasy of her gaze and the nullity of her smile" [Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 95].
Rather like the leading ladies from Hollywood's golden age, Linda, Cindy, Naomi, Claudia, and Christy are no ordinary women of flesh and banal sexual status, but mythological beings "around whom crystallized stern rituals and a wasteful profusion which turned them into a generation of sacred monsters" [ibid]. They don't enchant us because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their remoteness and frigidity. Their lack of human warmth and ever-changing appearance, ensures they remain unknown and unlovable; like mysterious and elusive lesbians.
Thus it is that the supermodel is never really with us: she just suddenly appears, struts her stuff, pouts and strikes a pose, turns, and then vanishes - immediately eclipsed by the girl who follows.
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