Hannah

An Australian newspaper published a piece today that uses the Vogue Italia editorial featuring three plus-size models as a springboard for a powerful condemnation of the fashion world.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...o-1226080879917

The article suffers from mixed messages, but contains fine denunciations, especially:


This is entirely true. I looked up the drought photographs to which she refers, and they're absolutely horrifying.







What makes these images so disturbing is how closely they resemble photographs of minus-size fashion models. This really is how today's "mainstream" catwalk cadavers look, with skull-like faces and tissue-thin skin barely covering their jutting bones. No exaggeration.

Furthermore, the article's writer makes the incontestable case that even if apologists for the industry try to make the clam that today's size-0 skeletons are not dropping dead en masse (although some are indeed dying, and many more are permanently damaging their health), fashion still should not be permitted to foist this toxic standard on the public, because it does ruin the body image of women in general, and lead to eating disorders:


Interestingly, the author describes how she, on her own initiative, assembled a personal gallery of images of full-figured celebrities to counter to skinniness-brainwashing, but had trouble finding many such celebrities or their photos. This is why plus-size models are so indispensable - they create the pro-curvy imagery that the media refuses to produce.

On the downside, the author claims that "scrawniness sells." But for that there is no evidence, because there has never been any society-wide alternative. Without a cross-cultural alternative to the hegemony of thinness, there is no way to claim that curves would not sell, nor that they wouldn't in fact sell better than emaciation.

I like her last point about the virtues of so-called "tokenism":


Exactly. To us, here at the Judgment of Paris, we see the anorexic models for the aberrations that they are, because we see gorgeous plus-size models all the time, who truly are normal. If society as a whole experienced a steady dose of such positive visual imagery, it would come to the same orientation.

Seeing the drop-dead gorgeous images of true plus-size models from the collections at Full-Figured Fashion Week has illustrated what the fashion industry could look like, if all runway shows featured lusciously feminine models. It could be an industry of true beauty. Let's hope that we're on the way to having that happen...

Meredith

Those photographs are deeply tragic. The writer was right to make such a comparison. Perhaps seeing what emaciation looks like on a poor animal might make some of the people who blithely accept this type of appearance for girls reconsider their passive acceptance of the fashion industry's culture-of-death aesthetic.

I also applaud the writer's dismissal of the "under-sized, empty-figured, curve-less size-8 model." Even given the fact that Australian sizes run one step larger than American sizes do, she is still indicating that a U.S. size 6 is "under-sized, empty-figured, curve-less," which it is. The idea that such skinny models could be passed off as curvy, let alone plus-size, is intolerably offensive. Only true plus-size models, a U.S. size 16 and above, can make any substantial difference in public perceptions.

Another article I read recently makes a similar set of arguments, although it's likewise blighted by mixed messages.

http://www.independent.com/news/201...and-glam-girth/

It too begins with the Vogue Italia spread as a springboard for the discussion.


It denounces the fashion industry's anorexic standard and reminds readers that this standard has led to actual model deaths. The author observes that fashion


The most interesting point, I think, is her final contention. One of the most absurd rationalizations that apologists for the thin-supremacist standard make is that fashion is meant to be "aspirational." Well, this writer makes the very obvious (but surprisingly seldom voiced) point that plus-size models can be aspirational:


Fashion can be aspirational without triggering eating disorders, and the FFFWeek 2011 runway shows have proved that, once and for all, as the beauty of genuinely full-figured models like Kelsey, Katherine, and Lindsey is far more truly aspirational than the cadaverous appearance of the industry's minus-size famine victims.