Little is more frustrating than watching beloved cultural institutions, already struggling under economic stress, hasten their own demise by betraying their customers with woke decision-making. We might call this the “no-bag” effect, referring to the irritation suffered by a customer who has just overspent on a pile of items in order to support a small business, only to be told by the supercilious clerk that the store does not provide bags. Well, next time I’ll just use Amazon, the customer thinks, and who can blame her?
Vogue’s online obituary for the late Brigitte Bardot is a case in point. The magazine long ago abandoned its mission of providing gorgeous inspirational eye-candy for young women who were never going to be able to afford the clothes, in favor of the dreariest woke-ism. So it’s no surprise that the Vogue cultural critic and body-positivity icon Emma Specter has written about Bardot’s politics instead of her style.
Bardot was a French actress, singer, sexpot, and style icon, whom Vogue could have celebrated for many things — her smoky eye, her blond beehive, her embodiment of French-girl chic, which combined bombshell cleavage with boyish, gamine stripes. I’ve never particularly liked Bardot — she had the cruel face of a small animal, a sclerotic trout-pout, and looked spray-tanned long before it was a thing — but you could learn a lot about scarves from her. The orange skirt, metallic jacket, and black beret she wore in the video for the song “Bonnie and Clyde,” with Serge Gainsbourg, was both playful and timeless, and would look good on the streets of any city today. If you wanted to know what to pair with pumps, or how to rock an off-shoulder corset top, or the scornful angle at which to hold a cigarette, Bardot was your girl.
Specter, a writer for a major fashion magazine, doesn’t mention any of this. “Mourning Brigitte Bardot Doesn’t Mean Absolving Her,” the headline on her obit piece reads. Instead, Specter preaches: “It’s our collective responsibility not to let [Bardot’s] legendary beauty and talent obscure the ugliness of her Islamophobia, sexism, and far-right apologia.” She calls the actress the “embodiment of prototypically ‘perfect’ white womanhood,” and asks readers to consider that her fame “relied upon systemic marginalization and outright racism.” We expect such claptrap from Jezebel, but from Vogue?
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