IF you thought the soft-porn image of Disney teen queen Miley Cyrus – wearing nothing but ruby-stained lips and a bedsheet – in Vanity Fair magazine was disturbing, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Pop diva Beyonce Knowles, 27, and her fashion-designer mother have launched a girls’ clothing line that makes Miley’s bare-backed glam session look like a Shirley Temple photo shoot.
The Knowles’ family business, “House of Dereon,” recently published ads for its “Dereon Girls Collection” with young models who look no older than my second-grade daughter. They are seductively posed and tarted up, JonBenet Ramsey-style, with lipstick, blush and face powder.
Draped in bling, several girls sport leather jackets and studded accessories.
One child wears sparkly, high heels (more pint-size Pussycat Doll than Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz”) and another slouches, gangsta gal-style, with a neon-pink boa, leopard-skin fedora and stilettos. A toddler-aged model is a Beyonce Mini-Me with huge hair, skinny jeans, spike-heeled leather boots and attitude to match.
Abercrombie & Fitch prompted an outrage a few years ago with its line of thongs for elementary-school girls and pedophilia chic catalogues. And, of course, Calvin Klein started it all with 15-year-old Brooke Shields purring that “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.”
But the House of Dereon photo spread sinks even lower. It’s sick and it’s wrong, and it’s not social conservatives who first said so. Fashion and celebrity Web sites have been buzzing with outrage over the last week:
“Pimp my kid,” decried one blogger. “Dereon Girls ad too adult,” concluded another. Gossip king Perez Hilton polled readers on whether the ad was appropriate. The overwhelming consensus: Hell, no.
The creepiness factor is heightened by the fact that women were responsible for marketing this child exploitation. I’d ask: “Where was Beyonce’s mother to tell her daughter to wipe all the gunk off the Dereon models’ faces?”
But Beyonce’s mother – who has helped manage the “Bootylicious” singer’s career from childhood – is her eager and willing partner in crime.
As for the mothers of this new crop of Little Girls Gone Wild, they were undoubtedly thrilled to see their daughters painted up and posing like Victoria’s Secret models. If we’ve learned anything from Lindsay Lohan and her hard-partying mom, it’s that the Lolita-posing apple doesn’t fall far from the bosom-flaunting tree.
So, what’s next? Nine-year-olds performing stripper routines?
Oh, wait. It’s been done. I saw that very nightmare last fall on the cable TV reality show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” – featuring the grade-school-age daughters of Olympic star Bruce Jenner strapping on stilettos and twirling around a stripper pole in their parents’ bedroom as family cheered them on. Future House of Dereon clients, no doubt.
Beyonce’s clothes, you should know, are available at many “fine” establishments willing to carry titillating tot wear. Shame on them all.
It’s time to redouble our efforts to fight back against the Forever 21 culture that poisons Hollywood, Halloween, prom season and every season in between. In our indecent world, 7 has become the new 21.
Shouldn’t a child’s innocence last longer than a porn star’s pot of lip gloss?