There’s war, there’s porn; there’s war porn - and then you have Vogue
You want to see something truly disgusting? Just wait till the next Vogue hits the stands. We’ve had fashion shoots that glorified AIDS and, not all that indirectly, anorexia.
Now, the Italian branche of Vogue has decided that the war in Iraq is too good a photo opportunity to miss - to sell a few magazines, that is.
Here’s what Emine Saner had to say about this new campaign in the Guardian:
War - it’s so glamorous and sexy, isn’t it? No? Italian Vogue seems to think so. In what must be the most nauseatingly tasteless fashion pictures ever, this month’s issue features a shoot (no pun intended) by the American photographer Steven Meisel, inspired by the Iraq war. Shock and awe most certainly - it takes some talent to simultaneously glorify jaded soldiers, rape and violence while selling this season’s Roberto Cavalli and Dior.
A model in a black dress that exposes both her breasts is leered over by a group of soldiers on their beds; a soldier wrestles a model in the dirt; a model in a black laced-up dress straddles a soldier while his friend films it. The models look like prostitutes brought to an army camp as entertainment, which kind of undermines Meisel’s title Make Love Not War. Unless, by “making love”, he meant rape:
a sleeping soldier, with a smile of post-coital bliss playing across his face, lies on his camp bed while the woman (in Versace, by the way) looks traumatised and bedraggled.
Enough said. You can see all the photos here. It starts almost innocently, by the way - but don’t ‘worry’: it soons becomes truly vile.
Thank you, Vogue.
One really shouldn’t wish this on anyone - but still: I almost wish all of the people involved in this campaign would end up on the least glamorous side of a battlefield, where even vultures would gag at the sight they made.
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