Our friends, Viktor & Rolf (pictured, right) have done it again. The avant-garde designers used their Paris Fashion week show to display a little gender-bending and homo-love. Tucked beneath the Louvre, attendees watched as hetero-couples ballroom danced to Rufus Wainwright’s gayer-than-thou channeling of Judy Garland.
Then, according to Guy Trebay of The New York Times, just as the final march of models were to be tramping down the runway, the floor became a politically-minded playland of faggotry:
Pumped from the ceiling, a bank of artificial fog rolled onto the runway. Suddenly, through the mist, appeared eight men in tailcoats and with patent-leather hair. Filing onto the catwalk as the orchestra struck up a song, each turned crisply to another, partnered and began to dance.
Fred and Ginger became Fred and Fred.
It was not the Stonewall rebellion. It was not Paris, May 1968. Yet, amid all the posturing and attitudinizing that goes on in fashion…there was something sharp and resolute, even radical, about this one small moment.
In an effort to question popular opinion of homosexuality, the dynamic designing duo decided to put their own twist on the debate. “‘It was using the very unnatural form,” or ballroom dancing, [Viktor] Horsting said, “to question what is natural.'” It’s worth noting, as Trebay agrees, that Horsting renounced his Catholic baptism to protest the Vatican’s relentless disdain for homosexuality.
If you have a cooler method of protest than gay ballroom dancing below the Louvre and possible self-imposed damnation, we’d like to know.
How about we take this to the next level?
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Related: Viktor and Rolf Tag Team H&M
