W Magazine: One for the Ages

Thanks for my motivation to finish my reading for class.  I think I need to look away for a while.

Thanks for my motivation to finish my reading for class.  I think I need to look away for a while.

Seems like a reference to Kubrick’s 2001.

crazy shit

The makeups good, love the Deitrich moment. Nothing wrong with a horror show, everyone seemed game.

Isn’t it amazing that a publication dedicated to women’s fashion can print something like this–which just reeks of hatred of women?

It’s intensely creepy. And nauseating.

So thanks for the palate-cleansing sorbet of Carmen dell’Orefice. And honestly, there are a whole lot of amazing “old women” whose photos could have been used as antidotes too–I’m thinking of Gloria Steinem, Judi Dench, Honor Blackman, Candice Bergen, Lauren Hutton, and, of course, our beloved Helen M.

looks like the W editors need to start checking out http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com.

If they really wanted to do “one for the ages” they could have done so many other things.  Like using models who bare a resemblance to each other but are of different ages.  That could illustrate a woman growing older gracefully and beautifully.    All this says is that old equals ugly.

I dunno. I thought it was interesting, as fashion “editorials” go. Of course they did not make her look like a fabulous old fashion model, or the way she actually will look at the age of 100, because if she lives that long she will have had the work done not to look that way. But I thought some of the ideas were interesting–the sequence of styles and attitudes and icons evoked. The way they exploited Ms. Valetta’s high forehead, which I guess is there from the beginning but  which comes into its own when the wrinkles start being added and sort of turns her into a reverse embryo.

I have my middle-age wrinkles, a few brown spots, and beginning-to-sag neck and I consider ‘em medals for living a normal life.  This horror show is a travesty of aging and is flat out offensive.

That old broad is fierce personified.

If the editors of W wanted me to have any idea what clothing was in the shoot, they failed. If they wanted me to have a deep sense of confusion and unease…win?

In that last photo, she looks a bit like Anthony Hopkins. Just me?

I applaud her for being willing to do something that was deliberately unflattering.  But the editorial itself is… unacceptable.  I like your editorial plan a lot though:)

Is that last photograph Anthony Hopkins in drag? You know, darlings, your entire life story is written on your face. Now *there’s* a scary thought.

What in the name of all things Miss Havisham…

mean, just plain mean!

TLo, I love your attitude towards women. You two are very enlightened. Thanks for doing this blog, it brightens my day.

Um, unfounded fear.

Well that “fabulous old woman” you have here has a ton of plastic surgeries and god knows how many injections into her face.  Notice the total lack of wrinkles?  That’s not an “old woman”, that’s a freak show. 

The thing is, for a fashion editorial, I never once looked at the clothes. The images and obvious grotesqueness of the faces took my attention. Unlike some high concept spreads intended for the artistic and narrative, holding and even deepening my interest and wanting to see how the clothes, etc fit the story – this was just a total turn off.

Horrible. Not a picture of aging (and the wrinkles are not well placed especially in the 2nd to the last photo) but a warped view of life.

I guess I am one of the few that finds this editorial interesting. Yes, she ages, but at the end she is around 100, no? What is a hundred year old woman going to resemble…certainly not your fabulous model in the last image. Both my grandmothers are in their 90′s and while they don’t look as extreme as the last image…they look their age. I think the flow through the images from when she is about 20 years in the first thru the last picture is fascinating. The model in the last picture with the surgeries and ton of make up is just as unnatural.

And what’s the point of all this? That to be old is ugly? That all women will turn into grotesque lusters of younger robotic men in sunglasses? 

My mother is 87 and she’s beautiful. That’s the only lesson on aging that I need.

and THIS post, THIS commentary, is why I love TLo so much and keep coming back. It’s really easy to be a uncritical, unreflective consumer or appreciator of fashion & pop culture, or to say “oh, lighten up, it’s just fashion!” But to be able to look at an awful editorial like this, and then to succinctly and brilliantly unpack it IN ONE TIDY PARAGRAPH – it’s genius. Tom & Lorenzo, once again, I salute you for your unflagging, tireless awesome. You know when to bring down the full force of the disapproving critical eye, and you also know (equally as adeptly) when some gorgeous Matt Smith has a fabulous personal style. I may use this post to teach critical reading. Seriously.

I can’t even really begin to describe my revulsion to this.  Not because the woman is aging, but the *narrative* is just… this feels like it should have been shot twenty years ago or more, it’s so bad from a feminist viewpoint.

This kind of reminds me of a ANTM challenge?

Sexy men in suits should never be the stuff of nightmares… and yet they are here. Ick.

The first thought I had was Highlander. He lives forever while the women he loves age and die.
Which probably means I have been watching too much of Highlander on Netflix.

I liked it. Told a story. Showed wrinkles. Big deal. Does everything have to be pretty perfect? I’m sick of Ageism.

Thank you for your commentary boys! 
Once again spot on– what woman who could afford to purchase those clothes would do so now?
Nobody wants to be seen in that velvet tuxedo and have someone say “I saw that outfit in the editorial with the really old ladies.”

I’m offended. The woman comes off as desperate. Age is shown as ugly. The woman seems to be a victim of aging. The whole thing is weird.

i swear to you on seeing even the intro picture, i sincerely, sincerely thought this was an article in tribute to madonna & her various recent boyfriends.

 I wanted to put in one more word. What is being shown is decades: teens, twenties, thirties, etc. And presumably mid-to-late teens, twenties, etc. So the final pictures are not of sixty or seventy year old women, but of a vision of this particular woman in her eighties, nineties, and at, say, 105. The comparison of the last photo to Gary Oldman as Dracula is apt: she is a vampire, as old as it is possible to imagine a vigorous person being, but one who does not have the ability to present an illusion of youth. She remains erect, fierce, defiant, and dominant over the men, if trapped by their ability to look at her. The photos to compare with la belle Carmen, then, would be the Ferragamo and the Ford, the latter of which certainly presents the old woman as non-fabulous by comparison, though in her own way just as fierce. But Carmen, in that photo, looks to me about 50, comparable to the Dietrichesque photo.
The grotesque element has to do with the concept of someone who looks really old being allowed to be photographed. If the woman looked like Carmen in all the pictures, they would still have the disturbing enclosed-but-dominant woman subtext, but they would not be grotesque.
The editorial obviously has touched a lot of people deeply, including our brilliant blogging hosts. I think it is digging at something about fashion and fashion models and ideals of beauty–the sense that ugliness is both immoral and fashionable. We are all supposed to strive, whatever our genetics, to look as close to the Orefice ideal as possible as we age–to live down or botox out or as a last resort photoshop away the ugliness of age. At the same time, images of domination–unwearable shoes, clothes that bare perfectly desirable and out-of-your-price-range (whether you want them as a hetero male or as a female) breasts and legs, and frankly misogynistic or dominatrix-inspired clothing is what we see in the fashion magazines.
Someone mentioned apropos the recent in/out post on Anne Hathaway the “uncanny valley” effect of her dress, i.e. that it gave her proportions that belong to a robot who is too humanoid. Perhaps what is going on in these photos is a deliberate sense of an uncanny valley–that the beautiful woman, who is supposed to be perfect and iconic, is looking way too human here.
 

I do not like this.

I think I see the concept they had in mind but it jumped the rails and went horribly, horribly wrong.  That is just all kinds of wrong.

I just don’t think they work as photos. Static and sort of cliche. The one with the red tuxedo is a little interesting but…nah.

 whoever dreamed this mess up needs psychological counselling and a kick in the ass.

Aside from laughing inadvertently at the ridiculousness of it all (I work with many in the extreme elder category and … it’s just ludicrous), I am in hysterics over the bad aging make-up. Wow. This is one time when more Photoshop was called for. This is like something Christopher Guest would come up with for a mockumentary about the fashion industry. Can’t you just see Catherine O’Hara in this editorial?