Vice has stirred up a LOT of controversy with their recent Women in Fiction issue, but not for any of the written short stories or interviews that were published as part of the series. Rather, the outrage has been directed towards a fashion spread that features famous women writers who committed suicide.
The spread, named “Last Words” by the Vice staff, shows models posing as the writers at their time of death. Those featured include a model wading into water as Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself, and another solemnly kneeling in front of an open oven, paying a tasteless homage to Sylvia Plath. Along with the authors’ names, age at death, and cause of death, the captions also mention the clothes being displayed, just in case we wanted to buy them.
Vice has since taken “Last Words” off its website and apologized for offending its readers. All the photos, however, can be found at Jezebel and all over the Web.