Tag: clothing

Plain on the Outside, Fancy Underneath

On Tuesday afternoon, while returning from an errand, I stopped briefly at Union Station here in DC to get some lunch.  Union Station has long been a busy depot by which rail and bus traffic arrives and departs, and it also  serves as a rail and bus stop for area public transportation.  With the passage of time, part of the inside of the terminal has been  transformed into a shopping mall of sorts, which frequently satiates the boredom of tourists and passengers.  Predictably, it also houses a Victoria’s Secret.

Fashion, photography, sexuality and social anxiety?

I probably shouldn’t pull punches here.  I find some of the rhetoric and claims in this video a bit suspect.

Perhaps the oddest part for me is that the videomaker is using imagery that she considers disgusting at least, while arguing (it seems to me) that the ads for children’s clothing used by American Apparel are somehow pornographic.

Now there’s a part of me that sympathizes with this view.  And then there’s the part of me that thinks… didn’t you just manage to make an unpaid ad for this company by using the same images as part of your critique?  Aren’t you also exploiting these children by showing the images, and not only that, but unlike the company that paid the models and their parents, you’re exploiting them without any compensation.  (Then again, by embedding this and drawing attention to it, perhaps I’m doing the same thing?)

It strikes me as a very slippery slope, to say the least.  Before I sound like a pontiff from a religion that doesn’t institutionalize child sexual abuse, let me just embed the video I’m talking about, so you can make up your own mind before I continue my rant.

Don’t view the following video if you think it might contain soft-core pron.