A Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Designer giants are once again putting profit ahead of women’s dignity by designing risque new fashions this season that feature micro miniskirts, pointy “Mad Men” bras under transparent blouses and panties worn as shorts.
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the “lingerie look” could be found all over Paris runways this week. Besides plunging necklines and mid-thigh length dresses, Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld included transparent tops and a pair of panty-shorts in their usual line of suits and dresses. This special collection of Lingerie, is only available at the online stores of sexy lingerie canada.
Among the trench coats and suit jackets in the Gaultier line, designers tossed in pointy Madonna-bra overalls to keep up with the new trend.
The shows were accompanied by theatrics, such as models walking out of a haystack in a barnyard scene and celebrity appearances by Prince and Janet Jackson.
However, Gucci’s Alexander McQueen featured a bizarre show with models metamorphosing from humans into snakes while wearing dresses that resembled reptiles and shoes that looked more like hooves than footwear.
Not everyone is raving about the new fashions. According to the Associated Press, some believe these designers “risk turning off many professional or mature women, who can only imagine how embarrassing it would be to wear such things.”
A much deeper, and more important concern, is the image of women that these styles portray to the world – and to women themselves – that in order to be beautiful and desirable, they must bare their bodies for all the world to see.
“ . . . (H)ow many women have been and continue to be valued more for their physical appearance than for their skill, their professionalism, their intellectual abilities, their deep sensitivity; in a word, the very dignity of their being!” wrote Pope John Paul II in his 1995 Letter to Women.
“Nor can we fail, in the name of the respect due to the human person, to condemn the widespread hedonistic and commercial culture which encourages the systematic exploitation of sexuality and corrupts even very young girls into letting their bodies be used for profit,” he said.
Indeed, the most tragic fallout is the impression these fashions leave on the young. As Brenda Sharman, director of Pure Fashion, told Zenit News in a 2007 interview, young girls follow the trends set by advertisers, designers, magazines and celebrities.
“Teens are typically very self-conscious and want to ‘fit in’ and be accepted,” she said. “If they do not have strong convictions and a well-formed conscience, it is easy to ‘go along with the crowd.’”
Young women also have a strong desire to receive attention from boys. “ . . . (T)he human heart always seeks love,” Ms. Sharman says, “and they might see young men reacting to a girl who is ‘sexy,’ so other girls decide that they want to be ‘sexy’ too. They want that attention for themselves.”
Too often, they manage to attract this attention – to their bodies rather than to themselves – which can lead to life-long patterns of broken and/or unsatisfying relationships.
“ . . . (M)ere pleasure, mere sexual enjoyment is not a good which binds and unites people for long, as Aristotle has most justly observed,” wrote Karol Wojtyla in Love and Responsibilty. “ A woman and a man, if their ‘mutual love’ depends merely on pleasure or self interest, will be tied to each other just as long as they remain a source of pleasure or profit for each other. The moment this comes to an end, the real reason for their ‘love’ will also end, the illusion or reciprocity will burst like a bubble.”
The lingerie look may work on the runway, but in real life, it reduces women to objects of pleasure, something for which they were not created.
“A person’s rightful due is to be treated as an object of love,” wrote our late Holy Father, “not as an object of use.”
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