Er, thanks. There’s a link from my profile? goes searching
OH! My MySpace photo, right. I forgot about that. Yeah, I am hot in that picture. Then again, it was unseasonably warm that Beltane! 
I’m all for designers using all body shapes for models; my only complaint would be to put different body types in clothes that are actually flattering. I would love to see models wearing clothes that would flatter someone with my body type; I might actually go out and buy some clothes of that style if I can see that it would be good for me.
Lynsey is actually larger than I am (I vary between size 18 and 20 depending on the store and how much walking I’ve done lately) at a size 22. But she’s quite pretty, I’d love to look like her. Then again, I don’t look particuarly feminine, and she, despite being a lesbian, oozes feminine. At least, her face does (she wears a lot of sweats and stuff when she’s not modeling).
~Tasha
Couture has nothing to do with convincing women to buy clothes.
Mangetout is right. Dressing an extremely fat woman in lingerie so that the rolls of fat on her hips hang out is nothing but another stunt. If you watch fashion shows (and they are compelling in a bizarre way - I highly recommend it) you can easily see that none of it is about creating attractive styles and none of it is about clothes that normal people can wear. Haute couture is not about looking good. It’s about being striking and visually interesting, but not about looking good.
Haute couture is to normal clothing and normal fashion what atonal jazz is to normal music - it’s something deliberately bizarre that’s appreciated precisely for being outlandish, and it’s the sort of thing that’s mostly only even comprehensible to experts in the field. Fashion designers simply don’t appreciate clothes for the way normal people do. That’s why they have living coathangers with giant numbers painted on their faces wearing clothes that look like they coated their bodies with glue and ran through a burning JoAnn Fabrics. I don’t doubt that fashion designers actually find these things fascinating and pleasurable to look at, but that’s because their relation to the design of things is fundamentally different and far more intellectualized. It’s the difference between avant-garde conceptual performance art and community theater. I don’t mean to imply that either one is worse than the other - but an artist cutting herself and rolling in spaghetti is not something outsiders understand, and it’s not going to impact what you see on TV. Gaultier’s outlandish use of a visually shocking image is not going to impact what you purchase at Macy’s, either.
None of this relates in any way to the clothes sold in stores, the clothes normal people wear - and for the most part, not even to the clothes that designers design for A-list celebrities at the Oscars. What does it matter what the models’ body types are? Haute couture is influential among designers and people who examine it as a hobby, but it’s not really relevant outside of that tiny world. Plus-size models at Gaultier’s shows don’t translate to plus-size models on TV or in advertisements, or plus-size clothes being sold in stores. Couture is an incredibly insular thing, and it doesn’t relate to the outside world at all. Dressing a heavy woman up so that rolls of fat show is just another interesting visual image for Jean-Paul Gaultier, and it’s one that is all the more striking because of people’s attitudes towards weight and the fact that this is one boundary that is not frequently crossed at fashion shows.
The model in the green sweater is bigger than me, and I’m a size 10 on top and 12 on bottom.
But the bra model on the same page is definately an 8 or 10.
Another hijack: what’s up with Lane Bryant an other Plus Size stores, only selling size 7 and up shoes?
She’s Brazillian. Most comentators stick “curvy” on Brazilians and Hispanics in the same way that most DJs will stick “gorgeous” on any singer or lead actor - the actual look doesn’t really matter.
Two actors I’ve heard called “gorgeous” in what absolutely has to be this automatic fashion: Juan Echanove and Gabino Diego. Please note that, being their own webpages, those are “pretty” pictures. Echanove lost weight after being cast as The Pig in a movie that followed Catalan fairy tale of “the pretty mouse that cleaned the stairs”, he used to have three chins going on four.
I would agree.
I’m 5’ 10" and I don’t know what I weigh, b/c I haven’t owned a scale in several years, but even when I was a skinny “God, Audrey, eat something!” hip-bone-protruding college freshman I was still a size 10…God gave me hips and an ass, and regardless of how flat my stomach gets or how skinny my thighs become, I was never and will never be a single digit size.
I’ve been an 18 and a 10, and everything in between…currently a size 12…and like Batsinma Belfry notes, I’m not as big as the model in the pic. (Nor would I wear that, for all the tea in China.)
The size of the clothes you wear has very little, honestly, to do with how you look in them; if they fit properly and they hug and hang on you in a flattering way, you can look/feel hot as hell regardless of the number on the tag. Not to mention the size on that tag can vary by at least two sizes depending on where you shop. It’s absurd. Every man I know just goes into a store and picks up a pair of jeans/pants knowing that if it says “32/36” it’ll fit.
Us girls? We’re screwed. You gotta try on everything. And if you’re at Old Navy/Gap, you have to try on each individual pair also, b/c I’ve bought the EXACT SAME pair of pants, same color, same batch, same size, same rack, and they’ve fit totally differently. Like, literally a size’s worth of difference.
I hate it and I don’t understand it.
Re: the OP…I don’t see how having painfully thin models and one very large plus-size model is any kind of way to “relate” to modern women. Most women don’t fit into either category, and frankly I think it’s more “shock value” than anything that he hired the model from the pic. Which I think falls into the category of exploiting, rather than embracing, either type.
But really, what normal woman even wears the silly shit they wear on runways anyway?
No, this makes sense: current models are size 0, modelling clothes intended for women sizes 6-10. Plus-size models are size 12, modelling clothes intended for women sizes 18-24. The problem range is women sized 10-18; nobody has been hiring models sized 6-10 to model clothes for them (except maybe catalog companies like Land’s End?), and that’s what they’re talking about doing here, hiring more typically-sized models. Which I am all for.
The issues here are that designers can’t necessarily design clothes that look good on that broad a range of people; something that hangs just right on a size 6 is probably going to look a little odd on a size 26, and vice verse. It’s the same reason some car companies were acknowledge as, say, sports car manufacturers or truck manufacturers: they’re making what they know how to make. That’s change a lot recently, and the clothing fashion industry is just now beginning to catch up to the car fashion industry.
You’re absolutely right, Excalibre. It doesn’t even matter to me what designers are doing, because I’m pretty sure they don’t affect the cheap, comfortable clothes I buy at Wal*Mart and Zellers anyway.
Seriously. Go buy a copy of W or one of the other glossy high-fashion magazines. The ads (which are a visual feast in and of themselves) show high-end fashion that you might want to buy if you were wealthy. They show attractive people wearing attractive clothing, usually in blatantly provocative, sexual poses - those models are the perfect, glossy fantasy of what you would want to be or to fuck. (The most ridiculous extent being Versace ads - they’re a heavily gay-oriented fashion house - showing ass shots of nude men. Isn’t it silly to try to sell clothes using pictures of people who aren’t wearing any? Of course not.)
Then compare those with the photoshoots of couture shows in Paris or London or Milan - the appearance of the models is disturbing. High-fashion models are emaciated precisely because emaciated people are simultaneously compelling and disturbing. The women you see modeling those clothes are all rib cage and elbow and eyeshadow - no man wants to have sex with them, no woman wants to be them. Their hair doesn’t look attractive. Their makeup doesn’t look attractive. Their clothes generally look like carpet remnants and medical gauze held together with safety pins (which they probably are.)
These images are fascinating to designers, who are familiar with this visual medium and naturally seek out what’s new and different and shocking; they are useful marketing for the sort of people who are interested enough to spend a couple hundred dollars on a pair of jeans not because they are pleasing to the eye but rather because they are compelling. The women are walking geometrical figures - lines and angles, not solids. They are not attractive - even if these high-end runway models put on enough weight to reach normally appealing levels, they tend to have very odd faces: tiny eyes, extremely wide or narrow mouths, or other facial features that are striking precisely because they don’t match what we find normal and attractive (psychological experiments show that the most attractive faces tend to be those that have very average features; computer-generated averages of faces are more attractive to viewers than the real faces that compose them.) Take weird-looking people, starve them, fry their hair with crimping irons, put makeup on them so they look like cancer patients or people who just got mugged, and dress them in the most outlandish clothing you can imagine. That’s a runway show.
This stuff is both a game to amuse fashion designers and enthusiasts and a marketing tool targetting those with excess money. But they’re not in themselves attractive and they’re not a representation of what anyone wants to look like; designers may actually sell some of the clothes they design for fashion shows (I wouldn’t know), but they certainly don’t sell many and it’s not where the profits come from (the profits come, to some extent, from expensive but not super-expensive clothes sold in high-end boutiques and department stores, and to a much greater extent from the sale of perfume. In many ways, high-fashion is an extremely complicated marketing tool to sell perfume. Chanel doesn’t make its money from dresses, it makes it from Chanel Number 5.)
Another comparison point - take one of those magazines and compare the women doing actual high-fashion modeling and compare them to women modeling something explicitly in an attempt to sell it. Look in other magazines or on TV commercials for examples. Examine women in catalogues, or makeup ads, and decide who’s more attractive. The faces of cosmetics companies, for instance, are generally extremely attractive women. Tyra Banks does not look like she just tunnelled out of a concentration camp. She is what men want to have sex with and what women want to look like - big eyes, slim but curvy body, attractive facial features. No yawning cave under her ribcage where her stomach should be. That’s because when you see her face in a magazine, the advertiser is hoping you will buy their makeup in an attempt to look like her.
Jean-Paul Gaultier did not stick a two-hundred pound woman in a negligee with rolls of fat on her hips because he thought she looked good, or because he gives a rat’s ass about designing for all women. If he did, he would have chosen someone chubby, not someone obese. He did it because her appearance is shocking - and all the moreso because it seems to embody commentary on the fashion world, and because she’s such a visual contrast to the other women on display. She is a symptom of the insularity and self-referentiality of high-end “fashion” - her purpose has nothing to do with marketing to normal women and everything to do with being talked about and creating something even more bizarre than all the other designers there this year. She’s the other side of the coin from the other women - they are starving to death, she’s risking an early death from complications from her weight. Both are visually shocking and neither are remotely attractive to anyone in the real world.
As is probably obvious, I find fashion magazines pretty fascinating. These sexless, grotesque parodies of people wearing their sexless, grotesque parodies of clothing is bizarre and compelling. Apologies for my rambling.
If you see Tyra Banks now in one of her shows, she said she is about a size 10 or 12. I read in an interview with her that she gained weight as soon as she was done modelling, and she now weighs about 152. I think she was a size 6 when she modelled, and she was never one of the skinny skinny models. Usually the ‘supermodels’ are not size zero, Kate Moss is the exception and she is known for her waif look.
Part of the issue with larger women (even size 8/10) doing runway is that couture clothes don’t have wiggle room for fat deposits. Most of us have that one spot that collects the fat a little, either you carry it in your ass or your stomach or wherever. If a designer is making a couture show and spending months hand sewing all this stuff, they don’t want to worry about whether the model is going to be busty or have a little tummy or a mushy thigh. They need to know that the models can wear the stuff. Plus they want the focus on the clothes, not on the model’s cellulite on her thigh.
You will see bigger / normal sized models more often in ready to wear stuff, things that you are supposed to see and envision yourself wearing. Catalog models and underwear models are usually bigger than high fashion / runway. I modeled for bridal shows and they want girls who are size 8-12 and tall because that’s what their sample sizes are in their stores.
Personally I like to see models who have beautiful bodies and look healthy. I don’t think the model in the OP looks good, I like more toned and athletic bodies. Give me something to look up to. The only women’s magazine I subscribe to is Self and I like it because they use models that are very beautiful but never scary thin. They encourage healthy living in general. I admit I like to page through W and Vogue though to see the photo shoots, but I see them as art pieces and not as shopping for clothes.
Exactly.
Precisely.
Absolutely. Two very different worlds here.
Yes, but only 20% of them by weight so it will all work out.
It’s not at all peculiar that designers would be more interested in the unusual and challenging than your average person. Musicians are generally more appreciative of odd, unpleasant music that has no commercial potential; filmmakers will be attracted to experimental films. But what’s always puzzled me about fashion is that the overwhelming amount of media attention goes to these shows focused on clothing that is never worn in public, or even imitated in the marketplace. It’s like the pages of Entertainment Weekly and the Academy Awards being devoted entirely to experimental short foreign films that never play in theaters, and the movie that 99% of filmgoers buy tickets for are never discussed. I find this weird. I think that the clothes the people actually wear are equally worthy of attention.
Exactly my point, although I didn’t express it as clearly. While I’m a bit perturbed by the fashion industry’s tendency to fetishize truly unhealthy appearances in these events, it’s not surprising that what appeals to someone who has expertise in an area is different than what is even comprehensible to outsiders.
I don’t know . . . listening to Anthony Braxton play trumpet is just unpleasant for most people. But runway fashion, while it might not make sense to most of us, still is appealing in the way that the bizarre and the macabre always is.
It’s not really much weirder than watching football, in my opinion. Most of us will never be directly involved in professional sports, and hell, a lot of the people watching these games couldn’t play if their lives depended on it. That doesn’t mean sports isn’t fascinating to a lot of people.
Well, I’m going to disagree. There is nothing at all shocking about the woman in the OP - if you live in the U.S. you see dozens of people that look like her every day. If you go to the beach you see people her weight in similar stages of undress. Given people’s stranger fashion choices, you’ve probably seen people her weight on the street with similar amounts of exposure. The only thing that’s novel about the experience is that she’s being presented as attractive, happy, and desirable. And that is a real statement for Gautier to be making, even if he originally intended it as an attention grab.
Furthermore, I don’t understand the people who are saying (paraphrased) “It’s cool that he put up a big woman as a model, but couldn’t she have been wearing something a bit more flattering, something that hides her rolls of flab”. Um, that was the point. She’s FAT. If you put her up there in something that hides or minimizes the fact that she’s FAT, then you’re just buying into the idea that fat women only look okay when they’re hiding. He’s presented her as beautiful and desireable while being inescapably fat. I think that’s cool.
mischievous
You’re totally missing the point. Nothing you see on a runway is meant to be “attractive, happy, [or] desireable”.
Seriously, do the experiment I recommended if you really doubt me. Compare the advertisements in a haute couture magazine with the runway photography. Advertisements are designed to sell a product. They have the specific intention of making people look attractive and desireable in order to do that. Then look at the runway photography. It’s artistic, it’s interesting, it’s really a fascinating thing to look at. But no one on a runway is supposed to be attractive or desireable, and I imagine that few of them are happy. (But maybe that’s just my imagination. If I found myself living on nicotine and Tic Tacs, you can bet I’d be miserable.)
If you have no problem with fat women being exploited as tools of visual shock, then that’s cool. I suppose I don’t either, any more than I feel pity for the models who are so skinny they don’t menstruate being used as startling, disturbing images. Both are being used for a specific purpose, and both sign on voluntarily and get paid well. But while you may find that woman attractive, most people - as we’ve seen in this thread - don’t, and the clothes designed precisely to emphasize what would generally be considered her least desireable trait should tell you something. She might look good to you. But she doesn’t look good to the designers. She doesn’t look good to most people watching. And she’s not meant to. Runway modeling is not about being attractive or visually pleasing. If it were, they would be depicting women that men are likely to be attracted to.
I think you just don’t get the purpose of that picture. Runway modeling is to a great extent a celebration of the grotesque; it has been that way for a very long time. Using fat women with rolls of fat hanging off of them in order to create that grotesquerie is not a step forward for fat acceptance. Most people are attracted to others of a healthy body weight; the fact that not one of the models on any runway in London, Paris, New York, or Milan meets that standard is proof enough that designers don’t do runway shows to depict attractive people looking good.
Frankly, humans are wired to look for partners who are healthy; practically everything that is generally agreed upon as sexually attractive boils down to exhibiting a person’s health. Men are not usually attracted to women who appear to be starving (did you look at DiosaBellisima’s linked pictures? You might think I’m exaggerating if you haven’t - but those women look quite literally emaciated.) Men are also not usually attracted to women who are unhealthily heavy. I’m no doctor, but a woman as big as the model that Gaultier showed is at a serious risk of contracted all sorts of diseases should she maintain that weight.
The Fat Acceptance movement is both fighting a losing battle and ultimately doing fat women a serious disservice if the idea is to normalize being obese. It’s one thing to recognize that not all women have the same body type (although, again, the insular world of haute couture is just not the place to look for that, because it’s not something that is influential upon most people’s attitudes). It’s a totally different thing to try to tell people to be attracted to women who are heavy enough that they are endangering their health. For one thing, only a very small percentage of people are attracted to that sort of thing - and that’s not society, it’s how we’re wired. It’s not evolutionarily advantageous to decide to have a kid with someone liable to die at thirty-five from diabetes. Men - except, again, for a tiny minority - are not going to be convinced to be attracted to women that heavy (nor are women likely to be attracted to men that heavy.) And pretending that it’s normal to be so heavy that it affects your health is not good either; most people in the United States are too damn fat as it is (and I’m overweight, so don’t think I don’t understand how hard it is to lose weight. If it weren’t incredibly hard, I’d sure be skinnier.) Pretending that that’s a good thing is not going to fool anyone and it’s not good for anyone.
Well put.
I had never thought of it that way. That makes a lot of sense. I don’t think anyone would argue that your average elite athlete isn’t extreme about their body - it’s an extreme lifestyle. I saw Catriona LeMay Doan in person once (an Olympic gold medallist for speed skating), and she had thighs that were upwards of, I’d say, 40 inches each.
We’re sort of assuming that runway models are negatively affecting impressionable young girls, but I’m not sure that’s true - they would have to be playing a larger role in young girls’ lives to affect them, and I’m pretty sure the runway models have a much smaller effect than say, Gwen Stefani or Lindsay Lohan.
I think I may have a slight disconnect, here. I’ve seen Tyra Banks recently on television, and she looks great at 152lbs. A Size 12, you say? Sure, I can buy that. I do not, however, believe for a moment that the woman in the OP pic weighs only 48 pounds more than Tyra Banks. Not for a freaking second. She might weigh 250. Might. If she drank nothing but water all this week, and bent her knees, leaning forward slightly, on the scales.
I’ve also heard that the average professional football player dies at 56. Don’t remember where I got the statistic; it could have been made up, but it sounds reasonable to me - their bodies take a lot of their own kind of abuse. Yeah, professional sports are extreme all right.
That’s my guess. But I’ve also been skeptical for a long time about how important eating disorders really are from a public health perspective. Some of the evidence I’ve seen suggests that the number of women who die from eating disorders is miniscule; of course, my heart goes out to anyone so afflicted. But whatever portion of an eating disorder’s cause is from media pressure to be skinny (something else I really have a tough time believing), I don’t think ultra-skinny fashion models really play that big of a role - those aren’t the images that dominate our media.
Guess I shouldn’t become one of those carnies who guesses people’s weights, then. 
As someone who knows and cares nothing about fashion, I agree with Mangetout and Excalibre. This is self-promotion and shouldn’t be taken as a meaningful comment. If the designer was trying to make a statement against ultraskinny models, he should have put this woman in clothes that made her look better. Maybe it’s the picture, but he seems to have drawn a maximum of attention to her thighs and butt, and I think it looks lousy. The fleshless models look bad, but so does this. I get the sense that someone is being made fun of, but I don’t know who it is.