So I was using a spare minute to go through the magazines that have piled up in the apartment and flipping through the spring 2019 issue of Porter, the publication from Net-a-Porter, the online shopping-magazine-website hybrid thingy-big-ball-of-stuff that everything is becoming these days, because everything needs to be everything these days. I’d grabbed this glossy chunk off our giveaway table at work and settled down to see what Gisele Bündchen—she of the cover—was up to these days, and apparently that’s a lot. The photos, by Kate Moss’s ex, Mario Sorrenti (OK, he’s basically the guy who shot the first photos of Kate in the early 90s) are straight-up fashion: clothing and personality.

But also voyeurism, which is to me what photography, fashion and modeling can do very well. Those pictures make us look. They invite us to make up stories. Then of course there are the stories that often come with the photos. Interviews and such that as I get older, strike me as more match-y/match-y make-us-smile than the Michael Kors’ 2019 cruise collection. Was I going to truly learn anything about Gisele that a publicist wouldn’t want me to know?

Wandering through the expected flowerbed of the first paragraph about her appearing after a ten-hour shoot looking amazing in casual designer style, make-up-free, glowing, golden hair falling just so with a sunny attitude, I was about to just turn the page and make up more stories about the rest of the photos when I got thorned by this passage: “Her big break came in 1998, when she walked down the runway topless for an Alexander McQueen show. (She didn’t know she would be topless until a few minutes before she was pushed out into the lights. She started crying, but no one could tell thanks to the artificial rain falling from the ceiling.) She was 18, and suddenly she was the It Girl.” What the fuck? I read that passage a couple of times and was destroyed by it each time. I wasn’t sure if the author had subliminally planted this passage in hopes of sending out some kind of “Please help” code buried in the rest of an expectedly positive piece. Because right here, right now, there is no excuse for treating so glibly a situation where a young woman is being exposed in a way she isn’t expecting/wanting in front of a huge audience as her career depends in that moment on her keeping her shit together as she takes a turn on the catwalk unexpectedly topless while fake fucking water camouflages her weeping? Yes, it was a time and it was McQueen, someone who probably saw this as an enhancement to his show and that’s all he was thinking. Hopefully not how he was fucking with a young woman.

But the times, they are meant to be a’changin’. And for this writer to throw that situation in as a parenthetical makes me think said journalist is not paying attention. Possibly a follow-up question could have been in order regarding the state of fashion, commerce, power and presentation today. I continued to read about Gisele’s passions and strengths thinking maybe we’d come back to this moment, but no, and the tone-deafness of dropping a scene of such seemingly calculated cruelty so casually into a profile without nary a nod stayed with me.

Having not been born yesterday, and possibly this is in fact the issue here, I’m no newbie in the house of commerce. The fashion industry in particular uses humans, and most especially models, to make an impression. I know this. I take it in on a daily basis. I worked in the music industry where objectification of people was also a major moneymaker. I looked the other way and often laughed along. And now, when I think about it, I feel terrible about the times I didn’t step in or stop things from happening. Now, and apparently this is where my age has come in, things are getting under my skin. We’ve got the # in the house. And yet still sentences like those above are floated out in a magazine story as if it’s all yesterday’s news—and look at her now, Gisele, doing just fine.

So although my main moments with Does This Make Me Look are aimed at sustainable yet stylish ways to drape things over ourselves, sustainable and stylish are also real things when it comes to what’s inside ourselves as well: how we treat each other and fashion often seems to suck at that.

In the same issue, ironically, was an amazing series of photos with Lauren Hutton. She’s 75 and no doubt has a gazillion stories to tell about the place she started, what she’s seen # and all. How she’s survived. But you know what? There was no interview with her. The pictures told a million stories.

What stories do you have to tell?