Dressing rooms are in the news. Most notably the lingerie dressing room of one of the poshest fashion department stores in the world. At Bergdorf Goodman everything is chic, soothing and hush. The dressing rooms are carpeted and cushioned to give a sense of quiet luxury. Bergdorf Goodman is not the kind of place where, A. you’d ever expect to be sexually assaulted and B. could get away with screaming for any reason. Along with the new hashtag #Ididntscream, #MeToo is trending again. Let’s not forget that Trump himself boasted on an open mike that he “just grabs women by the pussy” and that “they like it.” The outcome of the dressing room trial should therefore be a fait accompli, since the defendant has already admitted to doing the rapey things of which he stands accused. His defense has been that the writer E Jean Carroll was “not his type,” and so now it’s up to a New York jury of 3 women and 6 men to decide whether 79-year-old Carroll, was Trump’s “assaultible type” thirty-something years ago.
Carroll’s account of the dressing room brought back memories of the dressing room at a fashionable boutique in Sydney, Australia. In 1975, after an auspicious start in a fashion competition that went bankrupt and left me and sixteen other models stranded in Perth (more on this as the Stupid Model Substack entries progress), I became a recognizable 19-year-old model in Australia. I was on the cover of Cosmopolitan, and alongside my cleavage, the Aussie headline read “All You Need to Know About the Male Orgasm.” Perhaps John, the owner of the boutique that carried his wife’s name, associated me with the male orgasm, but most likely he was just another grabber who told himself that women enjoyed his advances. John, who hadn’t met me before, entered my dressing room and lurched at me as I was trying on clothes. I don’t recall the finer details of his grope since I’ve been grabbed so many times that this single grab has blurred into the collective grand grope. No, I didn’t scream. And I know why. The situation is already so embarrassing that the last thing you want is more attention. I found out afterwards that John was famous for pulling the curtain aside just enough to slip into the dressing rooms of his store. His Candyland. His Grab Emporium.
I’m confident I’m not alone. Let’s face it, a women’s (lingerie) dressing room must be a titillating trigger for some men. Take, for instance, the large backstage dressing rooms at fashion shows. In a documentary about him, the Australian journalist Clive James sits on a stool backstage at a Victoria’s Secret show, surrounded by topless models as they change their outfits, frantically stripping and dressing and stripping. His voice-over goes, “if anyone asked me how I felt right then, I’d say happy, very happy.” This perk of the bi-annual fashion-show dressing rooms has tempted many men to invest in fashion brands. Coming from both sides, as a model and a designer, I was always aware of who belonged backstage and who were the peeping Toms. The investors. The friends of friends. And just imagine Trump stalking the dressing rooms of his Miss World competitions!
When casting models for his next show, the French designer Andre Courrèges would ask the hopefuls to strip down to their panties in his backstage dressing room, before he’d march the naked girls out in small groups, for purely professional reasons, of course. This too, I write about in the upcoming chapters of Stupid Model.
I hope that, for the sake of young people, the dressing room now is a safe space, where gropers and rapists are deterred by video surveillance. I do know from this latest E Jean Carroll trial reports that the courtroom is still not a safe space for victims of rape and assault. The standards for questioning are archaic and remain attempts to blame the victim. It is also clear that men still don’t have a clue about what it’s like to be a woman. And it might be a disadvantage to have just three women and six men on a rape jury. We shall soon find out how New York measures up against the recent retro actions of the redder states.
