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Designers parody women at Paris fashion shows
by MELANIE MCDONAGH, Daily Mail
ake the most beautiful young women in the world, dress them in Paris couture frocks - no expense or labour spared - put them on a catwalk and what do you get? A collection of drag queens, that's what.
Yesterday, John Galliano, the British designer for Christian Dior, unveiled his collection for Spring 2005. Its theme was royalty - Galliano was inspired by the 19th-century beauty Empress Elisabeth of Austria - and it was meant, said the designer, to mark a return to 'full-on glamour' in women's fashion.
But what we actually saw was something quite different: a gay man's parody of female sexuality. A succession of 39 mannequins who couldn't, in their skin-tight frocks, walk down the steps of the catwalk, who could hardly stay upright in their six-inch stilettos, whose faces were unrecognisable under their geisha-white make-up and whose dresses were inconceivexceptionable as something you would actually wear.
Look here too...
Gallery: John Galliano for Christian Dior at Paris Fashion Week
Pictures: The latest fashions from Paris Fashion Week
Impossible to move
Indeed, the women who were paid to model them had to be lifted off the stage by bouncers because it was impossible to wear these skin-tight gowns and actually move.
It used to be that Parisian haute couture designers had the Midas touch that could make even plain women beautiful. This is the Midas touch in reverse. Galliano is the fashion genius who can turn beauties into freaks.
Of course, the rich and famous clients whose sense of self-worth depends on their places in the front row of Galliano's show weren't going to say that this particular emperor's clothes are a kind of couturier's parody of real women - a queeny version of what queens should look like.
And, of course, as sheer theatre goes, there is nothing to beat a show like this. It's pure fantasy and spectacle.
But even though the workmanship of the clothes was peerless, the embroidery breathtaking, the handpainted birds on the crinolines beautiful, there was no getting away from it: they represented something sinister about the way women appear at the apex of the fashion world.
Models look like space aliens
And it's not just John Galliano who is responsible for this joke at the expense of simple women. His fellow Brit, Alexander McQueen, sent his models out looking like space aliens in his latest collection. This, remember, is the man who once put amputees on the catwalk to show that his clothes could be worn by anyone.
And they can - as long as the models in question have no desire to look like real women.
Onceupon a time - in the 1950s, say - ordinary women fantasised about possessing a Paris gown if they only had the money. Now, the clothes have never cost more - prices for a couture dress start at £10,000 - but only Danny La Rue would covet the frocks.
Of course, there's nothing new about gay men designing women's clothes - and some of them have done so with genius.
Almost without the most brilliant designers are, and always have been, male and homosexual.
I asked a couple of fashionista friends of mine to name a single major heterosexual male designer, and they were stumped.
Eventually, one of them came up, rather lamely, with the name of Clements Ribeiro, the husband-and-wife team which does, indeed, produce covetable women's clothes. All the others were gay.
But homosexuality is such an obvious feature of the fashion world that the women - and it's chiefly women - who write about it hardly notice the phenomenon any more.
Curious idea of how women viewed
But it does help to explain the gap between the designers' view of what women should look like and what women for whom the clothes are notionally designed actually look like.
Gay designers may have the sense of style, spectacle and extravagance that makes for brilliant fashion theatre, but, taken to extremes, these same attributes can simply look like fashion misogyny.
The Galliano show, with models sporting crowns all askew over wildly frizzed-up hair and nipped-in 15in waists, gives contemporary women a very curious idea of how they are viewed.
What does it tell you about a designer when women can't walk in his clothes, let alone breathe properly in his crinolines? When they are depicted as disempowered, immobile figures with doll-like faces daubed in chalk-white make-up?
Not a woman-hater
But the real tragedy is that Galliano is simply brilliant at making beautiful clothes when he wants to. Away from the headline-grabbing, look-at-me spectacle of the couture shows, he makes lovely dresses for wealthy clients who have no intention of looking like outlandish human versions of the cartoon character Jessica Rabbit.
He is, personally, a kind man - the reverse of the woman-hater his clothes make him out to be. Similarly, Alexander McQueen's tailoring skills are legendary.
The real problem of the Paris shows is that they conceal not just the models' beauty but also the designers' ability to make clothes that real women would want to wear.
For although this week's creations verged on the grotesque, it is also the case that no one wants every dress designer to turn out the kind of clothes you'd buy in Marks & Spencer.
But there was once a time when it was possible to combine fashion genius with an appreciation of femininity and elegance.
Alas, what Paris fashion now looks like is a conspiracy against pretty women.
This story first appeared in the . For more great stories like this, buy the Daily Mail every day.
Daily Mail
steping down from soapbox) 
, so most importantly, I think the artilce should be read in that light.
I too dislike the Daily Mail & when I started reading the article I was fully expecting to disagree with all she says. However, the gay/misogyny point aside I do think she makes some good point is her article. You and Lena are both saying the same thing I think - that you can't make rules about how someone is just because they are gay. agreed. I suspect you are right about her anti-gay agenda given her readership. 
