If you’re right, their attempts are an abject failure, and pretty much all of them lack any fluency in the pattern language. But looking directly at it, I cannot bring myself to believe that the fashion industry is motivated by anything other than ego and desire to sell product. I don’t believe that people’s ideals tend to increasingly unhealthily starved-looking waifs; rather, the mass of people idealize more sexually attractive women.
It’s ideals of high status and sophistication, not (or not merely) of sexyness. And the images reflect ideals that society has exaggerated and fetishised in its allergic reaction to rising obesity.
To risk another elephant-related metaphor, Jonathan Haidt speaks of humans as being an elephant and a rider. The elephant is the unconcious source of desires and motivations. The rider is the rational mind, that acts as the elephant’s advisor and lawyer. But ultimately the elephant is in charge. Beauty, fashion etc. speak directly to the elephant. Of course, most everyone is aware that being so thin is hugely unhealthy, but that’s the awareness of the rider. This is why fashion doesn’t “make sense” in this way.
The richest, most sophisticated people I have ever met - old wealth people who can call the President and he’ll take the call because he knows their names - don’t pay any attention to fashion and are not in any way reflected by the fashion industry. Well, except the occasional trend to completely uncombed wild hair, but I contend that’s just a statistical fluke. If it was about societal ideals of high status and sophistication, the models would be getting older not skinnier.
But I’m still not buying the premise that models who look like prepubescent boys reflect a societal horror of obesity. There’s no evidence of this that I know of, and it contradicts your (much earlier) contention that the fashion industry exists to hold up a model of what we should be. We shouldn’t be stupidly obsessed with obesity to the point of starving ourselves; that’s not idealism, it’s neurosis.
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I don’t watch fashion shows, but I’d hazard a guess that the majority of pieces on display aren’t necessarily the newsworthy transgressive ones. Not everyone can be Gaultier, after all. So yeah, there will be beige pencil skirts that look virtually indistinguishable from last year’s beige pencil skirts, etc.
Still, there is something inescapably prescriptive, rather than descriptive, when it comes to fashion magazines and design houses. Too many missteps away from what people are willing to pay for and sure, a designer vanishes into bankrupt obscurity. But since fashion seems to divide its time between classic looks of long-standing cultural enthusiasm and the Fresh, Upcoming, Avant-garde, Next New Thing (America’s Next Top Model. The new black.), we pay a lot of attention to what the fashion industry offers up next. As I implied earlier, “unfashionable” has several connotations, most of them negative. Often we use it to describe a look that used to be fashionable, once upon a time, but has now fallen behind the times. You probably wouldn’t describe someone wearing a Hefty bag as “unfashionable” (though you might call it “strange”), but someone wearing wide lapels and a mullet might be considered unfashionable. Though these days, who knows. All too many dated looks are mixed and matched by hipsters, ironically and otherwise, in an attempt to come up with a look that stands out in a hopefully positive way, at least to the “right” observers.
And again, the fashionistas are presenting their wares to the public. Did any buyers say around twenty years ago that Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford were simply too hefty to sell anymore? Kate Moss was discovered, and her natural skinniness was used to usher in heroin chic (once again, Calvin Klein underwear ads showing young people what they apparently ought to want to look like, if “underwear model” is still anything deemed attractive), and even though it was controversial then, the problem only got worse into the 21st century, until finally Italian fashion labels Prada, Versace and Armani agreed to ban size zero models from their catwalks.
I guess we won’t be able to properly judge how this decision affected those houses’ bottom lines, since a year or so after they made this move, the bottom fell out of the world economy. But in any case, they felt it needed to be done, maybe to quiet the critics, maybe out of a genuine sense of alarm over the health of the models themselves. Either way, it took someone dying to motivate the change.
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That sounds rather contradictory. “High status and sophistication” seems to demand some conscious thought, some elevation. The superego. And yet you describe the elephant as being pure id. Which is it?
As an artform, fashion will appeal to different parts of the human psyche in different ways, and what appeals to our baser, subconscious animal instincts is not necessarily going to appeal to our more sophisticated nature. So if the underfed model appeals to us, is it appealing to us because it looks “sophisticated” to be at death’s door? Or is it because our animal side finds such models potentially easier to carry off and have our way with?
Okay, at this point I think I’ve talked myself out of serious interest and into pure goofiness. Sorry if I’ve bored anyone here.
What have we learned? Fashion is Danger.
Which is weirdly enough based on the Visage Fade to Grey video from what I can tell
Fashion!
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Well, it’s also ideals of beauty and glamour. Then again sometimes they’ll go for the “sophisticated older gentleman” look, such as Gary Oldman and Willem Dafoe.
What is it that people want, especially people with money to spend on clothes? They want to be seen as sophisticated, sexy, appealing, interesting. They want to be desired and admired. They want attention and social status. You can see any and all of that reflected on the runway, on the covers of magazines, on billboards, in music videos, etc.
The fashion industry holds up a model of what we “should” be, but it’s reflecting society’s visceral notion of “should”. Indeed that has problems, but those comes from society’s own issues with obesity and disgust, which the fashion industry is incented to follow.
FWIW, I’ve really appreciated your posts…otherwise, I would have stopped reading the thread long before. If Ashley had shown some nuance or humanity, reading a pro-fashion viewpoint could have been really interesting, but instead we keep getting industry lies being presented as if none of us have ever heard them before (so maybe we’ll fall for them?).
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I have to admire a willingness to be the only person defending against a BB pile-on (although this particular pile-on was rather mannerly, compared to most). I usually chime in for the underdog if they’ve got any sort of valid points at all, myself, because I am ornery like that. But in this case I can’t, because I find the fashion industry alternately appalling and extremely amusing (mostly the latter). But I’ll respect Ashley’s tenacity, if not the point of view.
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