When high-end fashion sexualises little girls

This is a fascinating discussion – where is the line between sexualising little girls and dressing up, between exploitation and cynical fashion industry humour; what makes a particular pose adult or even too sexy for a child?

I have some pretty firm views on the matter – see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and even here where I previously wrote about the same child model pictured, Thylane Loubry Blondeau. In summary, I think these kinds of images collapse childhood into adolescence as a marketing ploy; they sneak sexiness into our vision of universal girlhood (as if we couldn’t define femaleness without it); they rob children of their own budding sexuality and impose an adult heterosexual male version of it over the top of them; they teach children, including little girls themselves, that girls are to be objectified; and, they lead us to equate little girls with vanity and materialism. But the worst thing of all? These sexualised fashion images are sold to us as consumer choices for little girls to supposedly opt in and out of at will, as though all girls are as privileged as the children in the photos, as though all of them are completely safe from predatory adults and environments.

There used to be a fuck yeah tumblr fan site for Thylane (really!), but it has since been renamed the rather more safe, Thylane Blondeau Pictures. For those who’ve always argued it is creepy of adults to even suggest some images might be sexualising of children I wonder what they make of all that.

This, below, is one of the more controversial shots (particularly outside Europe), in Thylane’s portfolio  because she is shirtless in it, but I actually find that image quite inoffensive – she looks like a child, she’s ‘posed’ like a child, she’s in a childish context. There is something truthful about the image, though I have to wonder what the point is if it was when she is presumably supposed to be modelling clothes in order to advertise them.

So, it’s not child nudity that I have a problem with (god knows, have you seen our house?), rather it’s the contrived poses, it’s the deliberate and orchestrated mimicry of classic ‘sexy adult’ expressions that I find irksome. It is flesh for the sake of it. Like the image below, I see that as getting to be exploitative. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t find it obscene, don’t think it is child pornography, don’t think it isn’t a clever shot, and that Thylane isn’t beautiful in it – but this ‘come hither’ thing doesn’t feel truthful to me. It looks like an adult model’s pose, and it looks like one the photographer manipulated into happening for the shot in order to titillate the viewer.

There are a couple of other interesting things at play here, one of the more noteworthy is the way expensive fashion and high-end magazines signal respectability, taste and sophistication to the audience. How would these images look if they weren’t for high-end fashion magazines, if they were instead taken for a child beauty pageant with all the typical fashion markers of that ‘class’  of girl imagery?

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