To the Billboard Music Awards a week ago, Jennifer Lopez bared most of her stomach and the undersides of her breasts in a creation by … hmm, let me look that up.
At the Met Gala on May 4, Ms. Lopez, Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian West were the three fanny-flaunting Furies, in gowns whose designers don’t immediately spring to mind, though I do remember the violent hitching gesture with which Ms. Lopez adjusted hers in the Temple of Dendur before dinner, as if to ensure those few parts of hers still private remained so.
And at the annual awards presentation of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, to take place Monday, June 1, at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center (O tempora! O mores!), we can surely expect more, or less, of same.
It was there, a year ago, that Rihanna started the current rage for the so-called “naked look,” with a body stocking noted more for the manufacturer of the crystals that adorned it, the inescapable Swarovski, than its designer, Adam Selman.
At least one stylist, Anita Patrickson, who has worked with the model Chanel Iman and the actress Julianne Hough, decried this new standard. “It’s great if you’re doing a theatrical live show and the dancers are wearing it, but when you think back to Grace Kelly waltzing along the red carpet, it seems such a shame,” Ms. Parkinson said in a telephone interview.
Even she, though, recently put Michelle Rodriguez in a black tentacled back-barer by Zuhair Murad, a specialist in such things, for the “Mad Max: Fury Road” premiere at Cannes, where actresses have long simulated Venus emerging naked from the half-shell.
By encasing themselves in such creations — I wouldn’t go so far as to call them dresses — in the more formal, urban precincts of museums and concert halls, these celebrities are flaunting their bodies, to state the obvious (most impressively so in the case of those older than 40).
They are also neatly subverting the product placement that has dominated the red carpet for the last 20 years or so, since screams and flashbulbs drown out all of the now-automatic branding burps.
They are obviating the automatic question, “Who are you wearing?” Indeed, they are obviating speech. Silent, statue-like, the semi-clad are taking back the night from the global conglomerates that have so voraciously seized parties and galas as prime marketing opportunities.
And they are seeking to place themselves in a bombshell pantheon led not by Ms. Kelly but by Marilyn Monroe, who sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in a basted-on stretch of illusion fabric that few could tell you was made by the costume designer Jean Louis, though it sold for $1.15 million plus commission at auction in 1999.
Ms. Monroe certainly loved the camera and was known to pore carefully over portrait proof sheets. But one cannot imagine her indulging, as Ms. West did recently, in a 445-page book consisting entirely of selfies and distributed (I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “published”) by Rizzoli.
This book, titled “Selfish,” has been heralded as “riveting” by Laura Bennett at Slate; Jerry Saltz of New York magazine compared it with apparent sincerity to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.”
With all due respect to such critics, this is poppycock.
“Selfish” may as well be called “Surface.” Like Madonna’s “Sex” more than 20 years ago, which came quaintly wrapped in Mylar (and at least featured someone who went through the motions of dancing, singing and acting rather than just posing), it is a feat of packaging and persistence, nothing more. It does not so much suggest Venus as Narcissus, drowning in his Photo Stream. And it is about as engrossing, and as meritorious, as the accountant’s spreadsheet it is enriching.
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