Genocide as fashion in Tokyo?

In the midst of the constant reporting about the slaughter in Gaza, I stumbled on this fashion display in Omotesando in Tokyo last week.

It was a typical expensive fashion as a cyptic form of conceptual art that I am quite familiar with. The brand name was Comme des Garçons and by the entrance was a pile of bags labeled as “energy” or “freedom.” But what was most unnerving was the art in the background.

The edges of the entire gallery (which had overpriced clothing in the middle) was lined with fractured and decapitated plaster manniquins. The first impression was that this was some sort of aesthetically enhanced massacre. The most immediately relevent reference had to be the genocide in Gaza.

Perhaps in some sort of twisted cognative programming agenda, the horror of brutal extermination of people in some far away place was rendered as artistically intriquing through this display.

Perhaps we are going through a period of decadence, like that of the late Roman Empire. Could it be that Donald Trump is a reality TV version of Emperor Nero, or perhaps a knock-off of Emperor Caligula?

The fashion house Viktor and Rolf (founded by Dutch designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren) goes out of its way to find challenging images that can blaze new trails in haute couture. A poster from one of their exhibitions was so striking that they chose it for the cover of a retrospective.

/The viewer is confronted by a confusing image. A wealthy white woman appears as if she were lying on a bed, with a luxurious red blanket wrapped around her and her hair spread over an indulgent pillow. She is positioned vertically relative to the landscape behind her, cradling a blond-haired baby in her right arm, in the fashion of a Renaissance Madonna and child. Her blase facial expression suggests sexual indulgence, luxury and indifference.

But the image of wealth is set against a disturbing background. The mother and child are standing in front of the debris from a demolished home, perhaps from the aftermath of a Hurricane Katrina or of a Hurricane Michael.

Her wealth and her privilege are made more appealing, more intriguing, by their contrast with the sufferings of ordinary people that result from collapsing infrastructure, climate change and austerity policies. The fascination in image is that it allows the super-rich (and those who envy them) to experience the sufferings of ordinary people vicariously, much as Marie Antoinette enjoyed the experience of being an ordinary peasant by building a little farm on the grounds of Versailles.

Taking aesthetic pleasure from this image is quite simply a psychopathic act. After all, those rich are dependent on extractive industries and on fossil fuels to provide their big quarterly returns. Their search for profit has led to the climate change that makes such catastrophes and made it impossible for the citizen to generate his or her own energy.