IntroductionIs fashion something to die for? If one examines the content of fashion magazines, websites, videos, blogs, and fashion itself, the answer is a resounding "yes". Death is a fashion star, used to sell clothing, accessories, brands, celebrity, magazines, style-based television programming and websites, and cross-media collaborative efforts. From Alexander McQueen and Ralph Lauren to Target and H&M, skulls, crossbones, and skeleton motifs have taken over fashion. Death is the darling of not only the fashion set but also of the masses - and their dogs, who wear skull bedecked cardigans and collars and lounge on skeleton embossed beds. In mainstream fashion and lifestyle magazines, models, actors, stylists, and socialites not only model skull style, they model 'death' itself, in gruesome pantomimes of murder, suicide, and eco-disaster. These "corpse chic" (Foltyn, 2008b, 2009) narratives are 'ripped from the headlines', but are also inspired by literature, music, cinema, and true-crime television genres; they are the basis for photos shoots for the reality TV program
America's Top Model. In the twenty-first century, and in more ways than one, fashion, to paraphrase Karl Lagerfeld, is not only "ephemeral" and "unfair"; it is "dangerous" (2006).
Comment: Absolutely heartless.