Hey! don't you mess with my Amy

I think I am a little late at posting this but I am a passionate Winehouse devotee and I couldn’t understand why Jean Paul Gaultier had to create that abominable, so-called Amy Winehouse Tribute collection for Spring 2012. It was tasteless, exaggerated (even for Gaultier) and a shrewd commercial gimmick than a tribute to the ‘troubled British chanteuse’ (tabloids need to invent a new phrase for Amy now, really. Aren’t they bored using this?).

(Adrianna Lima as Amy Winehouse)


Saddling heavy eye liner and beehive over plastic faces or strutting with a cigarette doesn’t qualify one as Amy Winehouse, I wish Gaultier could understand that instead of glamorizing her dark days of addiction and drunken strolls. She was an extremely compassionate woman with of course, an iconic sense of fashion (NOBODY can pull that look better than her, EVER (what do you think about Adrianna Lima in that picture? I think she came close to looking reasonably good and not grotesque like those models from the show). I am sure there could have been a more humane way of creating a fashionable tribute to her. Those clothes were wrong (and really ugly too), those slurring catwalks were dislocated and it lacked a certain sense of celebration (or melancholy) that it was probably conceived with. It was nothing but a sham. I felt a little hurt by how blind people can be where ‘celebrity’ deaths are concerned and they can’t see beyond the camera fences. There was a deeply rich- yes, troubled, yes, crazy, yes, disappointed- but a beautiful woman behind all that has been spilled over. Probably, one has to be that crazy about her to understand this point of view or maybe, just a bit human? I really think.

(Snippets from the Gaultier show)

I somewhere understand Mitch Winehouse’s resentment over this ‘great’ show. Poor dad, imagine his state. “To see her image lifted wholesale to sell clothes was a wrench we were not expecting or consulted on. We’re proud of her influence on fashion but find black veils on models, smoking cigarettes with a barbershop quartet singing her music in bad taste” Mitch Winehouse expressed.

But I don’t feel too bad about this because the legacy, the beauty that she has left in my (and many other people) heart, can never be affected by anything, let alone a strange fashion show.
Plus, I am going to put up some other mixed media pieces about Amy Winehouse and yes, me. They will be here soon