Originally featured in ‘The real Runway’ August 21st 2011
If you're new to TTR and don't know how we roll, let us tell you one thing: we can sniff out a publicity stunt at ten paces. Quite frankly we've seen it all, and it takes the fashion world quite a lot to shock us.
Case in point, fashion's latest specimen in the viewing gallery: Rick Genest, aka. Rico the Zombie. The Canadian model tattooed top-to-toe in intricate anatomical artwork. Dude is clearly interesting to look at, but once you've seen the tatts where do you go from there? Sure, Gaga writhed on him in Born This Way, but a week later it was some other piece of meat. Formichetti's obsessed with him?...erm..cool?
Same with Andre Pejic. He's a boy, but he looks like a girl. A beautiful one, granted, but there are lots of beautiful girls. He's been in FHM's sexiest list as a man and a woman. Call us all kindsa skeptical, but the 19 year old is another media pawn to spark a bit of questionably homophobic controversy. Stories like these in fashion are like cheap firecrackers: there's a big bang when they explode but the spark's diminished within seconds. Who's next in line to the fashion freak show? We're pretty much immune to it all so this better be good.
It seems Brazilian label Auslander beg to differ, however. Plucking these two fashion mould-breakers from the blogs and column inches in which they currently swirl and plonking them into their Spring 2012 campaign. In doing so, telling us we should be shocked by what these two stand for, especially paired together. Hi-jacking and exploiting their brand of crazy is done with such brazen column-inch hungriness you'd think the collection itself would be equally as, ahem, 'controversial'. Shock horror, another firecracker goes out.
Yes, Pejic's gender fuckery (mixing men's and womenswear with such poised ease) does retain your attention that little bit longer, but that's Pejic's deal... not down to Auslander's slogan tees and Peter Pan necklines. Genest's poses are bold and engaging and the colours in his carcass-art compliment the navy's of some of the pieces. But for all their zaniness we can't help but feel, well... underwhelmed. Auslander's clothing (unlike its choice of models) brings zero new to the table. Nice, but a million miles from controvershe'.
The campaign bonus is that it puts these two anti-classical images of beauty into a mainstream context - you don't have to be lipsing Gaga or prancing about in an arty video to own looking different. But in the same breath, people like Genest and Pejic keep being the catalysts for getting gratuitious column inches. In a lot of instances the people who reap the benefits ain't wholly deserving.
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