When will fashion get what women really want?
Fashion is kidding itself if it thinks women are going to confuse Andreja Pejic as the new face of Bonds for respect for the reality of women’s bodies, writes Claire Harvey.
Are women allowed to do anything for ourselves any more? And can we just back up the diversity truck for a minute?
I’m talking about Andreja Pejic, the lovely young Australian model who’s now the new face of Bonds undies.
Andreja was previously known as Andrej, and identified as male.
She’s now chosen to identify as a woman, and has become an internationally successful fashion model.
RELATED: Bonds unveils first transgender undies model
I wish her every joy in her new life, and I fully accept her right to identify as female and be regarded as a woman. She is, quite rightly, an inspiration for every kid who feels lost inside their own skin, and who wants desperately to be able to match their outward appearance with their inner self.
But fashion is kidding itself if it thinks women are going to confuse a novelty-trick party-stunt for respect for the reality of women’s bodies.
MORE FROM CLAIRE HARVEY: A generation of girls are wrecking their faces
That’s what women actually want: a genuine acknowledgment that women’s bodies are nothing at all like men’s bodies: that they are different; special; sacred.
The people who call the shots in the international business of fashion have spent the past half-century celebrating women who have the frame of prepubescent boys: hairless, lean, leggy creatures with press-stud breasts, like cardboard dolls.
They’re as easy to dress as cardboard dolls, too: even the most unforgiving of fabrics falls beautifully over the angles — not the curves — of their frames.
The fashion “thought-leaders” haven’t made an intellectual step beyond Twiggy and Kate Moss yet; not if they’re being honest with themselves.
They made it to Cindy Crawford, then took a terrified leap backwards for fear she was too real.
The exquisite Jessica Gomes had to have her breasts surgically reduced to be seriously considered for runway work, so woman-phobic is international fashion.
MORE FROM CLAIRE HARVEY: I love being called someone’s missus
Robyn Lawley might as well be Susan Boyle for all her chances of landing a haute couture gig.
Robyn can’t even get a shot with the supposedly all-about-empowerment Victoria’s Secret, even though she has a stunning, super-healthy body nobody could call fat.
She’s an inch closer to the bodies of real human beings than her sister supermodels — and that is an inch too far for the global business of making women feel bad about themselves.
One of the glorious things about #metoo is that women are awake to, and speaking up about, fake empowerment just as much as they are calling out exploitation and harassment.
Martina Navratilova’s powerful article about the unfairness of transgender athletes being allowed to compete as, and with, women, has a direct parallel here.
RELATED: Martina Navratilova has faced backlash over her transgender remarks
In fashion it’s not so much that women are competing with one another — it’s that only one type of woman is admitted to the secret club and everyone else is excluded, even if “everyone else” is 99.9 per cent of the planet.
The tokenism of fashion’s treatment of women of colour, women of size, and women over the age of 25, is screamingly obvious to the real people out there who are supposed to be amazed by marketing executives’ cleverness in casting Winnie Harlow or Liu Wen or Adut Akech.
Each of those women is exquisite in her own right: but if you put her on any city street she’d stand out like an alien.
She looks nothing like the rest of humanity. And she is celebrated primarily because she is genetically blessed with a miniature frame very few of us could ever achieve.
And now fashion’s idea of progressiveness is to put a transgender model in women’s underwear and expect the size 14 ladies of suburbia (aka the customers) to accept it as a gesture of acceptance.
Reckon Bonds’ clever stunt will move many pairs of knickers in Westfield Miranda or the main drag of Albury?
Me neither.
We’re replacing the kangaroo with this? What a waste of $10m
What happens when you get a self-serving mining billionaire whose fortune depends on the Chinese Communist Party to help rebrand Australia? A national symbol that looks like a COVID-19 cell, writes Miranda Devine.
Sorry for the scare campaign, the planet is fine
When a climate activist apologised for how environmentalists had misled the public over climate change threats, the fearmongers were not happy, especially when Greta is upping her fight, writes Miranda Devine.