McFashion week? Not in Medellin, Colombia.
Touching tarmac in the land of Pablo Escobar, reporter Alice Pfeiffer was plunged into a fashion week that has its unique, eye-popping dress codes, jaw-dropping rituals and feistily pokes the question ‘beauty: submission or ultimate power?’ (photos Clement Dauvent)
Medellin, once the world’s cocaine capital, now a destination of choice for discount breast jobs and lingerie production, recently held its annual fashion week, Moda Para El Mundo.
The event, half runway, half tradeshow, follows similar rituals as its Western inspiration but differs in one major way: the purpose of beauty.
While European shows compete in complex semiotics, a skirt can simultaneously quote Wagner, Kurt Cobain and East London, the Latino equivalent is more straightforward: if it doesn’t make you smoking hot, it’s a waste.
Frilly lingerie shows, see-through beach wear, skintight denim catsuits are busted by bootylicious models with brand new noses, boobs up to their chin, all furiously winking down the catwalk. A show in New York
might make bloggers drool over handbags but in Medellin audience’s lust after the girl, or rather the overtly sexual femininity being promoted, and the endless lusty promises it seems to hold. “It’s not just sexy, it’s narco-sexy,” said Johana Isaac, a local underwear designer. “That’s what narco-traffickers want their girlfriend’s to look like, and for many girls, being chosen by one of those guys is the best thing that can happen to you”.
Aspiring to become the ultimate female trophy wife, and especially for the kinds of men that caused the country and its reputation to sink (see drug wars and cartels during the 80s and 90s), isn’t a common dream for the middle-class, and one that will make privileged feminists screech. But in a country that’s still facing extreme poverty and corruption unknown to Europe for centuries, this is hardly surprising. On the contrary, beauty is perceived as a currency which, if invested right, can lead to a life of leisure, unhoped for someone who grew up in the favelas.
Of course, entrepreneurship would be preferable to semi-prostitution but can one really blame a girl with neither money nor education to focus on her looks, when the mafia-clogged system makes kosher social ascension impossible? How fair is it to demand the same ideals as in the Western world?
“The men are bad sometimes, but you don’t care. If you’re beautiful, you never have to work again and you can have an amazing life, all for free. Actually, you’re the one in power” said Anna, an underwear model with E-cup breasts and an A-cup bra.
Medellin’s fashion week turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg in a regime of extreme beauty. The fierce race to bag any of a selection of highly dubious men was on and all around me during Medellin fashion week where many women showed full commitment to the cause: bum jobs, lip jobs, eyebrow lifts as 16th birthday presents; pole dancing classes, modeling schools, skin bleach, permanent makeup. As Anna explained, girls can spend all day getting ready, sewing and curling hair extensions, “being beautiful isn’t enough, you need to be the most beautiful out of all your friends. It’s hard work!”
Not that there aren’t any career women in Colombia, on the contrary, plenty of fashion houses and magazines are led by women but they generally come from upper-middle class backgrounds and received an international education. In other words, women exposed to European societal norms, unlike the majority of the Columbian population, have a palette of alluring options to choose from.
The great majority of Colombia lives in the other extreme and the gap between Escobar-esque luxury and the gritty favelas is far greater than between Paris and its outskirts, or Tottenham and Chelsea. While Existentialist thinkers once proclaimed that who you are is purely in your hands, actually transcending one’s system in Medellin is improbable. How likely is it to have values you’ve never been acquainted with, in a city you’ve never left?
As Simone de Beauvoir famously pointed out “you’re not born, you become a woman…it is the entire society that elaborates this product.” And in many parts of the world, this is true of social classes too: one often remains a product of one’s upbringing.
As a gender studies graduate, I certainly don’t think women should rely purely on their looks to obtain anything, neither the women who bask in Berlusconi’s gaze nor aspiring actresses in Hollywood. But it is a little naïve for privileged women with masters’ degrees to sniff at attitudes towards beauty and power that have been present in most cultures for millenniums. At Medellin fashion week, more than any fashion week in the world, the message is extraordinarily vivid and surreal. A famous Chinese proverb goes “Beauty is the wisdom of women. Wisdom is the beauty of men”. In other words, a career is preferable, but we’ve still got a way to go.
Alice Pfeiffer is a Paris-based, Franco-British journalist who writes for the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times, Dazed&Confused and Interview Magazine, amongst others. After completing a Masters degree in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and being tortured by a number of editors, she is now on a worldwide quest for anything dysfunctional, hilarious or on sale. Conspiracy theories are also welcome
