I am sad to report, after diligent web searching, it appears the vibrating Nimbus 2000 is no longer in production. But we all remember, don’t we?
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Wait…fat people are responsible for the disgust other people feel toward them, and are the cause of eating disorders in people who are especially disgusted by them?
First rule of holes…
Don’t even need a potion to fly that broomstick! Unbaptised babies everywhere sleep safer when your local witch has her own Mattel® brand Vibrating Nimbus 2000®! It’s a fashion statement that’s got your local coven abuzz.
On that cracked note, good night everyone.
In case that was in response to something I said…I’m speaking as someone who knows the difference in bodily proportions between boys and girls as children and teenagers. The body proportions of runway models are not normal female proportions. And it’s not simply that they are thin and have no breasts – for example, ballerinas are still quite clearly female in their proportions – there is a disproportion between head vs body, legs vs torso, and arms vs hips.
Obesity, not obese people, nor even fat people. Didn’t I just mention this? I’m not interested in assigning moral blame, only discovering causes.
One might suppose than men can use another drug delivery system.
sexist
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My preferences were informed by what was comfortable during my formative years; i.e., I dress pretty much exactly as I did in high school. I’ll be wearing cotton t-shirts, Levis 501s, and plaid flannel shirts as deep into the 21st century as Fate allows me to draw breath, and I have no doubt those items will be as available in the 2150s as they were in the 1950s. Four hundred years ago I might have worn nondescript tights and a tunic of some sort, but that’s what would have been on sale at Ye Gappe the first time I hit town with a couple of coppers to spend, and if I found the outfit comfy, I’d have probably worn it out and bought another identical outfit the moment the original became unmendable. And so on for the rest of my sorry days. There seem to be no dandies in my lineage.
There was a time between 1991 and 1994 when, thanks to Mr Cobain and some of his fellow Seattleites, flannel shirts became weirdly fashionable and hence overpriced. I found no advantage in being grunge before grunge was cool; I simply had to make my clothes last longer until they fell sufficiently out of fashion that I could afford to replace them. That’s my only real intersection with the fashion industry. I don’t resent them as someone who longs to be fashionable but can never get in. As a white male American, I have more unearned privilege than I know what to do with. As you imply, I could probably get in with the fashionable crowd if I put in the effort. If I just went ahead and forced myself to give a shit. But even though I’m 43 and have totally let myself go long since, I have what can be described as fashionable genes. I’m 6’2", I still have a decent head of hair, and I have a slender build. Six months or less at the gym, and I’d be fabulous. But again, I’m one of the lucky ones. Plenty of people I know who do give a shit about fashion bust their ass every day to attain what they feel might be a “better” figure. But there’s only so much they can do, of course, so they feel like failures. In that context, my utter lack of give-a-shit about whether my looks are going to attract positive attention (as opposed to simply being clean, well-fitting, appropriate to the situation, and reasonably inoffensive) feels less like a lapse of personal responsibility and more like a gift: if only these people could learn to let go, as I apparently did unconsciously, of their obsession with their shape and appearance, they might lead healthier and happier lives.[quote=“AshleyYakeley, post:74, topic:6800”]
Have a look at The Sartorialist, which shows both fashion insiders and random interestingly-dressed people in the street. None of these people are trying to “pass a test”, as you say. None of them copied some template. Mostly they’re just going with something that suits them.
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Then, for a fun contrast, take a peek at peopleofwalmartdotcom. I don’t expect most of those people were trying to get their pictures on the Web for the general amusement of all and sundry. There is, in fact, a test. Whether or not people are aware of it, the ones who appear in The Sartorialist (or the “Do” side of the back page in Glamour) pass the test, according to the tastemakers who publish such things. And our friends at Wal-mart (who generally bomb noticeably harder than your garden-variety Glamour Don’t) aren’t left to simply buy their Cheez-Its and ammunition in peace, even though they decided to step out in public wearing “something that suits them” (or so they thought at the time). Were they trying to flunk the test? Sometimes it’s hard to believe, but I suspect they weren’t.
Is this the fault of the fashion industry? No, not directly. But the industry feeds our urge to pigeonhole, to rank, to say “this one looks good and this one looks bad.” We’re not going to evolve out of those urges anytime soon, but the fun part of being sapient beings is that we can decide which of our urges are constructive and useful (such as compassion, love, and things like mild hunger) and which ones are destructive and outmoded (such as jealousy, greed, and violence), and then decide which ones could use a bit of suppression. Such is the purpose of civilization.
But here’s the problem: [quote=“AshleyYakeley, post:75, topic:6800”]
Right now, our culture is having a kind of allergic reaction to fat people. It’s having this not because of some nefarious plot by the fashion industry, but, I believe, because of the rise in the overall rate of obesity. Part of this allergy involves reaching for the extreme opposite, and images of thinness become desireable. It’s this that the fashion industry has no choice but to follow if they want folks to buy their clothes and magazines. Any of them would hire fat models in a heartbeat if they were equally appealing to their customers.
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We have a basic chicken-and-egg disagreement about why the fashion industry promotes such a skinny ideal. You believe it’s because the industry is helplessly following the desires of the customer base, rather than actually setting the mode for what is fashionable. And that’s where I disagree. I believe the industry is run by people who have a pathologically skewed view of what constitutes an attractive body. And Kirstie Clements agrees:
After the shows, the collection is made available for the press to use for their shoots. These are the samples we all work with and they are obviously the size of the model who wore them on the runway. Thus, a stylist must cast a model who will fit into these tiny sizes. And they have become smaller since the early 90s. We’ve had couture dresses arrive from Europe that are so minuscule they resemble christening robes. There are no bigger samples available, and the designer probably has no interest in seeing their clothes on larger women. Many high fashion labels are aghast at the idea of producing a size 14, and they certainly wouldn’t want to see it displayed in the pages of the glossies. As a Vogue editor I was of the opinion that we didn’t necessarily need to feature size 14-plus models in every issue. It is a fashion magazine; we are showcasing the clothes. I am of the belief that an intelligent reader understands that a model is chosen because she carries clothes well. Some fashion suits a curvier girl, some doesn’t. I see no problem with presenting a healthy, toned, Australian size 10 [UK 8-10]. But as sample sizes from the runway shows became smaller, 10 was no longer an option and the girls were dieting drastically to stay in the game.
Nowhere in the article does she imply that the industry is just catering to the tastes of the culture at large. On the contrary:
I was at the baggage carousel with a fashion editor collecting our luggage after a trip and I noticed a woman standing nearby. She was the most painfully thin person I had ever seen, and my heart went out to her. I pointed her out to the editor who scrutinised the poor woman and said: “I know it sounds terrible, but I think she looks really great.” The industry is rife with this level of body dysmorphia from mature women.
Honestly, I have no dog in this fight, other than a vague love for my fellow humans and a dislike for seeing them suffer for such a profoundly stupid reason as “looking good in a dress.” In this situation, I think Ms Clements knows far more than we do about the cause. [quote=“AshleyYakeley, post:74, topic:6800”]
I mean, perhaps looking good truly doesn’t matter to you, but your list of other ways in which you are successful does seem a little defensive.
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Of course it does; I could think of no other way to express it. The point isn’t that I’m so fabulous in every way except my physical looks; it’s that I’ve never found it difficult to succeed as a relatively plain-looking man. Of course I had plenty of help from advantages that were as unearned as a gorgeous face would have been. It’s no thanks to my efforts that I was born a white male Californian who was destined to be tall. But I learned in elementary school that people who judged me at first glance invariably dismissed me as just funny-looking, and that if I wanted to gain any positive influence, I’d have to improve myself in other ways that were more under my control: my sense of humor, my compassion, my conversational skills, etc.
As we have learned that it is not useful to judge someone by, for instance, the color of their skin, I have learned that it is not useful to judge someone by how physically attractive they are. But the fashion industry glories in such judgment; it celebrates an ideal that was relatively harmless when it was at least attainable by people who exercised and ate sensibly, but now celebrates an ideal that is downright suicidal. And I do not believe that this was a helpless reaction to the consensus tastes of the society at large. The designers and the fashion editors are, like it or not, the arbiters of fashion. They make mistakes that the public shuns by voting with their pocketbooks and the course is swiftly corrected, it is true. But as this article indicates, the designers and editors don’t have guns to their heads. They make their decisions based upon what they feel looks good, not what they feel the unwashed masses demand. They don’t have to choose to hire malnourished models. They don’t have to run their business this way… and yet they do. This is their fault.
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No, no, no. It’s not about “getting in with the fashionable crowd”. Fashion, itself, is not a cool-kids club. It’s about making yourself look better by your own tastes and values, tastes and values that are unavoidably embedded in your culture.
It’s a blog. It’s one guy with a camera, photographing whoever looks interesting to him. Sure, he has his own internal “test” to decide whom to snap, but none of those folks on the street woke up with the specific intent to make sure they were good enough for Scott Schuman to photograph. Mostly, no doubt, they simply want to look good, that’s all.
What there are, is standards, or more generally, a very roughly common sense of what looks good and what doesn’t. And we pretty much all participate in that to some degree or another. And this is a good thing: it makes the social world a brighter and more interesting place. Dressing is indeed a form of self-expression, and fashion is its language.
Kelly Cutrone gets it right:
Society has a hyper emphasis on thin and that trend comes from the consumers — it does not come from the fashion industry. The fashion industry needs to make money, that’s what we do. If people said, ‘we want a 300 pound purple person,’ the first industry to do it would be fashion. You look at the Dove campaign in Times Square — it sticks out like a sore thumb. Those girls in the white T-shirts and underwear, next to Calvin Klein [and all the other fashion ads]. As a consumer, it doesn’t make me want to buy Dove. I’m all for the real look, but as a consumer it doesn’t make me want to buy clothes."
Well, Cutrone does PR for America’s Next Top Model, and Clements has a book to sell. So who knows?
But you’re not in elementary school anymore. All those kids who judged you have long since moved on. Now you’re an adult, you can also gain positive influence by improving your sartorial skills. Work with the funny-looking. Try it!
I have no need to. Sure, it doesn’t sound like it right now, but I’ve long since moved on. This conversation is the most I’ve thought about fashion or appearance in years, maybe decades. I clean up okay for job interviews, weddings, or what have you. I’m lucky to work in a field where I don’t have to dress to impress. And clothes bore me at least as much as hot rods bore my wife. I leave peacockery to the peacocks, and play to my strengths instead. This stance has served me well for 35 years now.
As for Kelly Cutrone, she works in PR for a high-visibility section of the fashion industry. If she weren’t an ardent apologist for the industry’s practices, she’d be out of a job. Relatively few people still working in that industry are going to be brutally honest about the fundamental horrors at its core.
But someone smarter than I am will have to find them. I know next to nothing about what goes on behind the scenes in this industry, but I do find the claim that the fashion industry is guilty of nothing more than innocently providing what the consumers demand to be dangerously disingenuous.
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Providing what consumers demand, or showing what they desire, is how companies make money. It’s rather more plausible than the idea that the fashion industry is pervasively biased against their own interests.
We’re talking about a weird kind of industry. Unlike, for instance, soda companies who might roll out a new flavor after a certain amount of test-marketing, and then see whether it succeeds or fails based upon its flavor (or its marketing… I think Matt Yglesias may not have come to the correct conclusion in his Slate article from two days ago about the cola wars), or a car company that might think that what the American people want in the fall of 1957 is an Edsel, the fashion industry’s elite trendsetters and style mavens are rather entrenched. It’s easy to think that fashion-minded consumers simply won’t buy something if they think it’s ugly or wrong for them. But Vogue’s editorial voice is awfully influential. Sure, to a certain extent, it’s going to reflect trends that it sees on the better streets of New York, Paris, Milan, etc. In the sense that fashion is a language, it’s one of consensus, and as such it’s steered by the opinions of the culture as a whole. But the larger fashion magazines and style houses carry much louder voices of authority. Despite their widespread popularity, did Crocs ever receive a thimbleful of approval by anyone in the fashion industry?
The fashion industry doesn’t see millions of size-zero consumers flocking to buy their wares; the vast majority of people that size are starving and couldn’t care less about fashion. The industry takes a cunningly-designed scrap of cloth, wraps it around a fainting waif, and parades her down a catwalk, saying in effect, “Look at her? Isn’t she glamorous? Wouldn’t you just love to look like this?” Do they really have any cause to believe that market forces would punish them for parading the same outfit on a slightly healthier woman? If for no other reason than to shut down the growing tide of bad press and boring complaints by people like me?
I find Clements’ take on the affair to be utterly plausible. She’s reflecting the pretty reasonable concerns of the industry’s critics about the health of the models, which extend indirectly to those critics’ concerns about the healthfulness of the images peddled by that industry. Pointing to innocent greed as the cause of these trends isn’t a whole lot more reassuring (nor more plausible, in my opinion) than acknowledging that certain influential people in the fashion industry have their tastes colored by either misogyny or body dysmorphia. And when I say “certain influential people,” I’m charitably minimizing what Clements describes as “the industry is rife with [this].”
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Oh, her description of what is going on in the industry is quite plausible, but she has rather less to say about why.
In any case, why would you point to the authority of a fashion industry insider, to suggest that insiders are biased against themselves?
I can understand the position, but I don’t like it, on an intellectual level.
It seems to call for artists and businesses not to produce what suits either their own tastes or their bottom lines, but what some external moral authority deems appropriate to shape culture.
The problem for me is the gap between a niche culture, where I post a thing I like or dislike on Tumblr, and no one tells me that I’m forcing anything on anyone, and broader popular culture, where I post something on vogue.com, and my expression is suddenly irresistibly normative. Suddenly, the people who enjoy what I do lack agency.
At what point do we think that ideas go from creation and appreciation to manufacture and obedience? I don’t think they ever do, and I think that’s an important part of believing in the sort of individual agency needed for democracy to make sense.
(The same phenomenon is always on display in the gap between one media and another. What’s OK in novels is subject to an awful lot more scrutiny when put into a video game.)
In the end, the fashion industry exists in order to change what people think is an aesthetic ideal.
To claim that fashions merely reflect broader values in a society may well be defensible, but to say the the fashion industry does so is flatly ludicrous. When was the last time you saw a fashion show canceled because all the designers agreed that last year’s products were sufficiently stylish? They have to sell new product, and that entails selling both image and context - neuro-cognitive manipulation of potential customers to purposefully shape their idea of a beautiful self-image. This is not a secret; vendors use advertising psychology to sell product in every market.
“Heroin chic” didn’t just sell underwear, it sold heroin - and today’s anorexia chic is selling more than just dresses; it’s selling a body image.
Fashion industry: “Don’t blame us, we’re just holding up a mirror to society! Sure, it’s one of those weird fun-house mirrors that totally distorts the appearance of the human body, but…”
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Not really, it exists to come up with images that appeal to people’s existing and ever-changing aesthetic ideals, including a desire for freshness and novelty. The high fashion industry is perpetually trying to express the “feel” or “mood” of the times, the zeitgeist even, and people’s ideas of who they want to be, in the language of fashion. In the process, it must continually come up with new images. But it’s always constrained by what images people find desireable.
More like, it’s holding up a mirror to society’s desires, a very different thing.
Yes, really. You can’t convincingly claim that everything on the runway existed as an ideal before the (usually ugly, often badly dressed) designer came up with it, I’m afraid.
That’s not what I’m claiming. I’m claiming that pretty much everything on the runway is an attempt to appeal to people existing ideals and desires, and to express those ideals and desires in the language of fashion.
