How My Many Years As A Walking Coat Hanger Taught Me To Appreciate Art
Today I was most amused by a Facebook post by a classmate of mine in which she shared several photos from a supposed recent men’s fashion week. The photos were of a men’s fashion show where the male models were wearing all sorts of getup from women’s clothing articles like high heels and fishnet stockings, to more effeminate, or some might argue, emasculating attire, to more daring shapes like strips of wood, or hulking non-human forms.
My friends lamented the state of men, and that they felt sorry for the models as if they were trapped or tricked into such hilarious and demeaning attire.
They laughed. I did not.
I found myself actually bemused by their bewildered nature and realized they had only just cracked the surface of what they were seeing; what they were experiencing.
Arguments on gender roles, inclusivity, and sexism notwithstanding, having been in many fashion shows and fashion weeks, I can honestly attest to the mindset of the models backstage as being entirely ambivalent. Most professional models know their roles well: they are simply a blank canvas, devoid of most thought or sometimes rendered without unique characteristics. Models are, more basically stated, simply moving coat hangars. Models are not paid for their opinion (which if they had one and marketed it correctly, they could be called influencers), they are paid for their time and their image, which are in effect, rented out by the designer or brand who chose them. Models have no more stake in their look than a piece of art hanging on a wall chooses for that wall to be in a palace or double-wide.
I’ve walked the walk, and talked the talk. I’ve been that piece of art charged to wear a burlap sack as a statement piece of the designer, to standing in storefront windows in an impersonal act called “freeze modeling”. Some people thought I was a mannequin, but I felt like a monkey at the zoo. I wasn’t paid for my thoughts though, I was paid for that assignment — which to those on the outside, looks like standing around for a while. I’ll take that check, thank…
