A just-turned 13 year old girl named Maddison Gabriel was chosen as “the face” of the inaugural Gold Coast Fashion Week in Australia, prompting fabulous publicity from all sorts of outraged people, like other models (“I was 15 when I started, but 12? That’s taking it to a whole new level”) and the country’s Prime Minister (“We do have to preserve some notion of innocence in our society”).
Now, let me just say that I’m so over the demoralizing hijinks of High Fashion. If designers want to showcase their unattainable clothes on animated skeletons, and if people continue to be fascinated, adoring, and envious of these emaciated ideals, well, whatever. Maybe we should just chalk it up to another peril of affluence and start to pay attention to the humans who aren’t trying to starve themselves to death.
Still, this story disturbs me. Not because the fashion world is exploiting a willing 13-year old, but because she actually looks 13. Usually teenaged models appear to have gone through puberty, and their facial features are fully-formed so that I’m surprised that they are so young. But Maddison Gabriel looks like a prepubescent. And that’s perverted.
(I haven’t been this scandalized by fashion since my trip to Provincetown, where male swimsuits with heavily-padded crotches are the style du jour.)
