Prada- Yellow
Madonna- Red
Madonna, don't preach. Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democratic party and the retirement of David Souter from the Supreme Court tilt the balance of power in Washington further in Barack Obama’s favour
Defending her controversial new video "Justify My Love" on "Nightline" last week, Madonna stumbled, rambled and ended up seeming far less intelligent than she really is. Desperation and luxury are mortal enemies. Fear and power do not peacefully coexist.
Madonna, 'fess up. It follows, then, that she who wishes to reach the most rarefied and potent ranks of fashion, whether in dealmaking or designing, must have a certain serenity.
The video is pornographic.Mr Specter has put Democrats within one vote of a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, and they are likely to get that vote when Minnesota’s wrangling over last November’s election finally comes to an end. It's decadent. And it's fabulous. MTV was right to ban it, a corporate resolve long overdue. Parents cannot possibly control television, with its titanic omnipresence.
Prodded by correspondent Forrest Sawyer for evidence of her responsibility as an artist, Madonna hotly proclaimed her love of children, her social activism and her condom endorsements. Mr Souter, meanwhile, has given the president the first of what may be several chances to define, for years to come, the character of the country’s hugely influential constitutional court. Wrong answer. As Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde knew, neither art nor the artist has a moral responsibility to liberal social causes.
"Justify My Love" is truly avant-garde, at a time when that word has lost its meaning in the flabby art world.Neither event is instantly earth-shattering. It represents a sophisticated European sexuality of a kind we have not seen since the great foreign films of the 1950's and 1960's. But it does not belong on a mainstream music channel watched around the clock by children.
A certain above-the-fray quality. And a flat-out disregard for what you think. Which brings us to Miuccia Prada.
On "Nightline," Madonna bizarrely called the video a "celebration of sex."Mr Specter was an erratic Republican and is already an unreliable Democrat. She imagined happy educational scenes where curious children would ask their parents about the video.The rise of Mrs. Prada, as she is known to her Italian staff members, is a well-known tale—your basic story of a onetime communist and mime student from Milan who takes over her family's dusty luggage company and, with the help of her go-getting husband, turns it into a luxury conglomerate that in 2002 had revenues of about $1.9 billion. Oh, sure! Picture it: "Mommy, please tell me about the tired, tied-up man in the leather harness and the mean, bare-chested lady in the Nazi cap." O.K., dear, right after the milk and cookies.Almost his first act after crossing the aisle was to vote against his new party on the budget. He complained about so-called reconciliation instructions that would let the Senate pass healthcare reform on a simple majority vote, which the administration could more easily win.
Mr. Sawyer asked for Madonna's reaction to feminist charges that, in the neck manacle and floor-crawling of an earlier video, "Express Yourself," she condoned the "degradation" and "humiliation" of women. Her power, first manifested in the minimal black nylon backpack draped over every influential arm in the '90s, also became incarnate in such celebrities as Uma Thurman, twirling down the red carpet in ethereal Prada-designed Oscar gowns. Madonna waffled: "But I chained myself! I'm in charge." Well, no. Mr Souter’s departure is also less than momentous. Appointed by a Republican president and expected to be a conservative, he turned out to be a liberal. Madonna the producer may have chosen the chain, but Madonna the sexual persona in the video is alternately a cross-dressing dominatrix and a slave of male desire.
But who cares what the feminists say anyhow?Assuming that Mr Obama aims to replace him with another liberal – bearing in mind the president’s statement that he regards “empathy” as a qualification for the job – the balance on the court would be unchanged. But having created some definitive design benchmarks, while a sure sign of her eye, is not what has really given Prada her juice. What sets her apart is her disregard—in some cases, her open contempt—for the dictates of fashion. They have been outrageously negative about Madonna from the start. In 1985, Ms. magazine pointedly feted quirky, cuddly singer Cyndi Lauper as its woman of the year. Great judgment: gimmicky Lauper went nowhere, while Madonna grew, flourished, metamorphosed and became an international star of staggering dimensions. She is also a shrewd business tycoon, a modern woman of all-around talent.
Yet altered loyalties will nudge Mr Specter’s independence in a new direction. So far as the court is concerned, Mr Obama can hope to appoint a more effective spokesman for the liberal viewpoint than Mr Souter ever managed to be.Whereas fashion expects an image to be constantly updated, Prada reportedly sank upwards of $100 million into projects that are supposed to be permanent, if not immutable: her architecturally pioneering stores in New York City (by Dutch brainiac Rem Koolhaas) and Tokyo (by the precise Swiss duo Herzog & De Meuron). The moves may not amount to a revolution, but they matter.
Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode.Whereas common sense says a designer should design what she likes, Prada will choose a color (such as turquoise) that she despises, because of the rush it gives her when she can make something beautiful with it. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive and funny -- all at the same time.
American feminism has a man problem. The beaming Betty Crockers, hangdog dowdies and parochial prudes who call themselves feminists want men to be like women. They fear and despise the masculine. Prada has few celebrity friends. She lives in the apartment she grew up in. And, of course, season after season, she sends intelligent, beautiful and, inasmuch as anything in fashion can be, sui generis collections down the Milan runways. The academic feminists think their nerdy bookworm husbands are the ideal model of human manhood.
But Madonna loves real men. She sees the beauty of masculinity, in all its rough vigor and sweaty athletic perfection. She also admires the men who are actually like women: transsexuals and flamboyant drag queens, the heroes of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, which started the gay liberation movement.
"Justify My Love" is an eerie, sultry tableau of jaded androgynous creatures, trapped in a decadent sexual underground. If you want to know what a season is about, you don't miss the Prada show," says Julie Gilhart, fashion director for Barneys. "She never follows anyone else's lead, just her own original energy. Her collections are completely an expression of herself." Its hypnotic images are drawn from such sado-masochistic films as Lililana Cazani's"The Night Porter" and Luchino Visconti's "The Damned." It's the perverse and knowing world of the photographers Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Contemporary American feminism, which began by rejecting Freud because of his alleged sexism, has shut itself off from his ideas of ambiguity, contradiction, conflict, ambivalence. Its simplistic psychology is illustrated by the new cliche of the date-rape furor:" 'No' always means 'no'. " Will we ever graduate from the Girl Scouts?As he contemplates his stronger position in the Senate and the opening on the Supreme Court, Mr Obama needs to weigh his promise to lean against Washington’s polarised political instincts and retain the support of the middle of the US electorate. This, he ought to realise, is not a matter of self-denial but of self-interest. "No" has always been, and always will be, part of the dangerous, alluring courtship ritual of sex and seduction, observable even in the animal kingdom.
Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists.Mr Obama’s reforms are more likely to stick if they are grounded in broad electoral support. They are also more likely to be well-executed if moderate Republicans are given a say in their design and can bring themselves to play a more positive role. And herself is curious, independent and thoughtful. Prada once showed a raincoat that was transparent until it got wet and became opaque. This season she charmed the front row with a collection inspired by 1950s souvenir scarves and the quirky tchotchkes (beaded bags, raffish straw hats and embroidered suede moccasins) that a stylish housewife might have picked up on a honeymoon in Venice. Bipartisan outreach can help check the more extreme tendencies within Mr Obama’s own party. Health reform is a prime example. She sees both the animality and the artifice. Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, "No more masks." Madonna says we are nothing but masks.An already powerful president has just become a little more powerful. He must use this strength with restraint, or his own legacy will be the greatest loser.
Prada the company has not been immune to the economic downturn and has some challenges ahead, including a heavy load of debt that it has been working to pay off. But one thing Prada the woman is unafraid of is a good fight. And more often than not, she wins.
Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism.
Sources:Obama: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4d1fa3ae-399b-11de-b82d-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
Prada: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4d1fa3ae-399b-11de-b82d-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
Madonna: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/14/opinion/madonna-finally-a-real-feminist.html
Of these three I have chosen Madonna and Obama.
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