07.02.09
Vogue 199/3: Thoughts
Since Vogue has gotten too clueless and vapid for it to be worth my time railing against the actual articles anymore, I thought I’d focus on the ads for a change. It turns out the ads are almost worse. The one that upset me the most was for Jimmy Choo – a shoe company. It was a set of three images on a two-page spread. The image that made me really angry was on the top half of the right-hand page. It showed a woman’s body from about her waist to just above her knee with one leg curled up so that its entirety was in the shot. The woman is wearing a white crocheted swimsuit with ties at the hips and open sides. On her feet are worked leather ankle strap stilettos with very high and very pointy heels. The heel of the visible shoe is pushed into the inside of the opposite thigh, high up near her crotch, and it looks rather painful. Her one visible hand, with its long, shiny, red fingernails, is teasingly pulling on one of the ties on her swimsuit. This is totally a bondage porn shot – the heels pressing into the woman’s flesh, the blood-red nails, the tease that she’s about to reveal more, the ties on the swimsuit and the tight cropping of the shot showing us only her crotch and surrounding areas. She’s not a person, she’s a sex toy. I was under the impression that Vogue was a mainstream magazine whose focus was fashion, not a porn magazine. I guess I was confused. And how is that supposed to sell me shoes, anyway? “Buy our shoes and men will want to use you for sex”? Not the best sales pitch if you ask me. Oh, and this was the “Power Issue”. You might want to look up “empowerment”, Vogue, since you seem to have totally missed the mark here. (And yes, I do hold a magazine partially responsible for the ad content. They can reject an ad for any reason, meaning that they didn’t reject this one and thus approved of it. They are responsible for what they print. If they said they wouldn’t print an ad, the company would make a new one. Vogue has that kind of power.)