Margiela Artisanal Collection 2024: Pubic Hair and Porcelain Faces

Maison Margiela Artisanal Collection 2024 [1]

 

 

I was pleased to see that John Galliano decided to experiment with an older ideal of female beauty in his latest collection for Maison Margiela; one with tiny waists, wide hips, and (at least the illusion of) hairy genitalia.

 

For I've long been interested in the question of female body hair and its removal; particularly from the pubic area due to a porno-aesthetic convention shaping our idea of what constitutes desirability. As I wrote in a post published back in January 2013:  

"I am slightly troubled by this trend. For whilst I understand the appeal of the hairless pussy on grounds that range from the practical to the perverse, still I can't help regretting the universal Brazilianization of women as I recall the words of Henry Miller: 'It doesn't look like a cunt anymore; it's like a dead clam or something. It's the hair that makes it mysterious.' [2]  

 

So, well done to Galliano for his use of couture merkins, fashioned from real human hair and visible beneath the sheer dresses worn by models. Perhaps this will start a new trend and maybe even encourage some women to go easy with the wax or refrain from relentlessly shaving every single hair [3].

 

 

II.

 

Of course, Galliano isn't really interested in reviving a more natural model of femininity. As he once admitted long ago, he hates female breasts for ruining the line of his designs.

 

And as the hyper-shiny complexion of his models indicates [4], his queer and slightly uncanny fantasy is to make a real woman resemble a porcelain doll; or perhaps bring the latter to life, fitting her out with all the secondary sexual characteristics of genuine womanhood, and then having her walk down the catwalk looking like a lurid Edwardian prostitute.  

To quote D. H. Lawrence: "It's just weird. And for its very weirdness women like living up to it." [5] But they might do well to remember, however, that the moment they take on that artificial china doll face, the fashion will change and the demand will be for something else.  

 

Having said that, Galliano does have a certain decadent genius and I can't help admiring his latest collection - just as my own perverse interest in the (related) topics of pygmalionism, agalmatophilia, and dollification make it hard for me not to adore the perfect porcelain features of the model pictured above. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Maison Margiela Artisanal Collection 2024 by John Galliano was shown underneath the arches of what for many is most beautiful - certainly the most ornate - bridge in all Paris, the Pont Alexandre III. Click here to watch the show - inspired in part by Brassï’s dimly lit, over exposed nighttime photos taken in Montmarte in the 1920s and '30s - on YouTube.  

 

[2] See the post entitled 'Epilation' (8 Jan 2013) from where I quote this passage.

 

[3] Perhaps. But probably not. I suspect that all the body positive and natural beauty stuff will make little difference within a pornified culture. Some readers might recall that the visual merchandising team at American Apparel tried something similar to Galliano at their East Houston Street store in NYC ten years ago to little effect. See the post 'On Mannequins With Merkins' (21 Jan 2014).

 

[4] The astonishing glass skin make-up worn by the models was created by Pat McGrath; a long time collaborator of Galliano's - from his days at Dior until now at Maison Margiela, where he was appointed creative director in 2014. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Give Her a Pattern', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 163. 

On Punk, Pink, and Dollification

(L) SA wearing a pink gingham check shirt from Child of the Jago [1]

(R) Ken Doll wearing a pastel pink and mint green striped 

two-piece beach set by Mattel [2]

 

 

For me, pink is one of the essential colours of punk: which is undoubtedly why Jamie Reid used it (along with bright yellow and black) for the provocatively lurid sleeve of Never Mind the Bollocks and why, many years earlier, the proto-punk fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli had created a shocking shade of pink to be synonymous with her brand. 

 

Thus, when I wore a pink (and white) ensemble for an event in Bloomsbury recently, I was confidently expecting it to be received within the context of the above history of art and fashion.

 

Unfortunately, there were some young people present that evening whose cultural references are far more contemporary and, in their eyes, I looked like a refugee from Barbie World - which is, arguably, a little unkind, if not entirely unfair: after all, who wants to be thought of as a human doll? 

 

Having said that, if it's okay for Ryan Gosling to be dolled up and dollified, for his role as Ken in the movie Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023), then why should I worry?

 

And even Sid Vicious was ultimately reduced to the status of an action figure following his death (if not, indeed, years prior to his tragic and untimely demise) - although, sadly, not wearing the pair of pink peg-leg pants that he loved so much ... [4] 

     

 

 Jamie Reid: Sid Vicious Action Man 

£12.50 [3]

 

Notes

 

[1] Photo by Paul Gorman taken on 7 Sept 2023 outside Treadwell's Bookshop (London)

 

[2] Anyone interested in buying the doll (£44.99) can visit the Mattel website by clicking here. 

 

[3] This image by Jamie Reid was used to promote the Sex Pistols single 'Something Else', released from the album The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Virgin Records, 1979). The original poster is in the Jamie Reid archive at the V&A and can be viewed online by clicking here. Obviously, Reid is critiquing the co-option and commodification of punk by the Spectacle (as well as, perhaps, the exploitation of dead performers, who will never be allowed to rest in peace so long as they can still shift product). 

 

[4] Sid can be seen wearing these pink pegs in a short film on Youtube provided by ITV Channel Television, which shows the Sex Pistols at Jersey Airport in the summer of 1977 about to board a plane, having been officially ordered to leave the island: click here. Paul Gorman informs me that Sid had actually borrowed the trousers from guitarist Steve Jones, who had bought them years earlier from Let It Rock.  

 

 

For a post published back in Feb 2019 on the politics of pink, click here.

 

 

All Dolled Up with Lulu Hashimoto

Lulu Hashimoto: tumblr.com

Japanese beauty, Lulu Hashimoto, is a girl who has really taken the expression all dolled up to heart.

Or, more precisely, Lulu Hashimoto is a doll-like character performed by an anonymous model who has really taken the idea of self-objectification to an uncanny level.  

In other words, Lulu is actually a full-body doll suit, consisting of a wig, a mask and stockings patterned with doll-like joints, created by Hitomi Komaki, a 23-year-old fashion designer who has a thing for dolls and their unique attraction (a disturbing combination of cuteness and creepiness).

Despite Komaki's rather puzzling and somewhat disingenuous denials, there's obviously something fetishistic about this game of dress up and disguise born of the world of BDSM; of becoming-object through a process of dollification - a process of physically and mentally transforming oneself into a living doll and seeking out an Owner to whom one must be subservient at all times.  

Lulu has not only turned heads on the streets of Tokyo, but has built up a substantial following on social media, with fans all over the world. She is, in addition, among the finalists of the annual Miss iD (alternative) beauty pageant this year; a contest open to all kinds of beings, human and non-human, actual and virtual, including holographic characters generated by artificial intelligence.

To broaden our understanding of the real in this manner - and to redefine notions not only of aesthetics, but humanity - is, I think, a good thing; it's certainly an interesting project from a queer philosophical perspective.    

And the possibility of donning a doll-suit, whatever one's age, race, or gender and (if only momentarily and imaginatively) becoming a beautiful young Japanese girl like Lulu, certainly has its appeal ...  

Notes 

Those interested in seeing more photos of Lulu and becoming one of her 31.3k followers on Instagram, click here.

Those interested in dollification as practiced within the kinky community might like to visit dollification.com

Chinese Beauty Tips with Reference to the Case of Kina Shen

Kina Shen / Instagram (16 Dec 2016) 

The Chinese still like to think they are a people apart, with their own unique aesthetic ideals - including ideals of what constitutes female beauty. But, actually, when one examines these ideals, be they Taoist or Confucian in origin, one finds they don't greatly differ from those that have been cherished amongst other peoples, in other times and other parts of the world.

For example, they think that girls with large eyes are very beautiful; particularly if the eyes have a double-fold lid (often achieved by cosmetic surgery), similar to the eyes of Westerners. The Chinese also value porcelain white skin and fine, delicate features, believing as they do that these physical traits reflect an inner moral dimension or natural nobility. Finally, when it comes to hair, the Chinese like it to be long, shiny, dark, and soft.

Those big-bodied blondes, with their fake tans and fake tits that so many Western men seem attracted to, are regarded as ugly and vulgar within the erotico-aesthetic that determines the Sino-pornographic imagination. And so it's not surprising to find that one of the most popular models in China today is 25-year-old Kina Shen, who prides herself on her hyperreal doll-like appearance, with eyes that are bigger-than-big, skin that is paler-than-pale, a body that is slimmer-than-slim, and hair that is sleeker-than-sleek.

Even though I don't view the world through Chinese eyes, she's certainly extraordinary looking and clearly a very talented make-up artist which, I suppose, makes her fully deserving of her huge following on social media, including 634k followers on Instagram [click here if interested in becoming one of them].

And even though I'm not a smoking fetishist, I admire the fact that Kina Shen often poses with a cigarette - something that now seems exotic and transgressive here in the West, where people have become so obsessed about their health that they've sacrificed style and forgotten the importance of living dangerously. I also like her attempts at philosophizing about the gothic nature of her being, as in this astonishing remark posted online:

"All this time I thought I was dark, but maybe I was wrong. I cannot stay away from darkness, because it needs me. Because I am the light it craves ... So maybe I am not cursed, but blessed with a dark kind of light."


To watch Kina Shen giving a YouTube make-up tutorial on how to achieve her big eye look, click here. 

Dollification: The Cases of Bastian Schweinsteiger and Alexander Hepburn

Cover of the first US edition (1923) 

by Knud Merrild 

I: The Case of Bastian Schweinsteiger

There was an amusing story in the press a couple of years ago concerning the German footballer Bastian Schweinsteiger and his lawsuit against a Chinese toy company that had manufactured an action figure that bore an uncanny resemblance to him.

The fact that the doll also came dressed as a Nazi soldier and was named Bastian, pretty much obliged the midfielder to take legal action, even though a spokesman for the company brazenly attempted to deny the undeniable by insisting that any likeness was purely coincidental. He further explained that, to Chinese eyes, all Germans look alike ...!

I've no idea if the case went ahead, or if there was some kind of out-of-court settlement; one assumes the doll has been withdrawn from sale, but even that I don't know for certain. At the time, most people simply smiled at the story and then quickly forgot about it. But it always stuck with me. And that's because, as a reader of Lawrence, it reminds me of the case of Alexander Hepburn ... 


II: The Case of Alexander Hepburn

Written in 1921 and published two years later, The Captain's Doll is a short novel by D. H. Lawrence that tells the tale of an illicit love affair between an aristocratic German woman, Johanna zu Rassentlow (known as Hannele), and a Scottish army officer, Capt. Hepburn.

Thanks to the War, she has fallen on hard times and so has to work for a living making puppets and beautiful cushions of embroidered coloured wool. He, arguably, has been damaged in other ways by the years of bloody conflict and evolved his own idiosyncratic philosophy based on his love of the moon that he's keen to enact in his own life, without any further compromise and at whatever cost.

If the existence of a wife, Evangeline, is problematic to his future happiness and his relationship with Hannele, so too is the existence of a doll that the latter makes of him, complete with tight-fitting tartan trews. A doll which not only accurately captures his physical likeness, but seems to insult the integrity of his being; objectifying him and belittling him at the same time:

"It was a perfect portrait of an officer of a Scottish regiment, slender, delicately made, with a slight, elegant stoop of the shoulders and close-fitting tartan trousers. The face was beautifully modelled, and a wonderful portrait, dark-skinned, with a little, close-cut, dark moustache, and wide-open dark eyes, and that air of aloofness and perfect diffidence which marks an officer and a gentleman."

Personally, I'd love to be dollified and wouldn't find it in any way unseemly or humiliating, whoever made it and however it was costumed. But Hepburn reacts very differently, when he one day sees the toy version of himself standing in a shop window. He stood and stared at it, as if spellbound; so disgusted that he wouldn't enter the little art shop:

"Then, every day for a week did he walk down that little street and look at himself in the shop window. Yes, there he stood, with one hand in his pocket. And the figure had one hand in its pocket. There he stood, with his cap pulled rather low over his brow. And the figure had its cap pulled low over its brow. But, thank goodness, his own cap now was a civilian tweed. But there he stood, his head rather forward, gazing with fixed dark eyes. And himself in little, that wretched figure, stood there with its head rather forward, staring with fixed dark eyes. It was such a real little man that it fairly staggered him. The oftener he saw it, the more it staggered him. And the more he hated it. Yet it fascinated him, and he came again to look.
      And it was always there. A lonely little individual lounging there with one hand in its pocket, and nothing to do, among the bric-à-brac and the bibelots. Poor devil, stuck so incongruously in the world. And yet losing none of his masculinity.
      A male little devil, for all his forlornness. But such an air of isolation, or not-belonging. Yet taut and male, in his tartan trews. And what a situation to be in! - lounging with his back against a little Japanese lacquer cabinet, with a few old pots on his right hand and a tiresome brass ink-tray on his left, while pieces of not-very-nice filet lace hung their length up and down the background. Poor little devil: it was like a deliberate satire."

One wonders if Schweinsteiger also felt this way when seeing his doll for sale: disgusted, but fascinated; staggered, but spellbound ...? If so, then, as one commentator has noted, we can hardly begrudge him taking legal action.

Towards the end of the novella, Hepburn confronts Hannele on the issue of the doll when hiking in the mountains (which she loves, but which he hates for their snow and affectations). He suggests that she might marry him - but he doesn't want her love, for it was love from which the doll was born. She is understandably full of perplexed rage at the things he says to her; including his claim that the handcrafted effigy does him the greatest possible damage - even if he can't quite explain why:

"'I don't know. But there it is. It wasn't malicious. It was flattering, if you like. But it just sticks in me like a thorn: like a thorn. ... And you can say what you like, but any woman, today, no matter how much she loves her man - she could start any minute and make a doll of him. And the doll would be her hero: and her hero would be no more than her doll. ... If a woman loves you, she'll make a doll out of you. She'll never be satisfied till she's made your doll. And when she's got your doll, that's all she wants. And that's what love means. And so, I won't be loved. And I won't love. I won't have anybody loving me. It is an insult. I feel I've been insulted for forty years: by love, and the women who've loved me. I won't be loved. And I won't love. I'll be honoured and I'll be obeyed: or nothing.'"

Appalled by this line of thinking, Hannele dismisses Hepburn as a madman of conceit and impudence. Nevertheless, she agrees to accompany him to Africa, where he plans to help establish a farm and, when he's made a few more observations and established all the necessary facts, write a book on the moon. 

And so Hepburn promises to call for her in the morning, before pulling back quickly into the darkness ...

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll' in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, edited by Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 

Note: The Captain's Doll (1923) can be read online as an eBook thanks to Project Gutenberg of Australia: click here.