THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE – A perfect body and a perfect soul weren’t prerequisites by the mid ‘90s. But did it make any difference? According to guitarist Ed O’Brien, the runaway success of Radiohead’s first single, ‘Creep’, was very easily explained. “Self-loathing is something we can all relate to,” he told Billboard magazine. “Every day we see people who are better looking or richer or more worthy than we feel.” When O’Brien said this in 1993, the situation seemed as unlikely to change as it does today. People on TV had perfect skin, great tans, perfectly coiffed hair and stylish clothes. The creeps and weirdos who watched them were doomed forever to be spotty, pale, badly dressed and in need of a trim. But by the mid ‘90s, things appeared to be looking up. Photographer Nan Goldin knew something was changing when she noticed that magazine fashion spreads and pop videos such as Fiona Apple’s ‘Criminal’ were cribbing the style of her own warts-and-all snapshots of junkies, transvestites and shabby bohemians from the ‘70s and ‘80s. “More and more fashion photography resembles my work,” she said, “and has this wider index of possibilities of who can be beautiful.” A shoot published in Ray Gun magazine in 1995 showed sweaty, skinny models posed against bare walls, smoking cigarettes. Stylist Tara St Hill made model George’s hair look stringy and dirty, and photographer Corinne Day zeroed in on Emma’s chipped nail polish and sallow skin. The feature was called ‘Goths on Acid’, but the models didn’t really look like goths, and acid was most likely not what they were on – the piece was a prime example of what was being described in the media as ‘heroin chic’. In 1996 the ideal was no longer – as it had been earlier in the decade – to look like Cindy Crawford as shot by Bruce Weber, but to resemble as far as possible, a methadone addict hanging out in a trailer park or a car mechanic on a lunch break. This ought to have been good news for badly dressed people. And yet somehow the new non-look turned out to be just as expensive, time-consuming and ultimately unattainable as the old one. IN her 1990 book THE BEAUTY MYTH, Naomi Wolf had warned this would be the case. She insisted that working to expand the mass media’s ‘index of possibilities’ was a waste of time. “Let’s abandon this hope of looking to the index fully to include us,” she wrote. “It won’t, because if it does, it has lost its function.” Advertising, she reminded her readers, works by making people feel bad about themselves – by inventing an ideal and then telling you that it can be yours for a price. (Craig Schuftan) #radiohead
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 09:33:28 +0000
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