I am curious, green

No Caption Needed points to the real story behind the Miley Cyrus controversy: the way we use the promotion of ethics to justify using imagery that is otherwise taboo:

We are never told the name of the model and there is no way to know her age. Nor does it matter. For whether she is fourteen or twenty-one, the point is that she is portrayed as a young Lolita, her supple body barely covered by a dress that seems to be in tatters. The expression on her face simultaneously performs a cultivated innocence and a primitive sexuality, the two reinforced by her bare feet and skinny, pale legs spread seductively around the back of a folding chair. Her long hair is both combed and yet unkempt, simultaneously complementing and accenting the tensions between nature and culture that pervade her pose and animate the adolescent sexual energy of the image.

This photograph is one of six images that appeared as part of a story titled “Green With Envy.” The story focuses on eco-conscious fashion being marketed to a “well-heeled audience” by Earth Pledge and Barneys New York. It thus operates within the soft porn aesthetic of high fashion photography. The woman above is wearing a Maison Martin Margiela dress made from “silk head scarves that were bleached, cut into strips and asymmetrically woven by hand.” The price is available on request, though the eco-conscious fashion wear on display in the other five images ranges in price from $910 for a smock dress made of “undyed cotton” to $10,000 for a ruffled dress made from “biopolymer—a corn-based alternative to polyester.” What we have, then, is the greenwashing of a soft porn aesthetic, where one progressive cause (save the environment) seems to trump another (protect our youth from sexual exploitation).

Apparently there is no end to what sex can sell, including a sustainable earth. Surely this is no way to save the planet.