W: Not all those little tabloid actresses.
TF: That's the opposite of it. One of the reasons we're so obsessed with thinness is that we've never been fatter. We're also living in a culture of extremes, with no middle ground. People are either purging or they're bingeing. So through these pictures I wanted to touch upon things like that.… I've always been about pansexuality. Whether I'm sleeping with girls or not at this point in my life, the clothes have often been androgynous, which is very much my standard of beauty.
W: So these pictures capture how you see today's world of beauty?
TF: We've become plastic, objectifying the human body. We're no longer animals. Women and men are so waxed and polished and buffed and shined up and manipulated. We don't age. We've got these weird lips that don't really look like lips. We've started to lose touch with what a real breast looks like; we've started to lose the animal side of our nature. It's time to somehow pull it back to something more human. We treat women almost like cars. It's happened over the last 25 years. When we were kids, it was lift and separate. Now, of course, Victoria's Secret pushes it all together.
W: You've always said that looking good requires work—polish and a certain fakeness.
TF: But I've also always talked about why the Seventies were such an important moment to me—because there was a relaxed quality; bodies looked real. I think it had to do with the fact that back then you really could have sex. We used to watch sitcoms where people had one-night stands all the time, and we grew up thinking that that was okay. Today we have a more perverse look at sexuality, but stylized and almost fake. If you watch a porn film today versus a porn film from the Seventies, there's something much sexier about the Seventies film because it's more natural. Today it's so stylized, sort of cartoonlike. But we're in a cartoonlike moment. I mean, think of Angelina Jolie's face. It looks like Lara Croft. She is exaggerated. Her lips are exaggerated. Our beauty standard today is cartoonlike, and it's artificial. So the idea of all these dolls [in the shoot], we're living in a world where there are humans who actually are just dolls. And the boys, are they dolls or are they human? They are in fact human, yet there are three of them so they're all the same and they look like dolls. The fact is that men are moving toward the same plastic beauty. And it's about me living in this world.
W: As someone entering the beauty arena, isn't this dangerous turf? You depict a frightening image of women, created in part by the beauty industry.
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