According to current arguments on the subject, it may be a sort of vicious cycle: designers make garments for a fairly tall and thin model body type because, as you say, it shows off the clothes. So model agencies hire women who are even more dramatically thin, designers start making sample sizes to fit the new skinnier models, thereby putting pressure on models to be even skinnier, and so on until catwalk models are literally dying of malnutrition:
Did any of them predict or profit from Sagging jeans, Giant Basketball Shoes, Hipsters, Snuggies or wearing pyjamas to class?
How 'bout the Real Tree camo thing?
Gracious, yes. The “sagging” pants style was exploited by men’s underwear makers like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, among others. The “pajamas as outerwear” style was echoed in fancier fabrics on runways in NY Fashion Week 2011, and designer collections have been full of hipster-inspired stuff.
While it wasn’t the fashion industry who first thought up these fashion trends, they’re never shy about jumping on board with them.
Maybe it is, I am not sure. I am under the impression that there are different kinds of models, the ‘sexy’ models are not the ‘editorial’ models, who are the ones who tend to be anorexic. But with runaway body weight neuroticism in this culture I really don’t know how the fashion industry in general feels about super thin models, or whether the consider them to be physically ideal.
Either way, I can dismiss the fashion industry but as I sit here in a T-shirt, jeans, white cotton socks and walking shoes (all mainstream clothing products selected for me by the culture at large) I really have no leg to stand on.
I guess I am wondering where is the line between nouveau fashion and traditional fashion? Most people wear jeans and t-shirts, but if a new trend comes up with those clothes I don’t know if people will jump on that fashion trend.
You can blame that evil Nazi whore Coco Chanel for that–before her damned “gamine” look of the 1920s, women had curves.
We don’t necessarily have much choice. When low rise jeans became mainstream it was difficult for me (then in my mid-20s) to find anything that wasn’t either 1) low rise or 2) total “mom jeans” with elastic waistbands and loose hips/thighs. I wound up buying new jeans that had a lower waistband than I wanted, although I got the highest low-rises I could find.
Nearly all of the t-shirts I buy are the J.C. Penney store brand, and I can tell by comparing newer purchases to my older shirts that over the past 7 years or so the shirts have gradually been getting longer (there’s a difference of several inches between my oldest shirts and my newest ones) and that recently the necklines became lower. The colors available also change according to whatever is currently in fashion. None of this is particularly dramatic, but they are changes in style and I’d have to alter my shopping habits in order to avoid them.
One thing that irks me is, it’s often very difficult to find skirts, pants, and blazers (as mentioned above) sometimes in the color you want. For years, I loved gray, and could never find anything in gray - until someone deemed it the ‘in’ color and it was everywhere. Now it’s brown - SO hard to find brown. Black and tan seems to always be plentiful, and on occasion navy blue. But it’s hit or miss. Herringbone tweed - extremely rare, and my favorite dressy slacks are now one-of-a-kind. I don’t want to wear orange capri pants, I don’t care if that’s the fashion - why can’t I find nice basic brown dressy pants?? Maybe I’m shopping at the wrong stores. I will not - I cannot - spend upwards of $100 at Banana Republic or wherever for one pair of slacks or one mundane A-line skirt. It’s either sew something myself or haunt the thrift stores, waiting for brown/gray/tweed/navy to come back into fashion. The Blair catalog, the Haband catalog my mother gets is beginning to look more interesting, LOL!
I was 20 when The Merchants of Cool first aired. Watching it years later it was amazing how much of the “youth culture” of the day that they got wrong. The producers actually tried to pass off The Insane Clown Posse as a popular band of the day. Sure, they had a bunch of fans, but calling them popular just doesn’t reflect real life.
This. I remember several years ago wanting a plain blouse (no wrinkles or fluffies) buttoning straight up, and went to all major dept. stores in my town. None had them at an affordable price. I found several over time at 2nd hand sales, flea markets, diakonia shops and similar, but it took time. And it doesn’t work for all items - underwear is not bought second-hand (obivously) and dito for shoes (too worn out usually).
The only alternative to bucking the trend and getting your own design is
a) sewing yourself - if you have the skill, but even for a simple blouse, you’d need a year training or so. Plus buying the fabric is damn expensive.
b) let somebody sew for you. An aquaintance regular went to Thailand with cheap tourist flights and had his suits hand-sewn for cheap there. Some business now advertise to order shirts on the internet: take your own measurements, order it, it’s sewn in Eastern Europe and shipped, and cheaper than in Western Europe
Both of those options cost time or money, more than the cheap blouse on sale with the ugly design.
The purpose of the fashion industry is not to make clothes that look good it is to make clothing that mark the wearer as high status. Those with the highest status among women are those who are young, beautiful and rich. Expensive clothes send a signal to others that the wearer is rich and has idle time to devote to appearance. Thus all of the clothes must be from brand names that are expensive.
The problem is that it can be hard to tell the difference between a thousand dollar dress and a hundred dollar dress from a distance. Thus the clothes must be distinctive and different. Consumers have a great incentive to cheat the signal and purchase expensive styles for less money. Thus downmarket manufacturers rush to copy the expensive styles. The more it is copied the less distinctive it is and the weaker signal it provides. Thus creating a need for a new style. This happens very quickly in clothing because clothes are replaced very often and copying is very cheap. In other areas of design such as cars and housing it takes longer for the cycle to happen.
I remember a foreign report several years back on the problem at the other end: Women in Brazil were complaining that the only sizes available in the stores were size 36 and 38, when real-life women had size 42 minimum. There were literally no sizes available for real-life women, because apparently the ads were all aimed at 20-something thin women, not women age 40 who had borne children and gained some pounds.
I know it sounds dumb to exclude part of your customer base - but then lots of companies make dumb decisions.
And I once had a colleague at work who was short even for a female - I think 150 (5 ft.) and she said she enormous trouble finding serious work clothes (blouse, pants) because everything in the size that fit her was kiddie stuff, and wearing a Micky Mouse T-Shirt to work makes a bad impression.
She mostly shopped when at holiday in Italy because Italian clothes were much smaller. But if you think of the typical Italian Mama, she’s rather large!
I’m not sure if that’s entirely true - I think Coco Chanel dressed to emphasize her thinness; however, before mass production really took hold in the 20s people had to work too darn hard to get really curvy.
Women from earlier times dressed to create an hourglass figure, giving the illusion that they were super curvy; however, a 19 inch waist, or 20 inch waist, or 22 inch waist only really exists on a very tiny woman - while corseting can be credited with doing some of the heavy lifting, the overall smallness of women in those earlier eras help an awful lot. Couple the corseted waist with a full, billowy skirt and voila - curvy. But take off the dress and I suspect the vast majority of women from that time would have been really very thin.
That being said, the ‘starved to just the point of death’ look is most certainly a modern phenomenon.
That is absolutely incorrect. You may be able to find staples from year to year in the stores, but men’s fashion most certainly does trickle down in the manner suggested in the OP. You probably couldn’t find skinny jeans in any men’s store 5 or 6 years ago, for example. Suit cuts have changed rather dramatically in the last decade, maybe less.
As Kimstu said, definitely. I remember about 20 years ago or so, people were notching their jeans at the cuff so the pants would fit over their shoes. It wasn’t long before manufacturers caught on, and factory made slits were born.
Also, to go along with the camo thing, once upon a time, guys wore a hooded fleece sweatjacket and separate plaid flannel shirt. Now of course they’re made together, only looking like they might be separate.
Arguably, yes, but what about Twiggy?
Even if women pre-1920s were not all naturally curvy, that look was “in”–Anna Held, for instance, was very slim, and padded herself for that hourglass figure. The slimmer “tango girl” look came in with the 1910s–but it was Nazi Whore Chanel who really marketed the “grown women should look like 12-year-old boys” phenomenon.
From the Gibson Girl to the John Held flapper in 20 years . . .
Probably close enough to draw more of the ire of people who think Hollywood and fashion are already oversaturated with teal and orange. “But it’s not orange; it’s tangerine!”
Expanding on puddleglum’s point on fashion being a status signal, is that one of the explanations behind how incredibly fragile high-end women’s tops are? That they don’t need durable clothing, because they can easily replace it if it starts to show wear? The stuff is shedding sequins and showing runs in the silk, sitting on the rack for cryin’ out loud.
Interesting post and discussion. Thanks, everybody.
Skinny jeans are not the majority of jeans, regardless of what the emo teens want you to think.
And what does the cut of suits have to do with fashion filtering down to Target?
Branding can be just as much about who you don’t want to wear your clothes as about who you do want to wear your clothes. If too many older, larger women wear your clothes then the younger skinnier women will not want to wear them.
Wait, what?
It doesn’t matter what the majority of jeans look like. The fact is, thin cut jeans are available now at Target, and they weren’t 5 or 6 years ago. In other words, certain fashion trends trickle down to lower-end stores. If you’d like to continue to assert that these kind of stores are completely uninfluenced by fashion trends, you’re going to have to do a much better job than you’ve done so far. That’s an extraordinary claim.
We aren’t talking exclusively about Target. Read the thread.
Zara’s success is based on not trying to impose what people wear: first, they send different items to different stores; second, they reorder constantly and if an item isn’t selling in one store, the store can send it back and it will be sent someplace else.
Their logistics are murderous, but knowing that you’ll find different things in different stores is an incentive to enter, and knowing that if you ask “do you have this one in red?” in a store which does not will either get you the address of one nearby which does - or, if enough people ask, that one in red in the store where you asked? Priceless.
Now compare that with any of the chains which send the exact same amounts of the exact same sizes of the exact same blouse to their locations in Badajoz (where a 5’0" woman is tall and water is something you buy in bottles… wait, there’s some in the river too) and Bilbao (where a 6’0" woman is not the average but not anything to stare at either, and where soft rain is a sort of default state), or with those boutiques which order only once every six months, and it’s no wonder Amancio Ortega’s “strange ideas” stole the Spanish market from under his competitor’s feet.