What percentage of couture designers are female? I’m not really sure how you read a male versus female split into this. While high fashion may be focused around dressing women up, most of the power players involved are men. (And, cliché though it admittedly is, there’s a lot more gay men in fashion than chance would dictate. Which would theoretically place me in their target audience.) The other point I suspect is a definitional one; you may be using “visually pleasing” differently than I am. I’ve been attempting to draw a contrast throughout this thread between things that are interesting and things that are, well, beautiful.
Let me try to explain it this way. I’m sure you’ve seen Picasso’s painting Guernica. To me, at least, this is one of the most visually arresting images I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I can describe its effect in words; it’s simply - even apart from the historical significance of what it represents - a fascinating, moving, absolutely spell-binding image. But it’s not what I would call visually-pleasing or beautiful at all. In fact, the style of it is deliberately chaotic and shocking and ugly; that’s an important part of what makes it work.
Comparing haute couture to one of the most famous artworks of the century is probably a bit of a stretch; however, the same basic dichotomy applies. I don’t think most couture is really visually pleasing - it’s not, on a purely aesthetic basis, particularly beautiful. That doesn’t mean it’s any less fascinating - obviously, I find it pretty compelling. But the images of runway-style modeling are rarely beautiful; they are visually interesting, but the point is not simple aesthetic pleasure - it’s something more complex than that, which is why the ridiculous and the shocking are such important aspects of it.
Perhaps; I don’t follow high fashion all that closely and the more mundane world of fashion trends amongst the public is even less relevant to me. I’m really only in this out of fascination with couture; I don’t honestly care much about real-life clothes.
Certainly a designer’s couture work may be thematically related to what they’re doing with their pret-à-porter lines, and without a doubt the things that are popular within haute couture are also influential within normal fashion. But I think you’re overstating the relationship. Obviously the same designers who produce runway shows involving skeletal women draped in burnt mosquito netting are also designing handbags and outfits sold at boutiques - it’s no shock if they tend to look to some of the same ideas in designing their collections. But I don’t think it’s so much that haute couture influences regular clothing as that it’s likely that a designer who is currently fascinated with a particular color or texture will use it in a lot of their work. And I truly doubt it comes down to the level of the clothes most people end up buying at mall (as opposed to folks who actually buy designer clothing); there’s simply too many steps in between and fashion trends among normal people just don’t seem to follow anything in the couture world, from what I’ve seen.
I highly doubt, for instance, that I’ll see anyone walking down the street in this little number - which is actually pretty tame for Gaultier, I have to say. (No nipples showing or anything. It’s actually an attractive, albeit weird and impractical, piece of clothing.) Gaultier is generally known as one of the more outrageous designers out there, which is really saying quite a bit when you think about the world he inhabits. At any rate, I probably exaggerated the point that haute couture and regular fashion are separate things - but I still don’t see any direct relationship between what gets shown on runways at couture shows and what ends up in stores six months later. (Whereas a designer’s high end pret-à-porter work, in contrast, obviously tends to be ripe for imitation.)
I should qualify what I said about unrealistic standards of beauty. The average person will obviously never look like a fashion model; if you aren’t blessed with the right genetics, all the diet, exercise, makeup, plastic surgery, and bathing in goats’ milk in the world will not make you look like Tyra Banks. However, I don’t know that I think that their weight in particular (which is what we seem to focus on) is necessarily out of reach for most people. Most of us in the western world are too fat; certainly, considering people’s builds, some women simply cannot possibly become a size 4 or 6. But a lot of women could. A lot of women could weigh the same as Tyra Banks in her modeling days, if they dieted and exercised enough. Obviously, the vast majority still won’t look that good - there’s a lot more than weighing the right amount that goes into looking good. (In case you haven’t noticed, she’s the only model I can name. Plus I really do think she’s extraordinarily beautiful.)
When it comes to highly visible fashion models - the ones that you see in the pages of Cosmo - I’m not sure most of them actually are underweight. Again, if you do the comparison I suggested (and I did it myself over the weekend just to make sure I wasn’t just talking out of my ass), haute couture models seem to be vastly skinnier than the ones appearing in advertisements. The women you see selling makeup and clothes on TV or in magazines are definitely better-looking than most people could hope to be, but I don’t see any evidence that they’re actually skinnier than many people could be; most of them are not distinctly underweight-looking.
I guess I wonder how realistic our current cultural dialogue on weight and media imagery really is. The fact is, unrealistic standard of beauty or not, most people in the United States are overweight. Even teenagers, blessed as they are with speedy metabolisms, are increasingly too fat. Eating disorders actually affect a pretty tiny percentage of the population; whether or not most people are too obsessed with their bodies - something I think is a legitimate question although I’ve not personally run into real empirical research on it - most people are certainly not too skinny, no matter how they feel about it. If we’re so obsessed with meeting these unrealistic standards of beauty, why the hell are we so fat?
