Fighting for the middleweight

In the ring: the fashion industry vs. eating disorders

After the recent deaths of two models due to complications of anorexia, the fashion industry is scrambling to throw the mantle of responsibility as far from itself as possible. In the April issue of Vogue they've reported on the scuffling wild eyed search for some kind of solution to the problem of girls starving themselves in order to get work as models. They reported on Spain's attempts to put regulations in place to limit the age of models and to insist that models have a BMI index of at least 18.

This is less than useless, of course. What struck me plainly in the eye with shiner force is that no one seems willing to lay the responsibility where it really lies. Rebecca Johnson says in her article that "It's a fact: Clothes look better on a thin person. Models are therefore, by definition, thinner than the average person, always have been, always will be." I think it's stretching things a bit to call that a fact. Certainly you could make a case that clothes don't tend to look as good on overweight bodies as they do on fit bodies, but to claim that clothes have always looked better on a thin person is extremely near sighted.

Thinness right now is not the same that thinness was fifty years ago. Thinness is purely subjective. I look at girls who are plus size 12 and wish to god I could be that thin. It's a fact that no clothes look good on me. There comes a point where the body loses it's fluidity due to rolls or lumps, and the lines cease to be pleasing. I'm not trying to insult either myself or anyone else with my size figure, I'm attempting to be honest. But just as a figure gets too large to show off clothing to advantage, a figure can also be too thin to do anything but hang cloth on. The models in the magazines right now aren't doing anything for clothes. There is no substance to the bodies wearing the clothes in the magazines now, you may as well be draping the clothes on attractive padded hangers.

The people responsible for the still increasing thinness of the models are the people who are paying the thinnest ones to work: the designers. A designer can't make a person anorexic who doesn't have some predisposition to the disorder, but by hiring thinner and thinner girls they are weeding out all of the healthy ones. That's where the buck stops. Follow the money. Ask yourself who the trend setters are. We will bounce back from this extreme if designers learn how to drape fabric on the three dimensional human form again. If they remember that what they are doing isn't making a work of art in a vacuum but sculpting over the human body.

People follow the lead of the designers, how else could you explain the popularity of the boxy Chanel suit? How else could you explain bell bottoms and fur vests? The designers put their concepts out there and perhaps the consumer has some say in the ultimate style popularity, but not much. If every designer is putting fur vests on the runway then consumers tend to see the trend as hot and feel they must have it even if makes them look like prehistoric animal hunting stick insects.

Some designers seem to be making the connection, such as Caroline Herrera who Johnson quotes as saying "We have a big responsibility with this disease,". So true. If all of the designers refused to hire models that are grossly thin, people would begin to readjust their ideas of what a flattering figure looks like. If they chose only girls with a healthy weight (as in: their knees aren't bigger than their thighs) the models will have a lot less incentive to starve themselves. Go where the money is.

In every era there is some kind of fashion extreme. In the eighteen hundreds girls were killing themselves in corsets for the tiniest waist imaginable. In the medieval times some women would stuff their dresses to look pregnant because that was considered the most sublime figure. Some women think fashion goes to these extremes for men. To attract them, to please them, and to keep them. This is not at all true. I think you'll find that men will want to sleep with women no matter if they have a tiny waist, a large ass, or flat breasts.* Men adjust to whatever we do with ourselves because, mostly they just want the sex. If you ask men though, (as I have) the majority of them prefer women with figures. True fact. Boobs, butts, thighs. The whole shebang.

What I think is worth fighting for right now is the middle ground we lost first with Twiggy, and then with Kate Moss. The middle weight. The healthy medium. It is neither healthy nor attractive to pare your frame down to skin and bones, nor to become overweight as I am to the point where my weight bares down on my joints, causes me discomforts and health issues such as a higher risk of heart attack. I don't aspire to model thinness, as I have said before. I am lucky that my ideas of physical beauty were informed very early by women with substantial figures. My beauty lens was crafted and honed by the models of the thirties through the fifties by looking at old magazines and watching old films.

So what does the middle weight look like? Like Grace Kelly, who was certainly thin, but she had substance. Jane Mansfield, very buxom beautiful form. Marilyn Monroe had an ass, a belly, and boobs. Doris Day had a lovely figure as well. Did clothes look worse on them? NO. Clothes looked hot on them, and one of the reasons is that at that time designers were not cutting curtains for the body, they were constructing clothes to fit it. Again, I put the responsibility with the designers. It takes a special skill to design clothes that fit contours. It takes very little skill to drape over a flat plane.

Aside from the designers themselves deciding to use their power for good instead of evil, the only other way to change the course of fashion is for the consumers to start a revolution in which women refuse to buy clothes from designers who use bony thin models. So what's it gonna be? Who's willing to step up to the plate? Since I don't have enough money to even buy clothes from Lane Bryant, I'm hardly a consumer with power, but never the less, I will say this: if I ever make enough money to buy nice clothes I will only buy them from designers who use healthy looking models. I will also never aspire to the Kate Moss ideal. I just want my waist back.

So how about it ladies?