karl lagerfeld short film "Vol de Jour"

I got ahold of this youtube short by Karl Lagerfeld today; for those of you who don't know, Lagerfeld is the head designer for Chanel and also his own line. (Wiki entry here). He likes to occasionally spout of inflammatory things about how nobody wants to see fat women in fashion. He must be the stereotypical fashion guru, with his black and white uniform that include black glasses and white hair. I imagine they based the Zoolander character Mugatu after him (Derelicte, anyone?)

Regardless, he was born in 1933 so he's somewhere around 76 years old and he's still going strong. Recently he made this short film starring Lara Stone, one of the "It" models of the moment (she's Dutch) and some hunk of burning love male model named Baptiste Giabiconi. Without searching him on google, I'm gonna say "ITALIANO." This movie is...well, it's not the best. It's about a couple of very attractive shoplifters who go around stealing Chanel clothes. There's an awkward phase towards the end where Stone tries on clothes for Giabiconi and it gets strangely boring. The whole thing reads as a student film to me, except with remarkably attractive people and lush settings. My favorite part of it is the weird harpsichord music.

I wanted to post it to S and K because this movie reads like a lech's exercise in stalking some beautiful young people. It's true that I watched it while thinking about Lagerfeld himself, but this couple comes across as boring in the film. Beautiful, but boring. We're only interested in them because Lagerfeld is interested in them, and Lagerfeld is (let's face is) SEVENTY-SIX. I'm not trying to spout of some ageist bullshit about older people controlling fashion: I'm just saying it's more than a little fucked up that a 76 year old man picks and chooses the hottest new models. Stone is 26, 50 years his junior. Even the way the male model drags Stone around on the screen makes me nervous. We've got some serious female objectification on our hands.

I realize that I'm opening up a whole can of fashion worms here: most of the fashion industry is dictated by older titans who somehow get to say which pretty young thing matters and which pretty young thing doesn't. (And hell, get a load of the language I'm using here--"pretty young things"--female models are always the object for our consumption aren't they?) Stone herself, at 26, is practically ancient. But overall I'm not interested in indicting the entire fashion industry at this point in time. I just want to note that I saw this clip, I thought my readers might enjoy it, and I wanted to say a few words about how Karl Lagerfeld kinda weirds me out.