Balenciaga and fashion’s child sexualisation problem 

For a long time now, high fashion – with the alibi of being ‘art’ – has tried on rape, self-harm, heroin-chic and of course the simple, timeless classics of anorexia/bulimia as titillating ‘looks’. Anything to keep an enervated haute couture industry (for many years selling mainly in Russia, China and the Middle East, though post-pandemic even these are dropping off) in the headlines.  

Ambiguous – to say the least – about the beauty of the female body, the mainly gay male world of high fashion has, after a brief period of pretending to embrace ‘diversity’ (anything above a size eight) returned to physiques in which any semblance of female sexual characteristics has been excised.

Covering Milan Fashion Week in the Mail recently under the headline ‘The return of heroin chic is a cynical betrayal of young women’ Liz Jones said: ‘This season, the female models aren’t even pretty – their bodies are sinewy, hard, not feminine at all. What