Madonna and aging

As a woman gets older she is expected to keep her beauty and physical youth, but the pressure to do anything with her life experience is much lower if not non-existent. When Madonna turned 50 she received a big applause for having preserved her beauty, but I didn’t feel like applauding. I didn’t understand why a music artist that has never written a song on her own and that hardly ever sings live should deserve any applause. 

A lot of people found it sexist how the media was focused on her age and her looks. I was more disturbed that nobody seemed to notice that after all these years she didn’t ever try to be more than just the packaging of her songs. I can’t imagine a man would be taken serious as a music artist for over 25 years if he would be more focused on his looks than on his music.

Madonna is the prototype of the female music artist and when they look for a new female music artist, they look for a new Madonna. They will first search for someone with the right looks, good dancing skills and maybe good vocals too. Whether or not she writes her own songs is not even considered. Women are just packaging for songs men wrote and Madonna has perfected the art of being packaging.

But do people that listen to music from a female artist really care more about the packaging than the content? I think you find the answer in MySpace. If you discovered a song you would like on MySpace, it was easy to send it to your friends and they could easily send it to theirs. Nobody would consider how many other people might like it. The people would only consider how much they liked it themselves. It was a democracy far away from business decisions. And who did MySpace discover? Lilly Allen, the type of pretty girl you pass by, but a pretty girl that would just make good music. A pretty girl that gave up, because as soon as she left her space on MySpace it would turn out that the world cared more about her pregnancies and her weight than about the music she put her hart and soul in. And that’s what I thought was truly sexist. 

War and fashion

“…the charming full skirts falling to just below the knee did suggest a decorous army wife in olden times…” I think the person at style.com that commented on the Burberry Spring Summer 2012 doesn’t have a clue idea of what it’s like to be an army wife. If someone you love is at the battlefield, you couldn’t possibly care less about being ‘decorous’.

I don’t understand why the fashion world keeps on referring to the military and occasionally even glorifying it. War is something awful and if you would actually understand what it is, you couldn’t possibly feel ‘inspired’ by it. War only leads to the suffering of innocent people, while those that started the war hardly ever go to the battlefield. They rather enjoy their newly acquired status by surrounding themselves with bodyguards and women that are drawn to their power or women that know they don’t have a choice other than pretending they care about that.

Another example: the Michael Kors spring/summer 2012 fashion show seemed to be inspired by Africa and the military. Knowing how much the people in Africa suffer from armed conflicts, I find it two things you can’t put together. A few of the outfits of Michael Kors even looked very much like the uniform of Congolese soldiers: not really the greatest defendants of human rights. On top of that, the handles of his handbags reminded me of bullet belts for automatic guns. Even though I suspect he’s oblivious enough not to know whose look he’s copying. I still don’t understand how you can be inspired by the look of Congolese soldiers, even if it’s not consciously. The people from Congo that you should be inspired by are the ones that don’t carry guns.

Dutch on style.com

Hihi, style.com used a Dutch word on its website: 'echt' it means 'truly, real, geninuine'. Does this mean Dutch is the nouveau French?

London fashion week Spring 2012

London fashion week always if full of shows you either love or hate. And below are the 3 shows I loved the most.


Emilio de la Morena


Even though everybody is pressured to be pretty, wearing clothes that make you look prettier is often seen as unacceptable and superficial. In some subgroups eating disorders and plastic surgery are more tolerated than wearing clothes that make you look prettier. I think people that had plastic surgery or that have an eating disorder are ten times more vain and superficial than people that wear pretty clothes, because an eating disorder or plastic surgery is a much bigger sacrifice than wearing pretty clothes. For this reason I like it when a designer makes pretty wearable clothes, especially if their clothes say ‘I am a pretty girl’ instead of ‘I want to be a pretty girl’. Something I believe Emilio de la Morena has succeeded in.

Peter Jensen


When I looked at Peter Jensen's retro-inspired clothes, I felt like he had a real woman in his mind instead of just a girl that loves buying expensive quirky clothes. And he did have a real woman in his mind: Nina Simone, a black musician from the fifties with quite a reputation and a lot of soul. Fifties nostalgia always has more appeal, when the muse is a girl waiting to break free, than when the muse is the fifties housewife from the commercials waiting for her cupcakes to rise.

Roksanda Ilincic


Roksanda Ilinic warped women’s fashion of all decades since the forties in one collection: eighties pink, sixties blue, nineties grunge and silhouettes of the forties and fifties. A tribute to the women that learnt to take care of themselves, the women that were glad their men were back and the war was over, the women that wanted love, peace and understanding, the women that wanted more and the women that had enough.