(WOMENSENEWS)–Designer David Delfin described his most recent collection that employs images of violence and repression is the “most feminine one I have ever designed.”
Delfin’s clothing collection premiered last week at a Spanish fashion show and featured dark hoods resembling burqas or executioner’s masks, hangman’s nooses hanging between women’s bare breasts and bandages around women’s limbs. The hoods were so debilitating that several models tripped and stumbled on the catwalk.
Many spectators at the Pasarela Cibeles fashion show in Madrid booed and called out to the faltering models to guide them after they fell. Other audience members and reporters left the room in protest. The show’s director, Cuca Solana, tried in vain to stop the show soon after it started.
Later, both liberal and conservative politicians and women’s groups condemned the collection and urged boycotts of work.
“This is an insult to women at a time when we are all fighting for equality and respect,” said Fermin Lucas, director of the Ifema convention center that hosted the show, in an Associated Press interview.
Delfin said his work was purely artistic–based on a painting by painter Rene Magritte–and had nothing to do with burqas or women’s rights.
“Something creative is being turned into something political,” he told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
