Part of me wishes

[imomus]

You'd think it would be easy to find cute girls in fashion magazines, but they never seem to feature the nerdy dark-haired, dark-eyed types I like. Page after page, fashion mags present a disconcertingly Aryan conception of beauty. So I play safe with Japanese idols like Yu Aoi, who have the kind of oriental-giaconda sloe-eyed serenity I like.

One of my favourite streetwear / style mags these days is Dutch mag Code. I like their visual style, and I like their taste in girls. It was in Code that I first saw photos of Emmy the Great, seen here in a slick new video in collaboration with British band Brighton Port Authority:

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The new edition of Code alerts me to a slightly different kind of beauty, equally appealing: they have some lovely pictures of Sofia Boutella, a 26 year-old Algerian dancer.

I come pretty late to Sofia -- she has the fingerprints of Nike and Madonna and Jamiroquai on her already. Here she is in a Nike documentary:

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That reminds me that when I recommended the cuteness of Lou Doillon she was already a figurehead for Lee Cooper. Then again, I'm not always late, and I don't always take my cue from the commercial juggernaut of spectacular mass culture; I've discovered a few beauties myself -- quiet, shy, dark-eyed beauties, some who enlisted me to promote them, others who forbade even to be mentioned. I could start a modeling agency with the Turkish girls I see daily on the U8 line here in Berlin.

Watch this Tateshots video in which Juergen Teller talks about, and shows, the models turning up on his doorstep and I defy you (if you're male and hetero, or lesbian for that matter, or bi) not to entertain a passing fantasy about the exact limits you'd place on your power over these girls. Part of me really wishes I'd been a fashion photographer -- do I really need to spell out which part?

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's classic Momus-ism in that it relates the aesthetic (my taste for women of other ethnicities) to the ethical (the need for these ethnicities to be visible for political reasons), and the personal to the political.

The relationship between representation and the paradigmatic is a very complicated one, and it hinges on the question of which particularities get to represent the universal, and how we deal with the injustice inevitably built into that.

[(Anonymous)]

I find relating personal aesthetic tastes to wider ethical imperatives rather doubtful. What would you argue if you actually found Aryan blonde girls attractive? Would you then toss aside your spiel about magazines being ethnically diverse?

1. Momus finds oriental women attractive = "Aryan" magazines should be more ethnically representative.
2. Momus finds skinny girls attractive = it's patently absurd for magazines to be more representative wrt female body sizes.

The ethics bone is connected to the c*ck bone.

[(Anonymous)]

More old and overweight models?! That might be too fair.

We might as well accept that even our morals go through a kind of Desire Filter, which helps to prioritise them, but also compromises them.

The c*ck bone is connected to a*se bone.

[(Anonymous)]

What about demanding 50/50 male/female models? It does strike me that women's magazines are dominated by women (yet womankind are never slammed as 'closet lesbians') and men's magazines are .. also full of women (yet men are repressed homosexuals thanks to buying one magazine, Men's Health, which has pictures of stomachs).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, like I say above, it isn't just about representation, it's about the complicated relationship of the representative with the paradigmatic and the particular with the universal. There's always going to be injustice in who gets to represent universals, who gets to be the role model in the spotlight. But that doesn't stop us rooting for our personal preferences and hoping that they'll get the job.