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I sent the email below, along with a link of my blog post From Schiaparelli to Prada: Deterioration of Culture to a correspondent.
I have written a long post on the Met's exhibition "Schiaparelli & Prada, Impossible Conversations" (linked above), but this email adds more on my ideas and observations about the decline, or perversion, of culture that I see around me. Art, and artists, are often the first to grasp (either by accepting or rejecting) societal changes. I think Prada has given us some insights, not what she really wants us to see but nevertheless insights, on our current culture.
Here is my email, which I titled: War on Beauty and the related War on Masculinty:
Hi ____,
I read a little while ago your post on beauty with interest.
Beauty is a hard concept to "analyze" and to "deconstruct" as leftists love to do. It is an ethereal presence. We react to beauty rather than coldly observe it. We have to admit it is there in some things, probably not in us, and thus we realize it is some kind of favored state (it is clear that beautiful people, and babies, are treated better than ordinary people). At our best, we are humbled by beauty.
This hierarchy of beauty is what grates liberals and leftists.
I've written several (many) blogs on beauty, and I've noticed that there is an even more vicious war going on against beauty than when I started my blog a few years ago. This time, I think people are well-versed on how to attack beauty, and how to make beautiful people, things, etc. feel they're doing, and are, something wrong (and evil). Decades (even centuries, if you look back at the origins of modernism) have made such people adept attackers of beauty.
I wrote this post on Prada's really ugly clothes after I saw the exhibition "Schiaparelli & Prada, Impossible Conversations" at the Metropolitan Museum. Schiaparelli, in her time (around the turn of the 20th century), was considered a radical fashion designer, yet her least feminine designs are not as viciously ugly as Prada's. Schiaparelli was also much more talented, skilled (trained, I think) than Prada, and she admits the power of femininity and feminine beauty.
Prada is the post-modern feminist who seems to have a visceral hate for femininity. and feminine beauty, and ultimately beauty in general (I won't go into the many viciously anti-woman homosexual designers, since perhaps their deficiencies are obvious, but the heterosexual, female Prada is the ultimate betrayer.)
Prada of course supports all the evils that come with feminism, yet her life is strangely traditional, with a husband of several decades, two grown sons, and one son who is following her footsteps in her fashion design empire. She herself inherited this already successful empire from her father and grandfather, so she hardly qualifies as a female empire builder. She holds her temperamental husband at bay by giving him the high profile role of managing her company (and metaphorically, her too?). She's a clever, smart feminist. Those are the types that really do rule this world, since they realize that the female energy IS different than the male's. So, what they're after in not equality, but a reversal of roles (of power), even though they know from experience that this isn't likely to happen. But, I think even clever, smart Prada succumbs to her illusions, since her inner-most desire must be (from all the information she keeps giving us) to make women the superior sex. I think one of your correspondents called this envy. I think that is what it is. The natural, obvious, strength (power) of men, which they carry with such ease, is something to be admired, just as beauty is to be admired in beautiful women. When this admiration is perverted, it turns to something ugly like envy. I think we are in the age of perversions. And this is manifested, at least in my observations of culture, in the cult of ugliness as a vicious retaliation against beauty, and I think related to that (since it all presents itself as equality) the cult of male feminization, which is part of the degradation masculinity.
And finally, what happens if a woman can no longer be beautiful? The alternative now is that she has to look masculine. How does Prada reconcile all that with her "hatred" of masculinity AND femininity? One way is that modern fashion designers (and artists in general) who still work with/for/about women are creating alien monsters, neither male nor female. But, this is something I've just began to observe, and I still have to think about it some more.
Kidist
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