EDITOR’S letter
W hen we decided to dedicate this issue to celebrating women who are in their element, it was months before The New York Times and The New Yorker published their revelatory investigative pieces on sexual harassment in Hollywood. It was also before the disturbing allegations against some of the fashion industry’s top photographers surfaced and well before the Time’s Up black dress campaign that galvanized the Golden Globe Awards. Now, the idea of striving to be in one’s element—a state that inherently means one isn’t being silenced, harassed or exploited by power imbalances—seems all the more poignant. It’s a sentiment that our cover subject, YSL makeup ambassador Zoë Kravitz, shared during our interview in Paris a week after the awards. (See page 79.) “It is happening in every industry,” she said. “Women are being sexually harassed and being forced to take it because they are, say, single moms or immigrants. There are so many different kinds of situations where women are being forced to be quiet. For me, the idea of wearing black was to give a voice to those who didn’t have one at that moment. It was just a dress, but it represented more.” It appears that bullies and abusers are having a major comeuppance beyond Hollywood. We’re seeing it with politicians and media personalities and in the fashion world. In “Time’s Up” (page 60), Isabel B. Slone chronicles the Canadian fashion community’s response to the #MeToo movement that is, in many ways, driving this change. Time’s Person of the Year was a collective of individuals dubbed “The Silence Breakers,” but Slone didn’t find that same willingness to speak out here at home. While some people spoke on the record, many of the other Canadian designers, models and agents she approached politely declined. It would be naive to think that this isn’t, or hasn’t been, an issue in our industry. There is currently one sexual assault case before the courts in Canada involving a photographer and a model, and we’ll report on that story once the trial begins in April. Meanwhile, here at FASHION, we will ensure that the people we work with are beyond reproach in terms of their professional conduct on any of our sets. Like Hearst and Condé Nast, we will formalize this into their contracts, along with our expected code of conduct, which is being drafted as of press time and will be posted online. As The
Washington Post’s fashion critic Robin Givhan told Slone, it begins with the “simple recognition of the problem” and “the recognition that some behaviour is inappropriate and that creative freedom does not give you the freedom to behave in any way that you choose.” And Pahull Bains reminds us in “Who Made My Art?” (page 84) that we all have a responsibility to be as mindful about the art we consume as the food that we eat.