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It seems that now, more than ever, fashion is to die for. Skeletal models covered in track marks and bruises have provoked an outcry from those who believe that such images have a destructive impact on our impressionable young fashion junkies. This has been taken further by magazines such as Don’t Tell It in England and Juice magazine here, where models actually simulate corpses in glossy photo-spreads. ("Cause of death: strangulation. Gucci tank top $150."). On the Denton programme, Andrew Denton selected a couple from the audience who had won a "90’s makeover," and by the end of the show they were in coffins, completing their transformation into street-credible hipsters. The media, of course, have seized on such images and condemned their dark romanticism as Death Fashion or Heroin Chic - seemingly interchangeable terms.
Fashion has always been controversial. In the 15th century, Erasmus condemned the young boys of his time for the unseemly habit of wearing encrusted snot as jewel like globs on their shirts. Another Renaissance fashion was to wear shoes nearly six feet long so that the toe-cap would have to be controlled by ribbons which the wearer steered like a horse. Both cowboys and indians during the scalping wars of the early 1800’s wore their enemies heads as fashion accessories. But this morbid new twist, in an industry that has been traditionally viewed as celebrating life, has the critics frothing.
Of course the question must be asked, why pick on fashion? It is merely one aspect of the overlapping spectacle which consists of our visual culture, so why attack fashion- photography in particular? Perhaps we should view Death Fashion as a symptom of a wider cultural malaise and contextualize it as a new generation’s relationship to the timeless "life vs death" issue.
Since Generation X’s most celebrated icon, Kurt Cobain, killed himself and his hoaxed autopsy photos disseminated on the internet, being dead is about the coolest thing you can be. Goths, of course, have understood the forbidden thrill of necrophilic lust for over fifteen years now, by making themselves up as seductive zombies.
As the scholar Rudolph Binion has pointed out, "death is a potent aphrodisiac." But now this subcultural perversity has infiltrated the Paris-New York catwalks, and the glitterati can’t handle the stench. How long until some ragtrade enfant terrible uses actual corpses?
I think death fashion is primarily a late twentieth expression of what it is to live in a body - and the love/hate relationship we harbour towards our own flesh. Cultural theorist Arthur Kroker believes that bodies have recently become expendable as the economy collapses and the culture implodes, and the concentration camp spectres that totter along the catwalk draped in $10 000 husks only support such a claim.
Death fashion also speaks of the omnipotent power of the image over any other sense in our hyper-consumed culture. Even Quentin Tarantino, surely one of the Grim Reaper’s right hand men, understands the neglected gap between sight and touch. InPulp Fiction, a woman laments the pleasure a small pot belly can give to the hand, while simultaneously offending the eye. The latter, of course, is the organ which dictates the fashion industry, and the media in general.
In such a sterilized era, death is both everywhere and nowhere. Death fashion is a response to its ghostly presence and suspicious absence. People are massacred everyday - on the news, on the nightly movie, on video games - yet we have no authentic link to their fatal consequences. We cannot smell blood. When these are spliced together with jump-cut advertisements that aim straight for our wallet, via our libido, it’s no wonder they begin to blurr. Calvin Klein models morph into Bosnian holocaust victims until all the viewer feels is the vague sexual frustration which comes with living in a time when an erotic encounter can kill you. Richard Neville is not the only person to attribute the Port Arthur massacre - which Bryant allegedly described as "fun" - to such a cultural climate.
The media both condemns and perpetuates these images, like a snake eating its tail. JJJ seemed particularly outraged by the fashion spread in Juice magazine, conveniently forgetting that the first issue of their own magazine was cynically titled The Violence Issue.
A heroin user once told me that he liked the drug because it made him "exist less." Perhaps, rather than raging against the ugly reminder of our mortality, we should ask ourselves why young, beautiful and intelligent people find such a non-experience desirable.
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