The Fantasy of Youth
‘Once again using girls to sell clothes to women’
It’s a “Cinderella story.” A “fairy tale.” A “total Cinderella moment.”
But is it? “It’s not a fairy tale; it’s a cliché,” said Sara Ziff, founder of the Model Alliance, discussing fashion’s favourite new narrative, that of a 14-year-old Israeli who went to Paris in search of a modelling career, met designer Raf Simons in a Dior store and ended up opening the Dior couture show this month.
“It’s once again using girls to sell clothes to women.”
A season after more mature women were widely celebrated in ad campaigns like Céline’s (Joan Didion) and Saint Laurent’s (Joni Mitchell), the fashion pendulum has, it seems, swung dramatically in the opposite direction.
Aside from Dior’s new find, Sofia Mechetner, Chanel has announced that the face of its eyewear campaign will be Lily-Rose Depp, 16, daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s daughter, has landed a photo spread in the September issue of CR Fashion Book. In one picture, she’s wearing thigh-high leather Versace platform boots; in another, cat-eye makeup, a Prada dress and a pout. She’s 13.
We’re back in the 1980 days of Brooke Shields declaring, at age 15, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing,” and the 1990s world of photographer Corinne Day, a teenage Kate Moss and the waif.
To be fair, there has been some movement between then and now. There is heightened awareness in the industry, not to mention in the law, when it comes to the need to protect underage girls working in a grown-up world.
Three years ago, all 21 international Vogues signed and published a pact pledging that they would not use models under 16 (though this has occasionally been circumvented, as in the case of Gerber, who recently appeared in Italian Vogue, the photos used as part of an “age issue”). In 2007, both the Council of Fashion Designers of America and the British Fashion Council issued health guidelines that strongly recommended (the U.S. group) and required (the British council) that designers use models who were at least 16 for runway shows.
In 2013, after lobbying from the CFDA and the Model Alliance, the New York state legislature passed a law stating that all models under 18 must be treated as child performers, with all the related regulations.
Ivan Bart, president of IMG Models, the agency that represents Gerber, said it does not allow models under the age of 16 to do runway work. And according to a spokesman for Dior, its 14-year-old, Mechetner, was chaperoned at all times and has returned to Israel for school, her future relationship with the brand to be determined.
But there is increasingly a narrative around models themselves, an effort to move them from nameless mannequins to personalities. Mechetner is being “sold,” as Michelle Tan, editor of Seventeen, put it in a phone call, as a “a role model for the boldness of teens.” The Kaia Gerber story is one, as Tan tells it, of “Hollywood royalty: the next generation,” while Lily-Rose Depp’s fable is about “Uncle Karl introducing her to fashion” (Uncle Karl being Karl Lagerfeld, who once upon a time employed Depp’s mother as a muse).
And yet, no matter how many parental chaperones and stories are invoked, this doesn’t solve the public perception problem: that, as Ziff says, “when you dress children up in makeup and high heels, the implication is that they are sexual objects, and more often than not, that is how the images are read by the public.”
To see a Chanel ad in a magazine is not to delve into the model’s backstory. To see runway video online is not to see a model’s name and biography. It is to see a girl, like Mechetner, in a long, slightly transparent Victorian nightgown-like dress.
Fashion is, in essence, an industry based on deception: the promise that if you simply wear this, you will look better/ cooler/thinner/taller/more powerful than you really are. The suit was created, after all, to craft an illusion of physical perfection. That’s the upside.
But the pretence that these girls are older/more knowing/more seductive than they can possibly be at their age — and that anyone who buys the clothes they are modelling may look like them, when they clearly can’t because they are not in their early teens — is the downside.
No matter how much you take care of them, this disjunction between reality and image is jarring.
Of her own career, Moss told Vanity Fair in 2012, “I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird. But they were like, ‘If you don’t do it, then we’re not going to book you again.’ So I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry, and then come out and do it. I never felt very comfortable about it.” So what is the allure? “Teenagers are really ambitious these days,” Tan said. “You can’t fault Sofia for that, though I maybe wish she had waited a bit. It’s a reflection of the moment.”