A New York Times style magazine photo display of the actress Julianne Moore shows the positive delight in ugliness that characterizes the elite fashion world. Moore resembles a corpse or one of the subhuman sculptures of the artist Alberto Giacometti. One expects to see snakes in her hair. What is the purpose of hideously deforming a beautiful woman in this way? The purpose is to affirm ugliness, a pressing necessity in the desert of fashion, where beauty cannot be explained or defended. The photos remind me of the words of the Orthodox thinker, Fr. Seraphim Rose, about Giacometti’s art:

Even more revealing than the bodies of these creatures are the faces. It would be too much to say that these faces express hopelessness, that would be to ascribe to them some trace of humanity which they most emphatically lack. They are the faces, rather, of creatures more or less “adjusted” to the world they know, a world not hostile but entirely alien, not inhuman but “a-human.” … Man, in this art, is no longer even a caricature of himself; he is no longer portrayed in the throes of spiritual death, ravaged by the hideous Nihilism of our century that attacks, not just the body and soul, but the very idea and nature of man. … The new art celebrates the birth of a new species, the creature of the lower depths, subhumanity. [Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, Fr. Seraphim Rose, 1994]

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Rita Jane writes:

I’m recovering from the flu and went to work looking like that yesterday. Several people came up to ask me if I was alright. And this is what women are to aspire to these days?

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