After the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, you wrote that the label Marchesa, co-designed by his wife, Georgina Chapman, had “lived by the Weinstein, [and so should] die by the Weinstein”. After the very sympathetic interview with Chapman in this month’s US Vogue, have you softened your opinion?
Amanda, by email
I’m afraid it takes more than a glossy Annie Leibovitz portrait to make this winner of Ms Resting Bitch Face 2018 change her opinion, Amanda.
So, to recap, back in October I wrote about the problem that is Marchesa, and suggested that since that label only did so well because Weinstein, according to multiple Hollywood insiders, bullied famous women into wearing it, the brand was inextricable from the scandal around him, stemming from allegations that he sexually harassed and assaulted countless women. Indeed, with the benefit of good ol’ retrospect, it’s hard to look at the label’s rise as anything other than an extension of Weinstein’s pattern of bullying women. The degrees, clearly, are different but the game was the same, in that this was a man who viewed women as creatures who existed to serve his needs. And in that regard, Marchesa looks very much like it was part of the culture he fostered and exploited.
Some disagree with this. Certainly, no woman should be punished for what her husband did, as one columnist put it last weekend, proceeding to list all the various women who have been blamed for their husband’s wrongdoings, which is, most definitely, a thing. Unfortunately, this writer gave as examples Melania and Ivanka Trump, alongside the former fiancee of the Golden State Killer suspect, even though Melania and Ivanka literally work for and frequently defend Donald Trump, while the ex-fiancee of Joseph James DeAngelo, the alleged serial rapist and killer, was not in a relationship with him at the time, and has certainly never defended him. One of these things, you see, is not like the other.
In truth, a comparison between Chapman and the Trump women can be made, in that all of them explicitly benefited from the behaviour of the men around them. Ivanka and Melania benefit from the access and wealth Donald gives them; Chapman allegedly benefited from her husband browbeating women into wearing her clothes. To say that she didn’t know about his alleged behaviour is both undoubtedly true and not relevant with regards to her label. What is relevant is she would have struggled not to know how he leveraged his position to make high-profile women wear her clothes.
Chapman is undoubtedly suffering now, but she should not be the story. The story is the countless women whose careers, bodies and self-esteem Weinstein crushed, not the woman whose career he made and who got a $15m-$20m (£11m-£15m) divorce payoff from him. She is also reportedly splitting with him the money from the sale of their various properties, including a $15m Manhattan townhouse and a $10m house in the Hamptons. Money may not be everything, but, let’s be honest here, $20m-plus is not nothing.
“I didn’t think it was respectful to go out [after the scandal broke],” she told Vogue. “I thought, ‘Who am I to be parading around with all of this going on?’”
Quite how this sensitive concern for the feelings of her ex-husband’s alleged victims squares with the Leibovitz photoshoot she did for the interview, sitting on a shore, the wind blowing through her hair, is not clarified. One can only imagine how women such as Ashley Judd, Uma Thurman, Annabella Sciorra, Asia Argento, Darryl Hannah, Rose McGowan and the many, many others who were allegedly harassed and attacked by Weinstein would feel on seeing this absurdly glamourised photo of his ex-wife, who is being gifted with this spotlight purely to protest her innocence of any knowledge of his behaviour. And I say we can only imagine their feelings because their names are not even mentioned in the article.
Chapman seems like a nice person and she will now have a lovely life, up on her farm in upstate New York. “It’s rambling, it’s magical. It’s connected to horse trails, so you can just ride off of the property,” she tells the interviewer, and I’m happy for her. She ultimately was one of Weinstein’s victims, too. But the other victims are not able to run off to magical farms with their millions. Of all the stories to emerge from this saga, this is not the one that needs telling.
