The Haute Couture Week has just ended in Paris, and its main result was not some amazing collection, not some upward trend or even a new name in an old house, but what I would call “Demi Moore's case”. For several days now, everyone has been discussing Demi Moore, who was completely unrecognizable, who opened the Fendi show. Kate Moss, too, somehow did not recognize everything right away, but here makeup and styling worked more, which the new artistic director of Fendi's women's collections was quite quirky. But Demi had just a new face - and I personally, until I read that it was she, I could not understand who it was that opened the first show of Kim Jones for Fendi.
In our time, when everything and everything is so polarized that any "haircut" immediately sounds "shaved", at first there were screams about the horrors of plastic surgery, but immediately in response they heard no less angry screams about body and beauty positivism and about the fact that a woman has the right to walk with the person she wants. And it was here that the very case arose, expressively indicating some important contradiction within the new ethics.
In fact, at the dawn of the third decade of the 21st century, it is a little strange to hear arguments about the fact that women have the right to whatever face and body they like, pronounced with passion and polemical fervor. About this all has already been said, not only yesterday, but even the day before yesterday - and it's a little late to break chairs here. Women have this right, and men also have it, and children have, and in general any human being has the right to look the way he wants and not be condemned, discussed and persecuted by society for this. And in general, all this bad infinity of skirmishes - "Oh, what did she do with her face ?!" - "Yes, I did what I wanted!" - would not be worth any special attention if, apart from the usual network hate weighed out to all celebrities, there would not be something else very important connected with the most key meanings. Even so - with one of the main socio-cultural problems of our time.
Here we, in fact, come to a new ethics, in the center of which is placed the idea of full and joyful acceptance of yourself as you are - too fat, too thin, with too small or too large breasts, crooked, oblique, with Asperger's syndrome, Tourette's syndrome and other disorders of any spectrum. And no one - neither society, nor family, nor the Lord God - has the right to demand from us that we somehow rape ourselves and remake ourselves to their standards. Because everything, literally everything - all people, lions, eagles and partridges, in a word, all lives - are worthy of sympathy and love, and everyone should be given a chance to live without counter hostility because of certain forms of their physicality. Without any irony, this is the greatest achievement of modern humanism,around which everything else was built - from pop psychology with its "depreciation" and "boundaries" to body positivism.
Demi Moore shooting for Vogue España, December 2020 © instagram.com/demimoore
But what, if not a radical and complete rejection of oneself, can be behind such a radical and complete redesign of oneself? Celebrities who change their appearance at any age in the most unceremonious way - from 23-year-old Kylie Jenner to 58-year-old Demi Moore - turn out to be a walking logical contradiction: on the one hand, they all as one stand for women power and self-acceptance, on the other - we are ready to accept ourselves personally only when leaving the clinic of plastic surgery. The second somewhat devalues the first, makes it not only unconvincing, but also a little hypocritical. Do they have the right to do whatever they want with their body and face? This is a rhetorical question, the answer to which has long been knocked out over their eyebrows. But we, the public, feeling this contradiction, in response undertake to discuss them - and can we be blamed for this?
But there is another deeper and not so easily manifestable thing that Demi Moore's case points to. When a person gets up in the morning, looks at himself in the mirror - and is ready for anything, just not to see his wrinkles and, more broadly, the face he was born with - it scares. When he is ready to stop being recognized, just not to see traces of his age, it is depressing. This existential horror of irreversibility is exactly what is behind the entire external storm around Demi Moore. Apart from the hate, behind the hate and even inside the hate - it is to him that the authors of all these “what did she do to herself ?!” react consciously or unconsciously. In the case of public people - with excellent careers and positions - this scares not only themselves, but also those who look at them, because it makes ordinary people turn towards this horror.which is inside each of us, to notice it, to see how it moves in the darkest corner of consciousness, where we usually drive it. It's like in Dovlatov's famous story about the Tbilisi conference “Optimism of Soviet Literature”, where a Georgian writer asks the speaker from the Moscow poet Narovchatov about Lord Byron - was he young, was he good-looking, was he talented, was he rich? And at the end he says: “Look at Byron. He was young, handsome, wealthy and talented. And he was a pessimist. And you are old, beggar, ugly and talentless. And you are an optimist! "where the Georgian writer asks the speaker from the Moscow poet Narovchatov about Lord Byron - was he young, was he good-looking, was he talented, was he rich? And at the end he says: “Look at Byron. He was young, handsome, wealthy and talented. And he was a pessimist. And you are old, beggar, ugly and talentless. And you are an optimist! "where the Georgian writer asks the speaker from the Moscow poet Narovchatov about Lord Byron - was he young, was he good-looking, was he talented, was he rich? And at the end he says: “Look at Byron. He was young, handsome, wealthy and talented. And he was a pessimist. And you are old, beggar, ugly and talentless. And you are an optimist!"
If she - beautiful, rich, talented - is so unsure of herself and in such a disagreement with her completely beautiful appearance, then what can I, an ordinary person with loans and without plastic surgeons, do? Are we talking with enthusiasm and pressure about accepting ourselves with all our imperfections, or do we mean that all imperfections can then be endlessly corrected? Or is it that a person with all his fears and imperfections is a much more complex phenomenon that does not fit into simple body-positive formulas? The new ethics still does not answer these questions.
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