heroin chic

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Feral women, both ways

May 15, 2007 in Adriana Lima, Girls Gone Wild, Kate Moss, feral women, gender violence, heroin chic, raised by wolves, romulus and remus | 2 comments

kate moss; feralSo, I was thinking about how, by the end of my recent post on feral supermodels, I had become interested in how ‘heroin chic’ or ‘poverty chic’ had become, well, just chic. That is the first thing.

The second thing I was thinking about is why I am obsessed with chicness as feral. To be ‘feral,’ as you probably already know, is be wild. But not quite wild like “girls gone wild,” (although…) but more like raised in the wild, like raised by wolves.

According to feralchildren.com, feral children “are children who’ve grown up with minimal human contact, or even none at all. They may have been raised by animals (often wolves) or somehow survived on their own. In some cases, children are confined and denied normal social interaction with other people.”romulus and remus

Hmm. Today’s celebrities: survivors? — check (Kate Moss has been in the news for almost 20 years!) Denied normal interaction? — check. Raised by animals? — well at least there’s a good metaphor there. Read the rest of this entry »

Feral supermodels, hyperlinking, and the value of archives

May 13, 2007 in Capital, Dakota Fanning, Kate Moss, Mae Brussell, Montague Bookmill, feral women, heroin chic, social capital | No comments

Yesterday I was reminded of how hyperlinking might happen in all kinds of places. I was at the Montague Bookmill, grading papers while jd and mhpd played alongside the river. If you’ve ever been to the Bookmill, you know that the bathroom walls (now there are two bathrooms, upgraded, but they haven’t fully lost their randomness) are covered with letters and newspaper clippings. The bathrooms always remind me of the independent journalist Mae Brussell, who used mountains of news clippings and cross-filings to develop theories and keep tabs on all kinds of government activities. She was down with the “internet” before there was an internet!

Anyway, on my way out, I just happened to catch sight of a Natalie Angier article from 1993–”Fashion’s Waif Look Makes Strong Women Weep” (If you don’t get TimesSelect, you can click here to read it). It shot me back to college, to when waifs–and their attendant “poverty chic” and “heroin chic“–were new and news.

Angier, a New York Times science writer, sets it up like this: Read the rest of this entry »