Everyone’s been nattering on about Alexandra Shulman’s anti-waif missive — but only this article by aspiring Gaelic bard Kevin Myers of the Irish Independent puts it in historical perspective. Speaking out against “Cosmosexuals” (apparently, space-age metrosexuals) and the “fascist, woman-hating ethos” of “gay designerdom,” Myers intones, “May they engrave the name Alexandra Shulman in stone at that point where history turned.”
Comparing the “denizens of the Cosmosphere” to Marxists and Fascists out to create the New Woman, he notes that most designers are themselves openly homosexual, except for “Gaultier, Lagerfeld, and Valentino,” who are, to him, somehow “ambiguous” in their preferences. Only a straight man like Tommy Hilfiger or ex–rugby-player Paul Costelloe can craft clothes that “celebrate women’s carnality, their sexuality and the sheer exuberant bodiness of the female form.” Shades of Joyce there.
And who is this “New Woman”? “This emaciated elf eats on Tuesdays and her tiny peapod of a bowel sheds a shrivelled [sic] pebble or two about once a month. She hourly snorts cocaine like a bee smothering itself with pollen. At night, she lies listlessly akimbo beneath her many lovers, a comatose orchid being ravished by a series of priapic wasps. Then up at dawn, to stride the gaunt catwalk, all skin and shin and rib and polished pubic bone.” Coleridge would be proud. We are speechless.
Cosmosexuals Redesign Women to Suit Their Own Demented Needs [Independent Ireland]
