The Bloggomist: Three Times a Trend
Fashion Opinion

Weight is a tricky subject no matter which way you approach it. Everyone knows that the fashion industry is notorious for it’s promotion of the rail thin, emaciated body type. There is no secret that it has been under immense pressure for years from watch groups and current and former fashion insiders to steer away from advocating the dangerously skinny aesthetic.

However the backlash seems not to have leveled out but instead swung all the way to the other side. Now in an effort to promote “real women” magazines from Glamour to V have been pushing size 10+ ladies between their pages and while I appreciate the presence of the plus sized girl in an anorexic world, I think fashion has gravely missed the point.

I might offend some people with my point of view and in no way do I feel that plus sized models should be alienated from the industry, but whatever happened to “normal” girls? It seems there’s no middle ground at all. Starve yourself down to Sasha Pivovarova size and you’ll be walking so many runways your head will spin, or give the proverbial middle finger to the industry like Crystal Renn did and enjoy the perks of your plus sized career. But where does that leave the rest of us? Occasionally the fashion industry throws us a bone and gets all hot and bothered over someone like Gisele Bundchen or current glossy fave Lara Stone, but even their amazonian figures can’t really be classified as “normal”.

Statistics tell us that the average American woman is now a size 14. While I can’t counter that number I feel that the girls I’m around, the ones who are really paying attention and influenced by the pomp and circumstance of fashion, aren’t on either end of those extremes. Rather most of them are in that grey area between model-thin and “average” 14. The fabled weight range and waist size no one seems to think exists, or at least the one no one wants to promote. Apparently there are few things less fashionable than a size 6.

Even Renn herself has made a point of saying that she believes there should be more diversity in the pages of magazines, not just a focus on the extremes. She also went on to voice her fears about the fetishization of fat and how the singling out of one token plus size girl to put on a pedestal doesn’t advance “the cause of using girls of all sizes in a magazine”. It makes the chosen ones seem like a flavor of the week more than a solid statement about weight and aesthetics. An appeasement to the critics and naysayers, a sort of ” you wanted fat girls, here’s your fat girls” that, rather than feeling genuine, appears to be nothing more than a  fleeting novelty disguised as real change.

But what constitutes real change? What exactly is it that all of us want to see in a magazine? The fashion industry doesn’t seem to be hurting any by continuing to put their clothing on girls who look like they can barely stand up on their own. And why? Because they know they can and that we will buy into it. Ultimately they’re creating an image that a lot of us want to attain, a picture that few of us can actually live up to but that everyone would like to try. They know that we don’t want to see us, we already are us. We want to see the skinny girl in the $2,000 dress, we want to be the skinny girl in the $2,000 dress.

The 2008 Italian Vogue "Black Issue".

Mark Fast used plus sized models for his Spring 2010 runway show in London.

I’m making a pretty sweeping generalization here, but you get the point. If we didn’t want to see skinny girls in the magazines we’d stop buying them altogether. It isn’t that we don’t want to see the average girl too but I think, more than anything else that fashion and fashion magazines do is that they create an escape, and we all like an escape. For most people it’s understood that going through a day with rhinestones glued around your eyes, wearing 6 inch lobster heels and a bustle isn’t quite practical (unless you’re Lady Gaga, then I suppose you think jeans and a tee shirt are just wacky!) but it’s cool to think of a world where we could. I’m not saying that we all dream of being 5′10″ and undernourished but for whatever reason that image has been stereotyped into our culture and we accept it the same way we do gravity or the presence of Big Foot. Do we always like it? No. Can we change it? Probably. However we need to get our own preconceived notions out of the way first.

I am the first to say that there needs to be more diversity in the fashion industry, but I’ll also be the first to say that I buy into the current aesthetic as much as the next girl. Sometimes I find myself pretty disgusted at the emaciated figures staring back at me, sometimes I find myself jealous and I think that’s the same reaction a lot of people have. Will I vow to stop eating until I’m as thin as the girl in the picture? No, I don’t buy the claim that starvation equals happiness. However, I also don’t buy that “bigger is better” and I don’t believe it would hurt any of us to be exposed, or to expose ourselves, to the broader spectrum of what’s in between, be it shorter, smaller, bigger or taller.

I think what I would really like to see is not for the fashion industry to simply react to a challenge but to actually create it. All this screaming about weight and height and beauty standards has only prompted the industry to shut everybody up by throwing a girl under 5′7″ or over 110 lbs around for awhile. Then everyone calms down and it’s back to business as usual. I think it’s more intriguing, and I think it will be more intriguing, for designers, editors et all to find diverse beauty and promote it from the start, not solely after outside forces have told them they should. However this isn’t simply a one sided endeavor. It also takes us, the consumer, opening our eyes and being willing to accept it, we have to change our ideas about beauty too. Because for all it’s creativity and artistry fashion is still a business, and in the end a business must ultimately give it’s customers what they want.

***
To see more from The Miss Linds, visit http://evilmonito.com/author/themisslinds/

Published on 22 January 2010 | 1 |