Cosmosexuals redesign women to suit their own demented needs
And when they write a social history of women in the final decades of the 20th century, and the first decade of this one, may they engrave the name Alexandra Shulman in stone at that point where history turned.
Alexandra is the editor of British 'Vogue', and this week she told fashion houses -- fascist houses would be a better title -- in Paris and London that her magazine would no longer accept from them any pictures of skeletal she-models.
Female anorexia goes hand in bony hand with the fashion industry. Our anglophone relationship with that industry is so craven and submissive that we accept that absurd French term, "haute couture" -- high culture -- to describe it. And that goes to the core of the problem. From the outset, this bogus high culture has created an emotional and political imbalance, which places the fashion houses responsible for their fascist, woman-hating ethos, as our intellectual superiors. They are nothing of the kind. Only the word play of charlatans has caused this moral inversion, which allows misogynists not merely to appear to be superior to the rest of us, but to present themselves as what they are not: lovers of the female sex.
Almost no designers of women's clothes are women. Most are male Cosmosexuals -- who are either homosexuals, such as Yves St Laurent, Christian Dior or Gianni Versace, or more ambiguous denizens of the Cosmosphere, such as Gaultier, Lagerfeld and Valentino. Hardly any designers for women are simply straightforward heterosexual men. Tommy Hilfiger and Paul Costelloe clearly love women as they are. Which is why their clothes celebrate women's carnality, their sexuality and the sheer exuberant bodiness of the female form.
This cannot be said of gay designerdom: Versace, St Laurent, Dior, or of their Cosmosexual peers. Together, they have redesigned the female body to suit their own demented needs. This ambition is very 20th century, and echoes the earlier schemes of Marxists and National Socialists, to create The New Man. Except, the Cosmosexual project is to create The New Woman -- and what do you know: she looks just like a teenage boy.
Whether this process is conscious or unconscious is really irrelevant. At its heart have toiled a tiny minority of homosexual alpha-males for the past 40 years.
And it is one of the perplexing but irrefutable truths about women that they are drawn to, and captivated by, such men. Perhaps it is a combination of an irresistible attraction for the male-authority icon, with the certainty that he will not exploit it for sexual purposes. Perhaps the very power of these gay icons depends on them being surrogate but very charismatic father-figures. Alongside them are the Cosmosexual designers -- even more fascinating because of their luscious ambiguities and tantalising uncertainties. Are they available, or not? Ah yes, the delicious and confusing delights of one's teens, all over again.
There are no more personally powerful alpha-female journalists than those in fashion: yet even they are enthralled by the personal magnetism of the barons of this bogus world of haute couture. And the ideal young woman of this demented ethos is a waif, an asexual, unbreasted, libido-free hermaphroditic elf.
This emaciated elf eats on Tuesdays and her tiny peapod of a bowel sheds a shrivelled 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.
Men who love women have been excluded from the process of dressing them, while the high queens of Cosmosexual high culture impose their terrible visions upon a strangely obedient female sex. And puzzle heaps upon puzzle here. For these gay designers do not represent the attitudes of most gay men, who are usually very sympathetic to women. And there is no equivalent in the opposite direction, no prospect of men meekly obeying the ruinous fashion-edicts of lesbian designers, and their Cosmosexual she-chums of the penumbra. And most paradoxically of all, the political triumph of feminism has done nothing to stem the rising tide of woman-hating body-fascism.
Indeed, the sisters' ideological blinkers have blinded them to the role of a misogynistic haute couture in creating the disease of anorexia. This is the first ever, culturally transmitted fatal epidemic. It is the brainchild of a fascist Cosmosexuality, which in turn was born in the fashion houses of the world.
Indeed, it's not surprising that so many of these Cosmosexuals tend personally to dress like rather camp parodies of a reunion of SS-Obergruppenfurhers in Paraguay. With their shared hatred of so much of humanity, and their ardent desire to redesign the human race, the two groups would have so much in common. Let us therefore hope that Alexandra Shulman has just struck what will, in time, be the first blow of a victorious war against the Fourth Reich.
kmyers@independent.ie
