The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence - in short the Istanbul Convention, from the city where it was signed in 2011 - is a human right treaty recognising violence against women as a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women.
According to the convention, forms of gender-based violence against women that are to be criminalised include psychological violence, stalking, physical violence, sexual violence (including rape), forced marriage, female genital mutilation, forced abortion, forced sterilization and sexual harassment.
The 34 member states of the Council of Europe that have ratified the Istanbul Convention (Turkey withdrew from the convention in 2021) must adopt measures to fulfil their commitment to preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Sadly, though, while these states have pledged to prevent violence against women, protect the victims, prosecute perpetrators and implement related comprehensive and coordinated policies, these objectives aren't often met.
Last year the United Nations highlighted how Covid-19 was also overshadowing the issue and called on nations to act on International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
Almost a year ago, in November 2020, Dubravka Šimonovic, a UN human rights expert, spoke about a "pandemic of femicide and gender-based violence against women" that is "taking the lives of women and girls everywhere." It is indeed true that as soon as you switch on the news you hear horrific stories about women killed by men, mainly men in their own family or by their own partners. Just last week, Sabina Nessa, 28, a teacher was killed, probably by a stranger who may still be at large, in Cator Park in south-east London while on the way to a pub to meet a friend.
There have been artists who analysed femicides, highlighting they are a global emergency, among them Mexican Teresa Margolles and Indian Shakuntala Kulkarni but the theme wasn't often tackled in fashion. Alexander McQueen actually explored violence against women and rape in a few collections.
Throughout the '90s McQueen shocked the fashion media and even attracted hostile coverage with shows that featured bruised and battered models (graduate show, March 1993), models with clothes streaked with tyre marks as if they had been driven over ("The Birds", S/S 95), or wearing torn and tattered clothes as if they had been raped ("Highland Rape", A/W 1995–96 and "Widows of Culloden", A/W 2006–7, but here the torn lace and tartan were also references to the eighteenth-century Jacobite Risings and the nineteenth-century Highland Clearances). McQueen replied to all those who accused him of being a misogynist, explaining he actually wanted women to look stronger.
Last week, during the London S/S 22 shows, Chinese designer Yuhan Wang also tried to present a vision of stronger women: she moved from romantic dresses or trouser suits with a floral print, but equipped her models with gun holsters and cases.
The inspiration actually came from watching Labour MP Jess Phillips in a parliamentary debate in March 2021 on International Women's Day reading out a long list of all the women killed in the UK over the past year, in all these cases a man was convicted or charged.
The list included sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, found stabbed to death in Fryent country park in north-west London last year, whose bodies were also photographed by Metropolitan police officers supposedly guarding the murder scene who shared the images via a WhatsApp chat group. Phillips closed the list with Sarah Everard, kidnapped, raped and murdered by Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens who had just finished a shift guarding the American embassy, on her way home in South London.
Yuhan Wang, channeled in this collection - that she named "Juliette Has a Gun" - the sadness and anger that she felt realizing femicides are extremely common. While her ruched lace dresses and trousers suits in floral and butterfly prints and laces pointed at Victorian romanticism (see also the detachable Victorian jabots accompanying some of the looks), at femininity, fragility and vulnerability, she added a darker note to the designs with harnesses, body straps and gun holsters.
Yet the holsters weren't a reference to girls with guns and campaigns in support of self-defense and firearms, but metaphors for women who take control of things and react, a bit like Monica Vitti in Mario Monicelli's 1968 film "The Girl with a Pistol", who turns from rape victim with a weapon in her hand ready to kill the man who abused of her, to an empowered independent woman.
Yuhan Wang's silhouettes came from Victorian-era photographs of North American frontiers women and ranchers, imagine armed women in Westerns like Claudia Cardinale in Sergio Leone's" Once Upon a Time in the West" (the Western inspiration was echoed also in the horse prints and in off the shoulder looks).
The mood of the collection was permeated by the thought of violence against women, defined by the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, adopted by the General Assembly on 20 December 1993, as "any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life". Camouflaged in flower-prints or highlighted in bright and vivid green, the pistol holsters were a provocation, asking us to which extent should women go to defend themselves when laws do not seem to be enough.
Yesterday, in the "Violence Against Women and Girls: Police Response" debate at the House of Commons in the UK Parliament, Harriet Harman, Labour MP for Camberwell and Peckham, highlighted that Her Majesty's Inspector of police Zoë Billingham describes the current femicides as an "epidemic" of male violence against women that also shows the extent of the impunity of men (Harman remembered how the killer of Sophie Moss got away without a murder charge by claining it was just "rough sex gone wrong"). We may think that fashion can't do much for this "epidemic", but it can definitely join the debate in a constructive way like Yuhan Wang proved.
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