Can People Please Stop Putting Bella Hadid in a Box?
Today, following yesterday’s Fendi Haute Couture show featuring a number of supermodels and 90s vixens coexisting in a giant terrarium, we are renewing our plea for the fashion industry to stop putting Bella Hadid in boxes and/or glass enclosures.
This request follows an a-ha moment resulting from last season’s Burberry campaign lensed by the legendary photography duo Inez and Vinoodh, featuring the supermodel rocking the British brand’s new line of bags in a giant crate with what looks to be a wooden subculture of a panther.
Although it seems like forever ago, some of us might remember the splashy 2018 cover of Pop magazine, in which the photographer Charlotte Wales photographed the supermodel inside a plexiglass terrarium in what looked like the pedestal of a Damien Hirst sculpture. “This was one of my favorite days ever!” Hadid said in an Instagram post about hanging out in a cube for hours on end, making us wonder what her days are normally like.
While Wales’s shoot seemed to be a postmodern statement on the spectacle of celebrity in today’s visual culture, seeing Bella in a box again brings up questions as to what the unconscious impulse behind all of this is. The fashion industry’s inherent desire to commodify female bodies into products? Probably, but duh. The reality that Bella herself is the poster child of a user-generated generation of celebrities that is uniquely capable of eating these tropes and spitting them back out again? Interesting…
Either way, if they put Bella in a box a fourth time, we’ll let you know.