'The Discipline of Fashion' | Vogue Italia September 2011 - Stella Tennant by Steven Meisel

The Discipline of Fashion

Photographer: Steven Meisel
Stylist: Karl Temper
Hair: Guido
Make -Up: Pat McGrath

Model: Stella Tennant

Hot on the heels of the incendiary slave earrings blunder, Vogue Italia insists on continuing to use shock tactics.

The glossy magazine's much-anticipated September shoot is a dark and Gothic affair.

Featuring Stella Tennant, the 'Avant-Garde' themed styling is an ode to Ethel Granger, a lover of corsets and facial piercings who tightened her midriff into epically tiny proportions.

Photographed by Steven Meisel, Ms Tennant wears a dark Prada gabardine coat and sports a gypsy-style nose ring as she holds scissors aloft and ready to cut. Her waist is cinched to a freakish 13-inches.

The British model even appears to sport a lip stud - a small pearl that mimics Granger's  experiments with facial piercing.

The shoot has a Tim Burton style darkness about it as Ms Tennant is transported to another era, her dark stained lips and cold expression adding to the eerie feel.

The cover is sure to raise the eyebrows of many a reader. Vogue Italia was recently forced to apologise after publishing a story in which on-trend hoop earrings were called 'slave' earrings.

The contentious Vogue story read: 'If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern United States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom.'

Ethel Granger

 

Sparking an international race row, the glossy magazine went on to release an apology, blaming a translation issue for the poor choice of word.

Ex-supermodel Iman condemned the racial gaffe, telling Fashionista:

'Is it controversial? Yes. The naming of it, I don’t get it. I sometimes wonder in this age of reality shows has it become part of the language - the more controversy the more [buzz] it creates.

'I didn’t like it. Slave does not make it ethnic. Mind you, it’s not lost in translation - the word slave, we know what it is.'

Certainly, Vogue Italia seems, like Granger, to be dedicated to the hoop earring - whether worn through the nose or otherwise.

The marvellously eccentric Granger experimented with looks that were way ahead of her time, variously sporting large tribal-style nose rings, cheek and lip studs and multiple earrings decades before it was common for women to even pierce their ear lobes.

Granger, who lived from 1905-1982, still holds the Guinness world record for smallest modified waist, clocking in at just 13-inches.

Ms Tennant's corset - not the most common wardrobe addition, by any standards - was made by Deborah Milner, although we can only guess that a hefty dose of digital modification went into making Ms Tennant's waist so impossibly miniscule.

Ms Tennant, 40, is a mother of four whose stellar career is partly attributed to early-career work with Mr Meisel.

As for featuring a 13-inch waist on its cover - in the name of art as it may well be - the magazine looks dangerously close to glorifying a ghoulishly skinny body, too.

Twitter ● Facebook ● Bloglovin'