Women's Crossroads

"She was the first woman of whom it truthfully could be said that she shopped until she dropped," writes Liesl Schillinger of the doomed French Queen Marie Antoinette.

Although she's purportedly reviewing the new Marie Antoinette novel Abundance, by Sena Jeter Naslund, Schillinger seems much more interested in non-fiction book Queen of Fashion, by Barnard professor Caroline Weber, which argues that the queen, a 14-year-old Austrian cast adrift in a hostile environment at Versailles, used her adroit fashion sense to craft an "image of influence and splendor...using fashion as her buttress."

Americans have always been entranced by the splendor and excess of Versailles--which of course at the time our Puritan-led nation deplored. Sofia Coppola's new movie, in which the beautiful young Kirsten Dunst plays the daring and doomed Queen, is getting all kinds of fawning publicity--we love to see the beautiful queen prance in her finery, and we love to see her punished for it too, apparently. Versailles meets the White House.

Marie Antoinette used her fashion sense and purchasing power to "project power," Schillinger writes. "“Through carefully selected, unconventional outfits and accessories, she cultivated what she later called an ‘appearance of [political] credit,’ ” Weber argues."

Using fashion politically is nothing new. But what is new, and seems to be gaining steam, is the practice of using fashion to appeal to consumers' moral sensibilities. Shop til you drop, by all means! But buy MY brand, which is hip and cool not just on the basis of quality and visual appeal, but on the basis of the politics it represents.

Thus we have the amazingly lavish and undoubtedly ferociously expensive new GAP campaign launched this week, in which the likes of Stephen Spielberg, Don Cheadle, Penelope Cruz, and many other cool dudes and dudettes pose winningly in Gap outfits, all bearing the signature color RED.

"GAP is collaborating with (Product) Red and the world's most iconic brands to help eliminate AIDS in Africa," the advertising copy reads. "Every time you purchase a GAP (Product) RED item, half of the profits will go directly to the fight against this disease. Do the (RED) thing."

Okay, yeah, let's all go out and "do the red thing," why not? Shop til we drop to fight AIDS in Africa--thanks, Bono and Bobby Shriver, for coming up with such a brilliant campaign!

There's just one problem. What if, like the tragic Marie Antoinette, we get so caught up in our own image (as well-dressed, well-heeled, well-intentioned shoppers) that we lose sight of the fact that there is a difference between "doing the RED thing" and "doing the RIGHT thing"?

I'm glad, I really am, that GAP and the other corporate sponsors of the (Product) Red campaign (what, pray tell, is the function of those oh-so-Derridean parentheses?) are going to donate as much as half their profits on certain products to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Channeling Americans' fashion sense into social responsibility is certainly better than the mindless consumerism we're known for. But does anyone else agree that sometimes, in order to do the right thing, we have to forget about our own image for a while, and think deeply, with real compassion, about someone else for a while?