Side note: Perez called Tracie a "d-bag" and started his own fashion blog: cocoperez.com.
The Cut wrote burning rebuttal to Tracie's opinions.
Read both blog posts below.
Tracie Egan - "Are Gay Designers Responsible For All Of Fashion’s Problems?"
It’s hard not to hate Perez Hilton. Dude can be a real d-bag. So, when Jezebel blogger Tracie Egan wrote on her own blog that she’s not nervous about Hilton’s new CocoPerez “lady blog,” we were pretty much in agreement. After all, Jezebel is pretty awesome as far as the feminist blog set goes, and Perez Hilton draws penises on women’s faces. But Egan moved quickly from criticizing Perez for thinking he “gets” women to bitching about gay men in general. According to Egan, gay men are to blame for most of the problems in the fashion industry.
She writes: “I think that gay men are actually the most to blame for many of the problems in the fashion industry, like the absence of womanly curves on the runway, and the hideous, figure-assaulting trend that is the tent dress, which no women who have tits, and no straight men who have an appreciation for tits, have any use for.”
Tent dresses generally aren’t terribly sexy, and sometimes runway shows do some serious figure-assaulting, but blaming gay male designers is a bit of a stretch, no? Yes, they contribute, but some of the most self-described “flaming” designers out there also design some of the most feminine collections of Fashion Week year after year.
The big boys that come to mind are Dior designer John Galliano (he of the painted-on eyebrows and ruffled tops) and Alexander McQueen. Galliano’s shows are consistently rife with nip-waisted skirts that flow into rather feminine fuller bottoms, sheath dresses that are all about the lady body bits and other such girl-y items. McQueen, too, is way into women looking like women in his clothes.
Admittedly, both put out a fair number of body-disguising pieces, but those are generally the more conceptual, couture pieces. They’re not actually intended to be mainstays of the collection.
So, Tracie, go ahead and rip on Perez. We’re with you sis. But please, leave the fashion gay boys alone!
The Cut - "Tracie Egan Blames Gay Men for ‘Many’ of the Fashion Industry’s Problems"
Tracie Egan is a writer for Jezebel who has her own blog, "One D at a Time." In a post about why she doesn't fear competition from CocoPerez, Perez Hilton's new lady fashion site, she offers this aside:
I think that gay men are actually the most to blame for many of the problems in the fashion industry, like the absence of womanly curves on the runway, and the hideous, figure-assaulting trend that is the tent dress, which no women who have tits, and no straight men who have an appreciation for tits, have any use for.
It's hard to argue that gay male designers perpetuate the "tent"-dress trend any more than female designers or straight male designers. And it's hard not to admire Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz, who designed some of the most famous tent dresses in recent memory. Elbaz does not design clothes for straight men who "have an appreciation for tits." As Ariel Levy wrote in her New Yorker profile of the designer, he designs clothes "that a woman wears when she falls in love herself," not clothes "that will make a man fall in love with the woman who wears [them]."
As for the skinny-model issue, all of the top designers essentially pull from the same group of a couple hundred girls each season, who mostly have 34-inch hips and thighs smaller than arms. So you see the same skinny girls in all the top shows. Also, Marc Jacobs recently put Daisy Lowe, someone who may be slender but much more closely resembles real women than the typical runway fare, in a campaign. And who discovered Lara Stone and made her a star? Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy. The problems with the fashion industry may be many, but it seems unfair to place most of the blame on gay men when there are plenty of women and a handful of straight dudes working in it, too.
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