This just may be the best giant-cephalopod-menacing-a-village-sculpture in a shoe ever. Via Neatorama:
Jethro Haynes is a London artist who creates, among other things, sculptures from sneakers.
Fashion in Action!
DO NOT WANT
What not to wear – I don’t care how bloody hot it is.
Caught on a beach in Sardinia, Formula One racing boss Flavio Briatore:
Whatever does he see when he looks in the mirror?
Because You’re Not Worth It
You’re worth it – if white. L’Oréal guilty of racism
· Cosmetic giant fined for recruitment campaign
· First big French firm to be convicted of racial bias
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Saturday July 7, 2007
The GuardianPart of the cosmetics giant L’Oréal was yesterday found guilty of racial discrimination after it sought to exclude non-white women from promoting its shampoo.
In a landmark case, the Garnier division of the beauty empire, along with a recruitment agency it employed, were fined €30,000 (£20,300) each after they recruited women on the basis of race. The historic ruling – the first time a major company has been found guilty of systematic race discrimination in France – saw a senior figure at the agency given a three-month suspended prison sentence.
[…]
In July 2000, a fax detailing the profile of hostesses sought by L’Oréal stipulated women should be 18 to 22, size 38-42 (UK size 10-14) and “BBR”, the initials for bleu, blanc, rouge, the colours of the French flag. Prosecutors argued that BBR, a shorthand used by the far right, was also a well-known code among employers to mean “white” French people and not those of north African, African and Asian backgrounds.
Christine Cassan, a former employee at Districom, a communications firm acting for Garnier, told the court her clients demanded white hostesses. She said that when she had gone ahead and presented candidates “of colour” a superior in her own company had said she had “had enough of Christine and her Arabs”.
L’Oreal has not been immune to charges of racism in the past:
n the 90s L’Oréal was hit by claims over past links to fascism, anti-semitism and the giving of jobs to Nazi collaborators after the second world war. It went some way to satisfy its critics with a boardroom change and other measures. Liliane Bettencourt, L’Oréal’s major shareholder, is the wealthiest woman in France. Two years ago L’Oréal’s slogan was softened from “Because I’m worth it” to “Because you’re worth it” after concerns in France that the original appeared too money-oriented.
I wonder what Beyonce and the other women of colour who promote L’Oreal in the US have to say about this? She doesn’t seem to mind being changed with a weave and airbrushing and contact lenses into a perfect, albeit darker skinned, simulacrum of the stereotypical US blonde advertising bimbo.
L’Oreal recently bought the Body Shop, which then suddenly popped up with a ‘skin-whitening’ range. I myself have a L’Oreal compact I bought in a ‘grey market’ cosmetic shop – ‘Deep- Whitening’ foundation, labeled as such. It wasn’t meant to be sold in Europe but in Indonesia – because everuone knows or at least the major cosmetic companies would like to make people think that any woman with anything other than perfect alabaster-white skin must want to bleach it.
L’Oreal’s implict and explicit racism is a can of worms Liliane Bettancourt doesn’t want opened, but it’s going to be opened anyway, whether she likes it or not – and the connections with the Nazi collaborationist past: will be brought up again:
A Paris stage designer is suing French cosmetics giant L’Oreal for UKpound 20 million over her Jewish family’s home stolen in Nazi Germany in the Thirties. Most of Monica Waitzfelder’s family were killed by the Nazis in the Second World War. France’s Supreme Court will rule next week on whether L’Oreal, headed by British chief executive Lindsay Owen-Jones, is guilty of acquiring stolen goods by refusing to compensate Waitzfelder, 50, and her mother, Edith Rosenfelder, 81. The case is embarrassing for L’Oreal, maker of Garnier shampoo and Lancome cosmetics, and its biggest shareholder, Liliane Bettencourt. With an UKpound 8 billion stake in the cosmetics giant, she is the wealthiest woman in France. Her husband, Andre, had to step down as head of L’Oreal in 1994 when his pro-Nazi past in France was revealed.
[…]
L’Oreal was founded by Liliane Bettencourt’s father, Eugene Schuller, a French chemist who invented modern hair dye in 1907. Before the Second World War, he financed a fascist movement called La Cagoule (the Hood), which carried out a wave of terrorist attacks on Jews and synagogues in Paris.
Men may think cosmetics aren’t political, just trivial, silly women’s stuff they don’t have to bother with – but cosmetic companies ar giant multinatinals too, and they have an enormous amount of effect on womens’ lives.
Choice of cosmetic company isn’t just about what eyeshadow to use, it’s a political decision too.
Eddie Van Knijperhanden Strikes Again
And Martin wonders why I get my hair done in the UK:
Amsterdam barber stabs second client with scissors
Reuters | Monday, 25 June 2007
An Amsterdam barber has been arrested for stabbing a client with scissors, the second such incident involving the barber, Dutch police said.
The client was stabbed and seriously wounded after a fight broke out earlier this week at the barber’s shop, police said.
The barber stabbed another client with scissors in 2000. The man later died of his wounds, although the barber was cleared of any charges after a court found he had acted in self-defence.
Police said they were holding the man, 42, and investigating whether attempted manslaughter charges should be brought against him.
A Big Fat Profitable Meme
It’s serendipitous that this admittedly ‘well duh’ set of research results should pop up this week while the issue of singers’ weight is a big online topic: :
Ubiquitous pop videos may harm girls’ self-image
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday May 31, 2007
The GuardianMusic videos are driving a wave of dissatisfaction among adolescent girls by promoting ultra-thin role models as the epitome of beauty, psychologists warn today.
Watching pop videos featuring thin, scantily clad women for just 10 minutes was enough to drive down girls’ satisfaction with their body shape, according to a study which appears in the journal Body Image.
Researchers fear the damage inflicted on the self-image of girls as they prepare to leave schools and sixth form colleges is widespread, given the near ubiquity of music videos on television and on big screens in clothes shops, cafes and bars.
Viewing figures for MTV have swelled to 342m worldwide, according the channel, and a survey in 1998 found that 12- to 19-year-olds were the most frequent viewers, watching on average for 6.4 hours a week.
But Helga Dittmar, a psychologist at Sussex University and leader of the latest study, said adolescents were likely to spend far more time watching music videos than the survey suggested. “Public places such as stores, bars and clubs increasingly display music videos on large TV screens, making them an inescapable, almost omnipresent form of media,” she said.
Indeed they are omnipresent, even here in Amsterdam, which does at least keep a lid on the more blatant forms of public advertising; though we are forrced to watch ads on the trams, they’re not really of the music video type; more for sore arse ointment or real- estate agents.
But there are few fashion chainstores you can go into without an in your face dose of Christina, Pussycat Dolls or some identikit skeleton with inflated boobs, fake cheekbones, extensions and a spray-on tan gyrating over some German techno-trance monotony and there’s about to be an explosion of it all over, now that the Netherlands premier department store De Bijenkorf is getting in on the act.
“Introducing in-store television is a move towards the store of the future. It can be compared to the Internet 15 years ago, when not many people were exploiting it for commercial use. One of the really attractive features is the ability to develop our own content and programming.
“This means that we can produce content that is very specific to our needs and can be immediately tailored to reflect exactly our central and local marketing priorities.
“In fact, the ability to tailor content to reflect in-store initiatives, trends and promotions is central to the screens’ success.”
If you’re a teenager and want to keep up with your peers you can’t avoid it. I thought it was bad when I was young but the pressure teenagers are under now is horrendous, schoolgirls saving up from Saturday jobs for liposuction and so on.
Despite stating the bleeding obvious it’s still quite a timely report, considering the current furore about the perfectly normal, if tall (but then anyone is tall to me, being barely over five foot in a land of dairy-fed giants) winner of the latest US Pop Idol.
Some publicity-hungry suburban country club nonentity and one-member manufactured ‘pressure group’ that Fox picked up somewhere called Meme Roth called her ‘obese’. Obese. Really. Give me a break and get back to your obsessive jazzercise and mainlining aragula salad and ogling poolboys, you silly, silly woman. And ‘Meme’? What were her parents thinking? Let’s face it, when your name constantly reiterates your existence -‘me,me,me,me,me..’ – you’re bound to turn out a solipsistic narcissist.
But enjoyable cattiness aside, Ms Roth’s just another tool being used to create a sensation and push up Fox’s profile.
It’s Fox pushing this meme and Meme too. Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, it’s a company that has much invested in media worldwide, not just the US. It promotes music videos, it makes money from them. Of course they want to influence them. To think otheriwse is to mistake the purpose of a corporation, which is to make money.
To us it’s about more than mere vanity and fashion; it’s about whether we can look in the mirror and loathe or accept ourselves for what we are.
To them it’s just about making a market. Handily it also gives a nice lot of traffic to other mass media outlets too, who profess outrage but who are still happily counting the hits. Their ad revenue goes up as well and everyone’s happy, excpet the girls and women who are left wondering why it is they don’t look ‘normal’.
Weight is a hot-button issue for almost all westernised women and there’s lots of ways to make money from that. Again we’ve fallen into the corporate trap and they’ve created a controversy to frame the discussion andmake money out of it. They got us going and coming. No wonder we hate ourselves.