Emma Cowing: When fashion blights the age of innocence

Back in the mid-1980s, an advert for a furniture store named Vogue plagued the Scottish airwaves.

“If it’s in vogue,” went the jingle, “it’s in Vogue.” The TV ad ran for years, and as a child it confused me as I got it mixed up first with the magazine Vogue, and then with the pop song of the same name, leading to a brief spell during which I was under the impression that Madonna worked behind the counter at a sofa warehouse on Glasgow’s London Road.

The furniture store is gone but the sentiment, at least where the magazine is concerned, remains true. This was most recently demonstrated by a disturbing set of pictures featuring a young model named Thylane Loubry that popped up in an edition of French Vogue.

In the shots, Loubry – and let us pause for a moment, to reflect that she is just ten years old, an age where girls should be scraping knees, riding bikes and occasionally raiding their mothers’ dressing up boxes – wears heavy makeup and stilettos, an outfit slashed to her navel, and sprawls seductively in front of the camera on a leopard print rug, pouting for France.

Loubry, we are informed, is a veteran of the modelling world, having walked the catwalk for Jean-Paul Gaultier at the age of four, and taken part in a number of modelling shoots. She is described as a rising star of the fashion world. So that’s alright then. The debate over sexualising children has worked up a head of steam in recent times, so you can’t fault Vogue for not being, well, in vogue.

Indeed, just a few days after the pictures emerged, it was also revealed that a French designer had produced a lingerie range aimed at children as young as four years old.

The firm, the upmarket Jours Apres Lune, has designed a line that features bras, camisoles and panties encrusted in ribbons and pearls.

The range was accompanied by a suitably creepy advertising campaign in which heavily made up children in Brigitte Bardot bouffants modelled the sort of lingerie that would look over the top on an 18-year-old, never mind an eight- year-old.

The increasing sexualisation of children, of course, is not new. Earlier this year Matalan was forced to remove a padded bra aimed at eight year olds, while Asda and Primark have also been forced to remove items of clothing deemed inappropriately sexual for children.

Pop singers such as Rihanna and Katy Perry, whose fans are often pre-pubescent girls, have been criticised for marketing an incredibly sexual image. The website Mumsnet launched a campaign entitled “Let Girls Be Girls”, encouraging major retailers to sign up and make a concentrated effort to banish such items and images from their stores.

What I find disturbing about these most recent examples is that they were done deliberately. While Matalan could argue that their padded bra was an ignorant “bit of fun”, French Vogue has very knowingly dressed up a ten-year-old girl to look like a provocative adult. They are, it has been argued, being ironic.

The problem is, ten-year- olds don’t do irony. Instead of seeing these pictures online and thinking “ah, the post-modern social commentary of French Vogue is certainly something I will ponder at my next debating society meeting”, they will see these pictures online and think “I want to look like that”.

From there it is a slippery slope. In today’s world, images are often seen out of context. Pictures from a photo shoot in Vogue will end up in the pages of Heat magazine. Snaps from a lingerie advertising campaign will appear on teenage gossip websites.

Mocking something as fundamental as the innocence of children is a desperately dangerous thing to do. Our children are already bombarded by inappropriately sexual images every single day, whether it be on television, online or in our corner shop, where pictures of scantily clad lads mag cover girls peer down at them.

Parents nowadays face a full-time job protecting their children from such images. What they do not need is fashion designers and photographers with too much time on their hands making that task even harder.

In vogue it most certainly should not be.