this post from Orange reminded me of a reality tv show with petra nemcova called a model life in which she hand picks 6 very young girls to put them through their paces while dangling a modeling contract in front of them as a prize.on the surface it's a less campy version of America's Next Top Model; it's supposed to have a gushy heart at its center but i think the heart that beats inside this show is more of the same hard-nosed misogyny that makes up the whole of the fashion industry. (and the more i watch shows like this, that hardened, cynical, sexist face becomes more visible.)
while the people who inhabit the world of NEXT modeling are, in typical fashion, shallow and bitchy, there is a level of conscious hatred for natural female bodies that seeps through and makes my mouth purse in a really distasteful moue. the two 'handlers' for the girls end every show with stern words of advice for the week's winners and losers ("your photo shoot went really well and you can really pose" or "you're stiff and need to do whatever the photographer tells you") but they also enjoy a private review session that is an object lesson in How to Make a Woman Hate Herself (a paraphrase):
[two unlovely new yorkers looking at a photo of a pretty girl in a red bathing suit showing lots of cleavage]
BitchyBritishGuy: ugh. lucy. she's cute - incredible eyes - but there's just nothing there. she's so bland.
BlackBitchyGirl: yeah. she's just...ok. and her body...
BBGuy: yeah, a lump. unacceptable. she really needs to tone up.
BBGirl: yeah. she needs to learn that if she wants to make it in this business her body has to be really...you know.
BBGuy: yeah. fashionable. we have to want to wear the clothes. but i look at her body and all i see are curves and tits. unsubtle.
BBGirl: exactly. we need to see the clothes. she needs to learn that. let's tell her to get with a trainer, like, immediately. we need to take care of it. NOW.
[photo switches to pale genocide victim in a bathing suit]
BBGuy: well, no curves to speak of here. love it.
BBGirl: me too. she photographs so high fashion. this might not be the best suit for her but it still screams 'editorial', you know?
BBGuy: exactly. she's so unusual looking. you'd think it wouldn't work but it does. we should bring her in and tell her to keep doing what she's doing. i can't wait to see how she progresses.
BBGirl: me too.
[they smirk at each other]
the most disturbing thing about this show is its cognitive dissonance. maybe it's not cognitive dissonance. maybe it's just plain hypocrisy. the industry folks clearly prefer the two most sickly looking girls because they photograph 'high fashion' but are brutal to one girl because she's a (gasp) out of shape size 2; even so, they make a feeble stab at encouraging 'healthy' body images.
in an earlier episode, the woefully thin michelle was berated by their fitness trainer for having the lowest BMI he'd ever seen and lucy was declared 'perfect' for having a BMI that fit in her range for her height, weight and age. michelle insists she's normal and has always been like this (which she may be but it's not the point) and lucy is excited that she received approval. but by the end of the episode, fashion reasserts itself (not normalcy) and we see lucy chastised for being 'out of shape' and borderline fat while michelle moves up the list of frontrunners.
in this horrifically crazy world, size 2 = horrifically obese and unacceptable.
where can women go if a 2 is considered obese??
i don't think this whole thing can be laid wholly at the feet of those who choose or 'create' the image of the model. the designer is an active collaborator. while part of me (the part that watched Project Runway) can sympathize with the practical struggle to make fabric hang in a pleasing way, we need to stop using the designer's struggle as an excuse to shield an industry that consistently proffers a really whacked image of female bodies. the designer has no concept of women, real or otherwise. and any enterprise that ellides the presence of the woman i call misogynist and patriarchal.
their vision (and ours as well because we see through their lens) is becoming skewed in such a way i'm afraid the designers, critics and all the attendant folks in the fashion industry won't be satisfied until there's just a hank of hair and a pelvic bone moving down the runway.
Orange Tangerine: Skinny girls
3 comments:
Who are the designers making the clothes for? Strictly for runway shows, or for women to buy? If nobody buys the clothes, the designers will be poor, so would it kill them to accept size 6 or 8 models to give a hint of what the outfit would look like on a woman with some curves?
That Lucia has stick arms. Which is not to say that a woman who is naturally super-bony is any less womanly—but it's wacked out to promote the size subzero as the ideal when it matches up with less than 1% of the non-famine-stricken populace.
Smooches to you for using the word moue.
You know, I recall not too long ago reading an Elle essay by a New Yorkish woman who'd had a baby and Gained Weight and who was all broken up about it as a result. What really resonated, though, was her turn of phrase in regards to her new body--her "slatternly curves" she called them. It hit me in the gut, that a woman could be so ashamed of the fact that she looked like one. Horrifying.
That little exchange you posted, between BBG and BBG, reminds me of that. God forbid you see the woman in the clothes. Why not eliminate models altogether and just make all editorial spreads of the clothes tacked to walls in exciting positions?
Because women have to buy them, and in order to want to do that, we have to have some semi-realistic idea of how they will look. I'm a little tired of the fashion-as-art, designer-as-artistic-genius shpiel.
And I'm exceptionally tired of the transparent doublespeak. Have a healthy body image! Be skinny or die trying! WTF?
'slatternly'
there are other connotation, too, of the word slatternly: sloppy; messy; sexually, morally and spiritually loose; without discipline.
these words show how our public discourse defines the female body and demonstrate what it is that male designers (yeah, i said it) and neurotic women in our fashion industry cannot stand: the undisciplined (female) body.
what bodies do they prefer?
a body with a minimum of secondary sex characteristics (tits and ass)
a body that speaks of regimen, tightly controlled food intake and physical mortification
basically, a religious novitiate from the 15th century.
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