Stats and fashion: ex. Betty Catroux « Stats today- [ Traduzca esta página ]

But it is not really the point (yes, Ms Wingsurf, say although!). Two things do justify this almost surrealistic irruption of fashion into my stats department (Mr Nashville has just fallen in love with this beautiful woman, but this is not the point): (No, I won’t introduce you, Mr Nashville, you get your means by yourself):

that would be: Mr Nashville (he is my featured character of a most serious stats department in NASA), was reading with greatest interest the explanation of the element of distortion in stats, and although he had somewhat of a notion of what it could be refered to, he couldn’t really grasp the concept. Naturally he thought I had put the pictures for him, and he was perfectly right, although not exactly for the purposes his romantic mind (after all!) would have thought of. Sometimes pictures are indefinitely much more explicit than complicated words and as just tested, Mr Mark (WordPress) does little understand of my humour inserted in theoretical indications.

See, thus, how exactly the ‘frame’, the ordering categories (further called ‘religion’ in this chaotic department) does alter the result while trying to reflect reflect. It is almost obvious that you have a strange current mainly in France going from 1965/1990 and leaving heavy marks on everything even after, imposing a certain number of criteria on what is supposed to be beauty. Perhaps the most impressive ‘compte rendu’ of this way of thinking is reflected in movie “L’important c’est d’aimer” (the last of Sissi actress before dying, Romy Schneider): woman becomes an object whose possible value is to be determined by the, mostly male, photographer, who is supposed to know ‘what people like’ and imposes on women in fact nothing but the evidence, that only ‘HE’ knows what is supposed to be beautiful and thus, to sell.

It is an evidence that the image thus sold of Betty Catroux has nothing to do with Betty Catroux herself, and the angle of distortion is exactly the one appearing in stats through criteria that are not actually fitting to reality. Let us thus analyze the phenomenon a little deeper.

Who is Betty Catroux? This almost stupid question hardly and though so precisely answered by Wikipedia, is as vague as Friedrich’s II vast universe. A person is certainly not a frozen mathematical coordinate, and thus it is difficult to say who someone really is. From 100 people you may ask, each will give a different answer on who they think is Betty Catroux, but most of them, if knowing her name at least, will certainly answer ‘Yves Saint Laurent’s muse’, because it has been repeated often enough so as further thought not to be needed to answer. You will though certainly obtain two different images, if you restrain your question to people knowing her public aspect (pictures in Vogue) and those knowing her personally (there are not many).

Now, considering what I know (which is to say, the filtered image created through a very slight personal contact, information obtained through daughter Maxime, comparison of ‘reality’ with public image, etc.), you can’t but state that the public image does finally affect her private life. The fusion of two almost contradictory ‘selfs’ is hardly assimilated by the psychic system so as to push her almost away from herself: in daughter Daphne’s words “I saw her in the street, and she didn’t even recognize me.”

The character I know (inspired of a reality and perhaps having nothing to do with it) is of ‘a silent saying of extremely sophisticated almost philosophical answers in movement’. Thinking about her, the recurrent thought ‘in movement frozen soul’ would appear to my mind. As if, I continued, someone who still believes in higher notions of love (I even made up a Russian genealogical tree for her in order to explain the factor), in a context that does refuse such possibility, would simply cristalize this belief in movements expressing it against all wish of the environment to make it disappear. Perhaps she even knew already about aleatory factors or accidents: she moves as easily in one social environment than the other (I really laughed when I managed to pervert her in order to have lunch in a cheap locanta in Istanbul while she was staying in I don’t know which 5 stars hotel), did not fix really importance in material values (her former appartment in Paris was something like an empty, almost neglected allusion to a home, where the soul does eat up the walls and the doors and the windows so that you have the feeling that it is already decorated, when there is nothing there …), in almost radical opposition to husband’s Catroux heavily geometrical ordered structures imposing the value of things to the eye through their very situation. While she does invite to natural beauty, he establishes artificial criteria of esthetics.

Her supposed ‘androgynous’ nature does rather escape to my eyes. In fact, she would incarnate for years in my eyes the ideal ‘female’, who is so sure of what she is as woman, that not only she has no need of underlining it with special clothes or make up, but can even maintain the female through male clothes or ‘malish’ behaviour (I never saw actually, but what people say). She did not seem to have purposes, blind goals to become famous or to be top one, but rather enjoyed an environment where people seemed to share her extraordinary tolerance towards all kind of rare species, while she kept herself quite far away from excessivily frivol ‘events’, too frequent in the whereabouts.

In fact you can’t but think (I thought), that this woman has simply no material presence. Her soul lies in almost stubborn decision on her body, saying in movement what words can’t say anymore.

This almost irreal incarnation of beauty does obsessively say something that is not understood. It is obvious that the photographer push her into the role of ‘object’, submitted to male criteria, artificial and without will. The thought that a woman HAS to look like this or like that in order to please an undetermined number of undetermined male, which is to say, not be a person but a deaf and silent not even anymore object of pleasure but place of expression of sexual impulse seems to crash with her determined maintainance of female virtues reaching far beyond appearance and hold by the principle of some kind of belief at least in the possibility of making of love a fairy tale, where it in concept. Her strict incapability of ‘talking’, of ‘saying’, of affirming herself in words that do create territories, laws and obligations, her insistence in the possibility of a silent dialogue based on the slightest movements of souls, and tones, and ways of looking, does nothing but underline her deepest belief in essential female character. Dressing herself as a man does certainly not make of her a man: it seems just to hint ironically to the fact that there are no men anymore to appreciate essential female values, and she puts her man around her in an almost insulting gesture of despite to an environment that does want her to be just a body, or to become a man, possessive, agressive, jealous, material.

Photographers don’t like her face, don’t like what she says, whether it is liked or not. Their almost impositive deformation of hers as such, does only reflect the cruel answer of those thus put in question in their universal evidences.

This unconscious quarrel does almost destroy her, although she will never give herself up: her life, I’d say almost made tears in a transparent silence, insists on the fact that a woman is more than just flesh.

The evidence that deformed parameters and criteria do affect our lifes should thus be an important point for observation. People who just disappear in nothingness because there is no one to appreciate correctly what is expressed in the depth, cause a general damage. We loose references and reminders that could avoid more general disorders caused by the fact that there is no one to tell us where we are wrong anymore. The same happens with any product that is to be found in the market,with music, literature, programs. The fact of having a different view on things does not allow imposing our criteria, nor the purposed distruction of what is different to us. People who are extremely tolerant are mostly hit by that: they can’t understand that others may want to destroy them just because it is not the same than them.

On the other hand we should never forget another evidence: the fact of saying things through colours and movements does not make of us necessarily a silly doll. Thought is extremely complex and available for very little: people who are able to transform thought into very adequate esthetical appearance that makes the same available for many without too much of an effort, are extremely rare. The value given to things and the higher social recognition of these facts keeps the possibility of transmission of changing values and thoughts extremely high, if rightly considered. It’s not a question of money. It’s a question of correspondant levels, if they are still there ….