Barbie, Catwalk Models Now "Too Fat"
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It's increasingly clear that for many in the fashion world, there are two kinds of women: those about to die from starvation, and fat women. There's been a disturbing denouement to the controversy over Ralph Lauren's overzealous Photoshopping that led to a picture in which a model's hips were narrower than her head: The model in question, Filippa Hamilton, was fired for being "overweight." It took me a while to find a good, nonaltered picture of Hamilton so you can judge for yourself, but it seems to me that if you can call that woman "fat," it might actually be time for psychiatric intervention for your delusions.
But those kinds of delusions define the fashion industry. In case you haven't heard, it's now been determined that Barbie is too fleshy for the delicate tastes of fashion designer Christian Louboutin. He agreed to join a larger project of fashion designers making specialty clothes for the doll, and decided that he had to redesign the doll herself because her ankles were "too fat." Feminists sit around worrying that Barbie will distort little girls' body images, but fashion designers apparently fear that Barbie's setting a bad example of what happens to you if you let yourself go.
Of course, part of the problem appears to be that many male fashion designers seem to think women get to dangerously obese weights like 95-100 pounds by doing nothing but shoveling chips in their mouth all day. Or that's the impression I get reading Mary Elizabeth Williams' post at Broadsheet on the issue, where she quotes designer Karl Lagerfeld denouncing "fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly." He was responding to Brigitte magazine's announcement that they were no longer using profesional fashion models, as they were tired of Photoshopping away the inconveniently ugly parts of being painfully thin, such as the jutting bones. One can only imagine how Lagerfeld thinks a woman who reaches a whole size 6 must eat. Perhaps he pictures a woman with an IV pumping cheesecake directly to her veins 24/7.
In reality, many women take a pass not just on cheesecake but also on chips in order to even get down to a size 6, which the fashion world treats as morbidly obese. And as the Brigitte magazine example shows, according to the standards set by the fashion industry there is no such thing a beautiful woman, period. If you're painfully thin enough to make it as a model, the Photoshop team has to spend hours covering up the boniness. If you have enough weight on you that you have a little softness to you, then you're treated like the Goodyear Blimp.
The obsession with wiping out any traces of humanity from female bodies in the fashion industry reminds me of nothing so much as the obsession with sexual purity that flourishes on the Christian Right. In both cases, anxieties about the dirty biological reality of life are projected onto female bodies, and the solution proposed is an extreme form of control. As fashion designers balk at anything even resembling soft tissue on women's bodies, some factions of the Christian right are moving towards extreme forms of premarital abstinence that ban even closed-mouth kissing before the wedding. But since the anxieties they're trying to quash never actually go away, it's worrisome in both cases to see what the next steps in appetite-denial will be.
Comments
@ janipurr
By: buggie | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 19:14
wasn't there an episode of House where the patient is a teenage model, who is supposed to be pinnacle of beauty and it turns out she had testicles that never descending and House says, "the perfect woman is man"? That was great.
Fashion designers are all gay men
By: Janipurr | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 14:17
which is why they are so obsessed with prepubescent male bodies. They literally don't want their female models to be female--they want them to attain the designers ideal of beauty, which would require that they be underage boys.
Which is why I have never bought into the idea of the "fashion industry". It's all a bunch of BS, anyway. They won't *ever* design anything that looks decent on a real woman.
Such crap
By: asianshoebox | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 12:19
It's such damn disgusting hypocrisy. If a woman prefers to be natural she's a dike. If a woman enjoys sex she's a slut. If a woman enjoys dressing sexy but doesn't feel the need to screw every man that offers to buy her drink then she's a cocktease. Miley Cyrus is expected to say the rosary while she grinds on a pole. Men need to make up their mind what they really want out of women. You can't dress us like whores and then scold us for turning a trick or two. Women are supposed to be sexy without wanting sex, because a woman who can enjoy sex and is comfortable with her body doesn't have to worry what men think. And that's a man's worst nightmare.
Not her body...
By: xxreader | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 12:16
but her eyebrows that need some photoshopping.
@ Buggie:
By: ZoeCat | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 12:11
"I don't understand why they don't just use hangers mannequins instead of models."
Hangers and mannequins can't walk down the runway like a human can, so the clothes' "movement" woulnd't be shown to it's full potential. Maybe they should invent a fashion-bot?
Or better yet, like you suggested, accept that humans have body fat and design clothes that will "hang" nice on a healthy body.
Seriously.
By: sirenique | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 12:04
"In both cases, anxieties about the dirty biological reality of life are projected onto female bodies, and the solution proposed is an extreme form of control." Amanda, I love this sentence. You made my day.
I think part of it has to do
By: buggie | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 11:26
I think part of it has to do with the male designers being so egomanical that they see soft tissue as ruining their designs. I don't understand why they don't just use hangers mannequins instead of models. Then they wouldn't have to worry about finding enough 5'11" women who weigh under 100 pounds.
I love how Marcotte points out that the designers seem to attribute an ounce of soft flesh to gluttony, and that a size 6 is considered morbidly obese. I'm a size 14 petite and I haven't eaten a potato chip since high school! I doesn't surprise me that even a mainstream designer like Ralph Lauren is so obnoxious about all this. A woman with just normal hips can't hope to find comfortable-fitting pants these days. Have you ever tried squeezing yourself into skinny jeans? It really makes you wonder who on earth these clothes are made for. Maybe they're really made for men.
I think one of the most horrible aspects of how models are treated is that it sends the message that women's health and beauty is achieved through deprivation rather than fitness. Models can't be fit. They don't consume enough calories to sustain a long run, and if they gained an ounce of muscle they'd be fired for being fat. Too many women still take this approach in life. Diets are marketed to women, fitness is marketed to men. Men make themselves healthier and more attractive by positive action: eating healthy foods and working out. Women become more "attractive" through negative reinforcement and deprivation. You would think that our current generation would realize the problems with this, but as this whole controversy shows, it's all still alive and well.
No big surprises here!
By: swaingo | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 11:17
A wise hairdresser once told me that the reason most models are skinny, hipless and androgonous is because lots of fashion industry people (designers, photographers, makeup/hair people, ect) either want to look like or are obsessed with 14 year old boys. While that statement definitely offensive and more than a little bit homophobic even coming from an old gay man, there is an underlying truth. It’s no surprise to me as 135 pound 34 year old woman that Karl Lagerfeld or Christian Louboutin wouldn’t find my womanly form appealing.
It seems to me that these
By: Kit-Kat | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 10:43
It seems to me that these designers do not actually like women. I looked at the RL photoshopped picture, and it was viscerally disturbing. These are people whose business is superficially about designing clothes that they hope women will buy, but they have no appreciation of any woman whose entire skeleton is not visible. And a woman like that may be "attractive" to some but she is not sexual (she's probably not having regular menses). It's as though the ideal woman has the absolute minimum amount of "body."
It's nothing new--women in the late 19th century used to drink vinegar or eat tapeworms to stay very thin, and used makeup with arsenic in it to stay very pale, and were expected to exhibit no sexual interest or feelings at all. Anxiety about female bodies and female sexuality has a long and unpleasant history in our culture, and this is just one extreme manifestation. The current concern about obesity seems to be providing a cover--sure, some women are obese, but in a world where a size 6 is *too big* to model, obesity is not the problem.
Exquisite, on Point Analysis
By: writingbabe | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 10:31
Amanda Marcotte has given the most succinct and accurate assessment of the fashion industry's obsession with thinness I've seen to date: "anxieties about the dirty biological reality of life are projected onto female bodies, and the solution proposed is an extreme form of control." The comparison to the extremes of the religious right are so perfectly parallel. Marcotte is right to question what form of "appetite denial" will be required of women next. If you're to be devout, deny the sexual appetite; if you're to be beautiful, deny the appetite for sustenance. Marcotte's exquisite analysis highlights something we've known for decades if not centuries: women's bodies are the battlefield on/in which the culture wars are fought.