Here is an article I wrote for the latest issue of Missy/Ink Magazine which is available across Canada at Chapters Indigo!! It's called... Artistic Vanity Primarily associated with and commercially directed toward women, fashion and makeup artistry are of very few mediums in which women are granted more freedom than men. So it is not surprising that fashion and makeup are also treated as culturally unimportant or shallow. Society has coded these types of expression as distinct from other art; calling us cultured if we attend art galleries and shallow if we read a fashion magazine. This hardly seems coincidental; dismissing fashion as vain prevents it from ever gaining the same cultural respect as other expressive outlets. But the way my body is cloaked and my face is painted is art. Art is creative, it is political, and its influence is far-reaching and long-lasting. In order to make sense of the world around us, humans created language. We assigned meaning to arbitrary so...