There has been a lot of talk about how maybe things are changing–there was that woman who posed nude (or partly nude) in some mag, showing that she had a bit of flesh on her stomach that was praised. And Crystal Renn, the plus sized model who put out a memoir about being told to lose a huge amount of weight by her agency, has been getting a lot of press. And then I read this article in Jezebel: http://jezebel.com/5372115/glamours-plus+size-model-photo-unveiled-on-ellen
I definitely understand that people want to see variety. But by its nature, isn’t this industry exclusive? That is people will always want to see the best–not average. I mean, I get all of one thing is bad–you don’t have to be thin, white, tall, and blonde to be beautiful. But why is it just weight? People often congratulate magazines for showing plus sized models and not just very thin women, but they’re still emphasizing looks.
It always kind of gets to me when model Crystal Renn complains about the rigid beauty standards and how dehumanizing it can be to be judged on the size of your thighs/hips. Which I understand must suck, but then is the answer really to try and say that beauty can be more inclusive? If you really dislike all this judgment, it seems like the better thing is just to reject anyone being judged on their looks.
As far as I’m concerned it has nothing to do with inclusiveness. But about being more exclusive in ways that are actually attractive and have girls with real female shapes that don’t look like ugly skank heroin addicted death camp escapist.
People do judge on appearances, and you won’t ever prevent that. Some big women are beautiful and some aren’t, just like some skinny women are beautiful and some aren’t.
The fashion industry promotes certain ‘looks’ that change over time. Hemlines, waistlines, colours, and so on, go in and out of fashion all the time. Super skinny ‘heroin chic’ isn’t necessarily beautiful even, but it is a fashionable look. If the fashion industry is going to lighten up on the body shape issue, so that you can be considered fashionable without being almost underweight, I think that’s a good thing. People can’t change their bodies the way they can their outfits. Modern standards of beauty have already become much broader in terms of facial features, and skin or hair colour. You don’t have to be a blue-eyed blonde, with peaches and cream complexion, small, bow-shaped lips, a delicate nose and jaw. Before that, it had to be dark hair and white skin. Now there is a huge range of variation in what is considered beautiful, not just one look. No reason not extend that to body types as well.
As to whether people should judge on appearances, that’s a different question, but there is no denying they do, or that many (most?) women want to be considered ‘beautiful’ if they can manage it.
Yep. Beauty standards do change/evolve, but there is always going to be some standard as to what’s aesthetically pleasing, especially when it comes to selling magazines and products. Not many people want to look at a magazine or advertisement filled with ugly, toothless hags (men or women).
I don’t think we’re ever going to change the fact that we’re going to present people who are beautiful in a certain light–that we’re going to have “beautiful” people on ads, in plays, movies, etc. Of course “beauty” changes by era, too. I just get the attitude from a lot of people that they like seeing plus sized women because they get to see women who look like them or who they can relate to and they feel way better than when they see size zero girls on the runway. But I guess my point is that I’m not sure if this is any better. I mean, back when the beauty standard ran to more buxom/stacked women, did everyone feel better about themselves? Didn’t ad agencies still market stuff to women, saying “Wear this” or “Use this product” to look like x model? I’m just wondering if it’s ever possible to really satisfy people who complain about the reasonable beauty standard.
Sometimes I wonder where America is going by being an 'all inclusive" society. Is it not watering down the extremely bright, beautiful, rich etc?
Is that really what people want?
Some people are born fast, they become sprinters. Others are born beautiful, they become models (or porn stars) Children have differing intellectual ability, yet we insist on standardized testing in order to accommodate those not as fortunate.
Society (meaning you and I) will have our own variations of what is considered beautiful, ALWAYS.
What needs to change is the people trying, by any means necessary, to change themselves to be something they are not.
As an aside: I watched a tv snippet the other evening. They showed the before and after pictures of the model they used for a billboard ad. Not only was she dressed, made-up, hair dried etc, she was also visually computer enhanced to make her appear more “beautiful”
Agreed, beauty standards do evolve/change, but they change very little, and the allowable changes are limited to certain attributes (e.g. a couple extra pounds in the hips might come into fashion, a cleft-palette or a chin-less face, will not).
Compare Birth of Venus to Vanessa Hudgens (or Crystal Renn, for that matter) Sure the former has some more meat on her, but can you say that the standard for beauty has really changed that much?
Hips, hair, breasts, feminine features with [near]-perfect triangular relationship between the eyes-nose-mouth.
It’s tough, because while it’s good that beauty can mean more than a very restricted type, I see that ad for Dove where they have every girl saying she’s beautiful and think “If we’re all beautiful, the term has no meaning”.
Really I’d venture to guess that this isn’t so much a feeling of inclusiveness nor political correctness finally making its way into the fashion industry as that Americans are fat. They probably did a survey of readers and non-readers and discovered that a significant percentage of women didn’t read the magazine because they didn’t feel like it represented them. Almost certainly that’s always been true, but before that group wasn’t big enough to warrant inclusion.
Yeah, I see that, too. I see people posting on lots of boards how “X actor isn’t fat, she’s barely even plus sized” but I think that’s because for a lot of people their normal isn’t my normal. I read the term “Wisconsin skinny” for the first time the other day. I mean, I read a Jezebel post that talked about a Vogue cover featuring Beyonce with a caption about curves. And the post was all about how racist the cover was (as in, only black women can have curves) and then there were a bunch of comments about how Beyonce doesn’t even count as curvy because they think she’s very thin. And while Beyonce is hardly a heifer, and is in wonderful shape, it makes me wonder what these people think when they see really skinny people.
Then she should pick a different industry that is less rigid about beauty standards. That’s like complaining about the accounting industry because it requires too high of an attention to detail.
It’s only “all inclusive” such that any idiot can jump on the internet and state their oppinion on anything they think they understand. In reality, the masses are not included with the extremely bright, beautiful or successful.
Remember those Dove commercials from 4 or 5 years ago, with “ordinary” women in them? They made an impression, but not a lasting one. One ad executive dismissed their impact by saying that the fashion industry is, at its heart, aspirational and will always be advertised that way.
Fashion photogs don’t think that size zero models are particularly more beautiful, they just think that clothes look best on a coathanger and hire the models who most closely resemble one.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what annoys me. I do think it’s fucked up that she was pressured to lose so much weight and it is nice that she’s managed to achieve some measure of fame. But if she really hated/still hates hearing remarks on the size of her thighs, she probably shouldn’t be a model at all. I mean, people in the modeling industry are still going to be catty about a model’s looks. The people who go on about beauty at any size kind of irritate me because the message seems to be “Don’t judge me for being bigger–judge me for my skin, my hair, my eyes–everything else. Just not weight!”
Yes, in today’s world that manifests itself in thinness. In another era, it was a more buxom figure that, again, not everyone could attain. I just think it’s always going to be something that by definition the ordinary doesn’t have.
And despite the fact that a lot of them are thin, I’ve never looked at an actress or model on TV and thought “Wow, death camp levels of thin.” A lot of them are very thin, but I think that people seem to think they’re thinner than they are because most people are just so big now.
The standard of beauty for both women and men has not changed at all in hundreds of years; arguably it hasn’t changed for as long as the Western world has existed. You are absolutely right and all of those women are very good looking. Ultimately it’s the face which is the heart of beauty, not the body, but a fat body has never been idealized nor has an extremely skinny one for most of history. The ideal body, typically, for a woman, is voluptuous and curvy, but not fat in such a way as to make it asymmetrical in its proportions. Even a lot of fat, if it is well-distributed, can look good. These looks have a basis in biological reality - a woman who is well-built looks fertile and strong, and these are desirable feminine traits as opposed to being rail-thin which connotes frailty. There have indeed been times in the past when thin was in, for women - the Elizabethan era, for instance, or the 1920s. But these are generally anomalies.
What has happened is that - in my opinion - in recent years, gay men have become the arbiters of taste for women. This means that the woman will be looked at by the designer from the standpoint not of someone who is sexually attracted to the woman, but one of impartiality which is more concerned with the clothes than with the female figure. As stated above, the woman are basically chosen to be clothes hangers.
I think that if more heterosexual men were in the fashion industry - at the high and low levels, big name designers and interns and assistant designers alike - the modern ideal of feminine beauty would return to the days of Marilyn Monroe, who would today be considered hopelessly pudgy.
Am I the only one to point out that the fashion and beauty industry isn’t supposed to represent the average woman. It’s supposed to represent the top 1% of the top 1% hottest women?
That’s not really the problem. Of course they should represent the hottest of the hot, the problem lies with them spreading the belief among women than being anorexically thin is what makes you the top 1% of the top 1% hottest women. Most fashion models are hot in spite of their bodies, not because of them, as someone above pointed out beauty is mostly based on your face so they can use skeletal women who carry clothes better and still make them seem incredibly beautiful because they have pretty faces. I don’t understand why women foolishly look at fashion magazines instead of something like playboy or penthouse as the standard for beauty.
Please tell me you’re kidding. The fake tits-plastic-bleach-blonde Playboy models have no more in common with the average woman than the anorexic ones in fashion mags.
Its not about having things in common, its about an ideal. The perfect woman is going to have very little in common with the average one, but at least playboy models are a more accurate representation of what people consider a perfect woman to be than any fashion model is. Not to mention fake boobs and bleached hair is not going to get you killed like starving yourself will.
