Shut Up Karl
February
9th, 2012
You should hide behind that fan Karl
Lagerfeld, shame on you, for calling Adele ‘a little bit fat’. Who are you?
What is the point of saying that? What are you trying to prove? Why are you
trying to cut a bitch down? Shame shame shame. Don’t read people as that
only leads to being read to and you don’t want to hear that story. You have
talked about being bullied, and I am sure you were. I see it, as I was bullied
too, and I am disappointed in you, for here you have proven yourself to be
quite good at it, and you are the very worst kind – a condescending one.
Adele is nothing less than amazing. She is a
true, courageous and rare talent and someone who has captured the attention and
the admiration of the world in a seriously short time. She is ALSO a great beauty
and tremendously meaningful incandescent wonder. She looks so awesome, her
loveliness radiates from her strong and fast spinning interior klieg lights and
brightens everything to the degree that it makes even dark, overcast me feel
luminous and fierce and worthy. That’s what a light like her does.
She lights up our life. She is beaming through the clouds and bringing you the
sun. Fuck you if you can’t realize that. Fuck you and your fucking glasses.
Take them off for a second and see the goddamn light. Self tanner doesn’t give
you no vitamin D. You need sun.
Adele sings and I wish I could sing like that,
and I do, in the shower. I wonder if i could look like her. Maybe 20 years ago
that could have been me. Maybe I am beautiful after all. Maybe everyone was
wrong about me. Maybe I am going to be loved. Maybe I’ll be happy someday.
Maybe, yes. Maybe.
It sounds complex because it is terribly
complex, but curiously simple and plain. When you see someone you identify
with, who has a body that could be your body, and you recognize it on the
screen because you remember it from the mirror and you watch them shine and
conquer and overcome and overwhelm and startle and take over the world, you
think you can do the same. It gives you strength. It’s powerful, indescribably
so. A star like her – we haven’t had someone like that for a while. She’s been
desperately needed. Where you been all our lives Adele? I am just glad you’re
here.
Adele changes the game and all the rules. She
makes a generation of women, young and old, want to play. She makes us feel
like we could win, we could actually win this time. Finally, we have our eyes
on the prize. When she’s on the cover of a magazine, I buy it right then and
there. She doesn’t look like the girls who are always on the cover of a
magazine. She looks better, and all the more so because she really fucking
deserves to be there.
Why are you trying to tarnish that? why are
you trying to spit on her success and fame? Its ugly. It’s uncouth and unfair.
And I know that you, as you have the kind of face and frame easily run to fat –
its familiar as I have the same – I know you’ve struggled. I have felt for you.
You know what it feels like to be judged. Why do it? Because you’ve made it to
the other side? Is it better there? Aren’t you hungry? I am, just looking at
you. I know to be as thin as you are now, you need to control everything that
goes into your mouth every second of every minute of every hour of every day. I
wish you were as ardent in controlling what came out of it.
I don’t know why we care what you have to say.
We don’t have the luxury to starve for fashion. We have to work for a living.
We have double shifts. We carry groceries we can barely buy with our meager
salaries up many flights of stairs and feed our children and deal with our
children being molested and woefully sometimes bury our children and find a way
to live through this, being merely children ourselves. We worry through vocal
surgery and survive the silence and still go to gigs and keep from getting hit
and if we do, successfully cover the bruises with concealer so we can go to
school and to the DMV and SXSW and keep our heads up high while being unloved
or loved by the wrong ones and hang in the friend zone as we hang our laundry
out to dry and run for the bus and fight for the right to marriage while
finalizing painful divorces and try amidst all this to keep going and get by.
When you say we are fat, you murder our grace,
and we’ve already lost so much to begin with. We’ve already lost everything,
except weight. That we gain steadily, along with self hatred, and all you are
doing is adding to our burden, pressing down on the scale with the long toe of
your fine, elegantly tassled loafer.
We don’t have millions of dollars to perforate
our fat with expensive, experimental injections. We don’t have time to be
lightheaded and sick with hunger. We can’t afford fasting clinics in the Swiss
Alps or a messianic nutritionist or portion controlled meals wrapped up in
white linen and enshrouded in Chanel camellias. We have to pay the rent and pay
for gas and if eating is some comfort to us in our difficult lives, let it be
so. Just let us be. Let us listen to Adele, who is triumphantly one of us and
let us enjoy her and feel like her and think we are her for a moment and be
safe in her music and in our heads.
To someone like you or me or Adele or anyone
really, to be called fat is the gravest insult, and the injury in yours is that
you say she has a beautiful face. How many of us have heard the same thing and
suffered more for it? Its not a compliment. It’s like saying ‘my, what a
fabulous turd.’ Keep your compliments and condescension to yourself. It doesn’t
soften what you know in your heart to be a mighty blow.
You consider yourself to be the authority on
style, as you are supposedly style personified but what good is style when you
have no class? What good is style when you have no humanity? What good is style
when you make us want to kill ourselves? We are dying, Karl. Lots of us are
already dead.
Don’t bother apologizing, as I am sure your
people, your ‘Team Lagerfeld’ is advising you to do. There is no ‘I’ in team,
but if there were, there would be a Tim and a Tam and have you had a Tim Tam?
You should. They are real good. What you could do instead of offering an empty
apology is design for us, all the regular folks in the world, and really go for
it. Make clothes that flatter us, make us feel good about ourselves. Make
beautiful things that glorify us but won’t bankrupt our bank accounts or our
spirit. Do your job, dummy. Be the sartorial equivalent to Adele’s music. I
know you have it in you. There is immeasurable genius behind all your idiocy,
behind the ridiculous glasses, within the high perimeter of that starched
collar.
If you say it isn’t possible, then you are
useless. If you say you can’t do it and that it is our own fault that we can’t
be thin enough for your vision, then you are a dismal failure, and you’ve
always been one and you always will be.
We are sick of only being able to wear your
fragrance. It stinks of selfishness and stupidity and lack of effort and
frankly, that is beneath you, because honestly, I know you try, just like we
try. We are all trying Karl, but I am asking you to try harder. With your
prodigious means and power, you could change things for the better, for
generations to come. But if you don’t want to now, then you probably won’t
ever, which is sad and wasteful of your lavish gifts and a precious opportunity
lost. If you want to be that way then flap that fan until you take flight and
fill the thin air with your antique birdsong – out of earshot, so we can listen
to Adele in peace.
P.S. I
know he apologized but I still think this is a good piece of writing and truly
worth reading. I was a little late responding because I was so angry!! As I
wrote, I was crying and clenching and unclenching my jaw and my asshole at the
same time. It would have been nice for someone else I guess but unfortunately I
was alone. Fashion just hurts my feelings all the time. I love his work, even
though it never fits me and I can’t even get my arms in a beautiful white silk
sequin pantsuit I have of his I bought on ebay. I keep it and I look at it and
I am enraged but I can’t fucking throw it out because it is so nice. I have a
bunch of clothes of his like that. It is sick. Ok, I am considering his
apology. But he needs to make shit we can actually fucking wear.
Margaret Cho
