Spare Us the Misogyny When it Comes to What a Woman Wears
Chinese pianist Yuja Wang likes to dress as sensually as the music she performs, and there’s nothing wrong with that
I never heard of Chinese pianist Yuja Wang or classical music critic Norman Lebrecht until recently, when Lebrecht wrote a damning critique of the classical prodigy titled “Spare us the skintight sonata.”
The acclaimed 34-year-old Wang likes to wear barely-there outfits and 5-inch stilettos, a topic of discussion as much as her stellar performances. Apparently, the 73-year-old Lebrecht is just too distracted by her show of legs to focus on her music:
“Onto a stage bounds a young woman in a backless gown slit up to the hip, or a micro-dress cut an inch below the butt. That’s right, I’ve turned into a fashion critic. And the moment these words appear I shall come under a social-media onslaught for committing the unforgivable male offence of reporting what a female artist wears, instead of how she plays. My defence is that Yuja Wang does everything possible to draw attention to her appearance. She habitually changes costume in a concert interval to show more leg and she feeds the internet with a stream of selfies in halter tops and skimpy shorts
