old ground: Meadham Kirchhoff, the male gaze and being happy being a girl

In the latest issue of Dazed there's a great interview with Meadham Kirchhoff by Katie Shillingford where Ed Meadham says, of the S/S 12 collection, 'I wanted it to be about girls being happy about being girls, without there being the threat of a male gaze,' which is cool. I can get down with that. I've discussed this before in relation to fashion blogging, but for an actual mid-level designer to say this is a good thing and for me, a big deal.

Then Benjamin Kirchhoff follows that one with 'we've been quite obsessed lately with something that Leith Clark said to coincide with the launch of her magazine [Lula], that she was terrified that every shoot and every representation of women in fashion always had this invisible male presence.' And this is where it gets interesting. Because it's utterly true, and there's almost no way around it. Run through the biggest designers in the world. Or the biggest photographers. There is no escaping it, which is a shame when you consider how much time and energy and money goes into assuring women that fashion will make them into better versions of themselves.

But it's funny, because the two of them started off doing menswear before switching to clothes for the girls, and they've pushing this great hardline on womenswear being fun and individual and for the girls for some time now and, as I said, it's really awesome and very, very popular (particularly here in London.) There's always going to be some women, though, who say that just because they acknowledge the male gaze's influence on fashion doesn't mean they've escaped. You know, they are still dudes, at the end of the day.

I've had this little bit of a conversation from Interview between Nicolas Ghesquière and Tom Ford going around and around my head for the past 6 weeks or so, where they're talking about the women they have in mind when they design:

GHESQUIÈRE: I prefer to think about what you are saying as urban fashion. It’s a woman who lives in the city and has a certain lifestyle—
FORD: She is skinny!
GHESQUIÈRE: She’s skinny. [laughs] She walks with confidence. She’s a bit masculine, even if she wears quite sexy clothes. All the clothes are very fitted. So there is that silhouette and attitude for that urban type of woman.

This made me pretty wildly confused when I read it. Ghesquière is the most talented man of our time, I don't need to explain that, and Tom Ford is Tom Ford and I'm not sure I've ever encountered someone whose opinion I respect who didn't acknowledge his importance and, again, talent in what he does. We can't exactly argue with that. So yeah, I want to hear about what these men say about the women they design for. Ford is really good at making women look and feel sexy, and Ghesquière is a genius who's actually a little off-kilter  in his women sometimes, picking Jennifer Connolly and Charlotte Gainsbourg over real models. So when these guys sit down and actually tell us what they think about their women, it nonetheless sort of comes as a shock. It's the idea of these two men who have enormous influence and power over what real, everyday women wear sitting around and talking about what they expect their women to look like and be and weigh that makes me kind of tetchy. I think a lot of the [gay, male] power designers don't realise that their 'ideal woman', the one they have in mind when they design, isn't this purely theatrical fashion construct that they can project whatever the hell they want onto. She kind of has the power to disrupt how the rest of us interact with fashion and also, you know, with ourselves.

So yeah, what Meadham and Kirchhoff and Leith Clark say is completely and utterly true. For all the women involved in the business at all these levels, fashion is always in danger of becoming dominated by the male gaze. By and large, what we are told is 'cool' and 'sexy' for women is dictated by a pool of about 15-20 men. And because of that I think it's incredibly important to have designers like Rei Kawakubo and Ann Demeulemeester and Meadham Kirchhoff and Rick Owens, alongside blogs like Tavi's and magazines like Lula and the Gentlewoman as an attempt to realign the way we're forced to see ourselves. It's weird. We shouldn't have to ask for our fashion not to be forced always through this prism of 'how men see us' and 'how we make them desire us', but that's the way it is. We need this small pool of designers and publications to remind us that it's not always necessary to give a crap. What you wear can be about you and not the rest of the world if you like. If you're an MK kind of girl, it can be about nothing more than being happy to be a girl and not really giving a fuck about the rest of it.  It shouldn't be a revolutionary act for a designer to work under that principle.

images 1&2 from rookie's meadham kirchhoff backstage gallery and 3&4 scans from lula via tfs