Body Monoculture

Compare Titian’s Urbino Venus to Manet’s Olympia, a deliberate variation whose shock is its subject’s youth. (For contrast, note the kids in the background of Titian’s version.)

Once upon a time, kids used to be skinnier than adults and their age could be estimated at a glance. That’s no longer possible, at least in the U.S., even in health-conscious California. It’s unfortunate that everyone is being judged by norms of youth which have long since disappeared from view.

In the classic old film “Some Like It Hot”, there is a scene on the beach where Marilyn Monroe says to Jack Lemmon (posing as a woman, in an old fashioned bathing suit), – “There’s one thing I envy you for. You’re so flat chested. Clothes hang better on you than they do on me.”
That line probably now reveals more that they meant it to at the time. The fashion industry is about selling clothes, and fabrics hang “better” on a skinny model than on a curvy one. In fact, I suspect there is a bit of thought going on right now into making clothing look really good on the rack rather than on the average woman’s body, since reaching for a garment off the rack, over other designer’s garments, is half the battle won.

You’ll see much more of the healthy, curvy look than the skeletal.

This is not better.

The way I see it, the theory is not exactly that thin is for selling clothes. It’s more than thin is a small comparative advantage in the very competitive world formed by the very top of the fashion world (famous designers and famous models) and that fashion is an industry where the very top sets the trend and the rest follows, even though it might not be in its direct narrowly construed economic interest. If this theory is correct, thinness should not be inordinately represented outside of the very top, because the comparative advantage becomes too tiny to make any difference, and this is indeed what I seem to notice if I compare the models featured in the Paris fashion week and the models featured in a garden variety mail order catalogue.

I was ruminating about this while out doing other things, and this hit me: the first fashion model to be a known celebrity was Twiggy, who, if I remember correctly, was also the first super-skinny model on the scene.
Before that, was the physical ideal really so different? Old mail-order catalogs have women with curves, but at the same time the undernourished childlike waif type seems to have been a kind of ideal in English literature. I’m thinking of “The Gift of The Magi” and “Jane Eyre”. Any ideas about this?

A Nietzschean critique of the beauty industry (let’s call it Genealogy of Models) might note that ‘beauty’ is actually, at base, another word for ‘rich’. In the days when food was scarce and expensive, and it cost a lot of bulk up, fat was attractive (Jane Austen heroine’s get praised for their plump shoulders) and thin meant: poor, starveling, undesirable. Then food production got industrialised and, in the affluent west at least, relatively cheap, until we reach the stage today where it is the poor, subsisting on a convenience high-fat, high-sugar diet, that get fat; where the rich, who can afford to source organic broccoli and pay for gym subscriptions and/or plastic surgery, are thin. The aesthetic judgement shifts itself about. Something similar has happened to ‘the sun tan’. In the 19th-century (and earlier) suntanned skin meant you were working outdoors, and were therefore poor; the rich could afford to stay indoors, or under parasols, and the paler and less suntanned the skin the more beautiful is was seen as being. Then came the twentieth century, when wage slavery was an indoors, office- or factory-based existence, and the poor became pale and pasty; where the wealthy jetted off to expensive sunny holiday destinations. Now a suntan is sexy, and pale & pasty not.

Did Bourdieu have anything to say about this one?

“The problem with the theory that thin is for selling clothes is that normal women find it harder to find clothes designed to flatter their non-thin bodies, rather than a model’s.”

It doesn’t really matter, you might as well ask why Ferrari don’t design cars that are easier for the fat late-middle aged men who actually buy them to get into. The customers are after superbity in clothes/cars and will work around.

Could it be that it is simply more expensive to manufacture more styles? And that on top of that the designs that are sent to manufacture are selected by a small clique of managers or owners, like a super-nasty high school?

I am not sure I believe this. Another possibility is that, as in other areas of life, hominids are taking an ape intuition and pushing it to an extreme.

Questions, not many answers.

“That’s not a problem, it’s a strategy for attacking their self-esteem and making them easier to manipulate.”

Women who have a strong interest in fashion have low self esteem and are easier to manipulate? I would love to be in the room when you explain that theory to Anna Wintour.

I always thought high fashion was designed for boyish figures because so many high-fashion designers were gay.

Not?

“The problem with the theory that thin is for selling clothes is that normal women find it harder to find clothes designed to flatter their non-thin bodies”

An industry that cares more about selling units than providing a worthwhile product? Who knew?

High fashion doesn’t want 12 year old boys, they want 12 year old girls (actually).

I would saying increasing extreme thinness is a labor issue, tied to the growing exploitation of girls who model. To get extremely thin bodies that can still be functional, girls basically have to be pubescent, which is why you begin to see younger and younger women model. It’s not uncommon to have girls as young as 12 walking the runway (there are beginning to be laws against this, I think Israel banned all girls under age 16 or 18 from appearing in shows.) Most of these girls are Eastern European and are willing to live and work in appalling and exploitative conditions for a chance to make it big. By requiring skinnier and skinnier, and with some exceptions, younger and younger models (19 is considered old, and by 24 a model is ancient–most models wash out before they hit 20), the models become more disposable, can be paid less, and basically have less and less say in their working conditions. Many models actually live in debt penury, owing thousands of dollars to their modeling agency who flies them over and puts them up, gets portraits taken, etc. I think that the perceived glamor of the job takes away from people realizing that high fashion modeling is basically an exploitation racket involving very young teens from former Soviet bloc countries.

There’s a claim that I think is being implicitly made by a number of the comments above that I want to disagree with: that the body-monoculture identified in the post is limited to haute couture runway fashion, the sort of clothes that are made as art rather than as commerce. I’m fairly sure that’s not true — while high-fashion runway models are the extremes of the extremes, the 5’11’ 12-year-olds — that pretty much anyone who gets paid as a model, even if they’re modeling for Old Navy, is way out on the tall and skinny end of the range of possible body-types. (Barring plus-size models, who, while they’re rarely close to the sizes of clothing they’re advertising, are larger than regular size models.)

So explanations relying on the artistic vision of couture designers have to be incomplete — the monoculture may start there and have spread to the remainder of clothing design and advertising, but anything limited to high fashion isn’t the whole story.

I just want to make crystal clear that what I believe is that the phenomenon stems from haute couture reasons (for instance those described credibly at 19 and 23) but that the haute couture world has an enormous influence on the whole industry (so that the analogy with the Ferrari breaks down somehow, because the bulk of the car industry is rather indifferent to what goes on at the top); something which is an interesting social peculiarity of the fashion world in itself. All in all, I find myself in agreement with your last paragraph.

I did not say that gay male fashion designers (1) lust after underage boys or (2) are sexually attracted to female models who look like boys.

The theory was first shared with me by a lesbian classmate when I was in NYC, who like 99.9% of the world surely knew more about High Fashion than I did (or do).

But yes, reading these comments, the resemblance of a thin woman to a clothes rack does seem persuasive.

LizardBreath, I don’t think there really is a monoculture in any very rigorous sense, or, at least, there are various monocultures. The kind of bodies you see on the runway or Vogue are very different from the kind of bodies you see in in the Girl Group or FHM or Hollywood where an athletic type of body tends to be preferred with bigger or smaller breasts depending on the audience. In the preference for athleticism of the gym/dance workout type there seems to be a male/female convergence going on.

I think the better question is why so many people care what the fashion industry likes. There are a lot of industries with a financial stake in what standards of feminine beauty are, and the fashion industry isn’t exactly the richest or most powerful. The food industry would probably like it very much if more Rubenesque bodytypes became more stylish, and the food industry is quite powerful. (And also sells a whole lot of advertising, to the extent that we can blame advertising for this.) And less cynically, fashion is only one out of many different ways for a person to change their appearance, so there’s no reason why the fashion world’s stylistic preferences should dominate the culture.

One possibility completely off the top of my head is that there’s a big crossover between the fashion industry and the entertainment industry. There’s a certain overlap between acting and modeling, so people who can do a bit of both are at an advantage. So the entertainment industry imports the fashion industry’s aesthetics, and then the entertainment industry is a massive launchpad for popularizing those aesthetics. Actresses aren’t in general as thin as models are, but they’re certainly thin.

LizardBreath: At the end of the day, fashion is an artform even when it’s not full-on haute. And as an artistic endeavor, it would make sense that people go into the fashion industry because they like clothes rather than that they want to “flatter women’s body types.”

Have you seen the shit Old Navy sells? If those people are doing it because of an abstract liking for clothes, rather than because they’re trying to make money, they’re very, very strange.

Yeah, I was being hyperbolically snobbish. Still, there’s a lot of clothes out there that are being sold as product, rather than as the result of anyone’s artistic vision.

The handful of editors who choose fashion editorial have (through competition with one another) collectively decided that very tall, very thin bodies are the preferred extreme.

Yeeeaaahhhh, but I don’t think they decided this from their own needs so much as from seeing that tall and thin, photographed just right, gets a certain kind of reaction. It stirs something in people, that “I wish that were me” /”I wish I could date her” kind of feeling and that sells magazines. Countless star athletes and rock musicians date models, why is that? Just because the fashion industry says models are cool? There is something else going on.

My guess is that the industry thinks “clothes real women can wear” is a euphemism for “women who’ve given up dreaming of looking like stick figures,” and they are all about selling the dream.

Trying to think if, say, Lane Bryant is a real exception to this, or the exception that proves the rule.

John@43: “Why don’t we have at least a bipolar fashion system?”

Young designers don’t distinguish themselves by saying “I make great clothes for normal women.” They don’t draw attention, sponsors, or get a leg up in the system by moving away from its traditions, no matter how stupid those traditions are. Good runway shows, using the models you just call an agency to get, those get you somewhere.

Think about spelling reform. (OK, not something most anglos are familiar with, but the best comparable example I can think of. Gawd, I sound like a philologist.) It doesn’t matter how many times you show people real, measurable variables like literacy, ease for children and adults, comprehension, saved trees, or any other thing you can think of are improved by reform. They still don’t want to deal with changing the way they do things, and if the old way was good enough for them, it’s good enough for their children.

Or… I dunno, for the computer geeks out there, consider all those hours spent learning to do proofs about finite state automata. Like you’re ever going to use them. But noooo… They were good enough for McCarthy and Dijkstra, so tough noogies if you find them boring.

If the art of draping clothes on skinny models and marching them down runways was good enough to make the careers of Coco Chanel and Vivienne Westwood, it’s good enough for the kids today. What, do you want them to start their careers like Christian Dior by putting dresses on fat Nazi wives?

Scott Martens @29

Not necessarily if you consider the photographers too. If a painter’s model has an unattractive roll of belly flesh in his intended pose, he just doesn’t have to paint it. It’s much harder to remove from a photo, and a bigger pain to rethink the picture because the model’s body won’t comply. It’s easier to pose skinny girls.

I know it’s just an example, but it seems kind of question-begging to suggest that the reason photographers like skinny girls is that there’s less of a problem with belly flesh.

Can you explain this a bit more? Your example about high fashion seemed pretty plausible, but this has me confused.

The focus on the Western World is running into the fallacy that there is one standard of beauty for the Western World. Standards for beauty found in Latin countries and African-American culture supports a significantly larger posterior (and curves in general) compared with standards in Asian-American or Anglo culture. Could the focus on thin be affected by the New York, Paris, Hong Kong fashion trifecta.

I think that, quite simply, a thinner and leaner body looks younger (just look at the gallery and ask yourself which figure appears younger), and, everything else being equal, we are hardwired to prefer younger mates for a number of reasons.

As of why thinner bodies look younger, perhaps it’s the simple fact that, given a normal diet, younger people have not had time to accumulate excess fat. Perhaps a leaner body is also an indication of the fact that one is more physically active, and hence an indicator of better overall health.

This is not by any means only relater to women, e.g. take Greek male statues and add some fat (or add some muscles and make them appear leaner), then run a poll to see which one is considered more attractive.

“There’s one thing I envy you for. You’re so flat chested. Clothes hang better on you than they do on me.”

This quote reminds me of another one I heard (or read) of a model referring to herself as a “human clothes-hanger” and did not consider herself attractive to men at all. I would also note that underwear and bathing suit models have more substantial body measurements than clothes models while those of men magazines even more so.

Why would a woman pine for the body type that makes clothes look attractive, rather than a bathing suit, or makes her more attractive to men? Is this linked to women preferring chocolate to sex?

It is interesting to ask why fashion models look the way they do and also wonder why women’s clothing doesn’t adapt to as many body types. Those are questions worth asking, though my theory on the latter point is that it’s just difficult to find clothing that fits any specific body type really well and it just takes time shopping to find it. Most people aren’t interested in spending the time, but I could make similar complaints about men’s clothes. The biggest difference with men’s clothes is that the style is not as consistently fitted as with women’s clothes and so variations in body types do not impose as many problems.

But to think that fashion models say anything about modern western beauty styles is just silly. At best you might start with sports illustrated’s swismsuit models.

John@44 seconding Scott Martens. I am told, but never verified, that average human beings are generally unable to drive a high-end Lamborghini or Maserati.

John@43 Why the fashion industry is monopolar rather than bipolar as you suggest (and as would be much more efficient in strictly economical terms) or very multipolar (as the car or food industry) is an interesting sociological question. To take a comparison with a world more familiar to the modal CT reader, the academic world (especially in abstract fields such as philosophy or mathematics) also tends to be very much influenced by the very top so that what the top five people in a (sub)field are doing at any given time is also assigned as PhD. topics to graduate students. Why is it so (if it is so)? IMHO, the explanations offered by Scott Martens @48 are likely to be relevant there too (and in a more wonkish mode, this is the topic of research of Pierre-Michel Menger: what characteristics of a given field influence the way reputations and careers are built in this given field).

If the fashion industry drives men’s preferences for thinner women, why did these preferences change? The alternative theory that calories became cheaper seems to explain the shift, though I wonder when exactly the two changes occurred. One theory suggests that in the US obesity escalated after farm policy began to encourage overproduction in the early 70s. I wonder if model sizes shifted before or after that?

I am struck by the overwhelming discussion of the annorexic look of high fasion when not a single of these images is modified to exen approximate that standard.

These images seem more to plant the question “If this body type were in fact considered sensual, or lust-inspiring, how would we feel when we looked at them?”

These images have been doctored to fit a sexually attractive body type per today’s standards. It is not the ultra skinny clothes rack disscussed most in these comments. If I were scrolling through images of that nature, I would feel no guilty urge to hurry. Scrolling through these images, I feel a need to move on quickly lest someone see what I am looking at and misconstrue my intentions. I feel the addrenaline rush of the forbidden fruit. These woemen are sexy! Desirable in the extreme. Perhaps this gives us insight into how people felt when they looked at these images fresh from the brush. People who were not innured to the carnal, the way we are now with easy access to images of desirable sex. Perhaps it gives us insight into the invasion against self control that ‘prudes’ feel when confronted with their desires in a public arena. Perhaps we too can be made into prudes if the right image is presented to us.

This is not about what men prefer. It’s about how ideal body images for women get established.

There are probably more actual images of women as objects in fashion magazines than anywhere else. Certainly more socially acceptable images. Someone above cited the SI swimsuit issue. But that comes out once a year and is thinner than a single issue of Vogue. Plus it’s targeted to men. Of course women get their sense of ideal body images from fashion magazines. Where else?

It’s not clear that this monoculture is stable. There has been a trend towards younger models over the last few years. Again, this comes from the quest for an image which will stand out among hundreds of competing images. An underage model striking a sexy pose in revealing clothes will catch the eye.

for what it’s worth, I asked my girlfriend (who’s done some modelling, and whose sister is a successful model-turned-agent) about this, and her first answer was the ‘clothes-hanger’ hypothesis. That is, designers don’t know who’ll be modelling for them, and a very skinny model will fit anything (with a little finessing). Which is a form of conservatism, I suppose, because there’s no reason the clothes couldn’t be made a little larger and the pool of models expanded to include some larger sizes. A collective action problem, no?- the first to try would be doing so at a certain cost of time and possibly money.

also, as said above, you’re not really meant to imagine yourself wearing the very high-fashion clothes. They’re meant to embody a certain aesthetic being suggested by the label more than anything. It’s an attempt to present the cultural moment in fabric, suggesting to the consumer that the designer ‘knows’ the zeitgeist so well that the more wearable clothes they design are sure to be precisely timed for maximum fashion impact.

(also, being skinny makes your cheekbones stand out more, and cheekbones are Very Important.)

only a few people out of a thousands have an IQ two or three standard deviations from the mean.

In fact, about 4 percent of people have IQs (or any other normally distributed statistic) over two standard deviations from the mean. Not that it has anything to do with anything.

I wonder if it’s a mistake to think of young/anorexic model bodies as an “ideal” rather than as a “problem.” In other words, the twiggish isn’t striking because it’s an ideal, but because it violates certain boundaries–gender in particular. If the body you’re looking at is ambiguously gendered and aged, it’s captivating in the sense that it’s unclassifiable, and not in the sense that it’s hypnotic. Larger bodies, by contrast, leave those boundaries untouched, or at least do not violate them in a way that causes frisson; the other extreme would scan as “ungendered” I suspect.

Apologies if I’m expressing this poorly. But, doesn’t most advertising work this way, positing coherence in contradiction?

There’s another aspect to the ‘clothes-hangar’ theory. It is easier to sew a tube than a cone, and easier to sew a cone than a paraboloid. Experts in sewing paraboloids are tailors, not fashion designers, and tailors/dressmakers can make clothes to fit real women — one at a time. Mass production is also mildly infamous for making clothes more tubular than they ought to be not just because it’s easier, but because not having the extra triangular bits means you can fit more garments on a given length of cloth.

We get around this with knits, with loose drapey clothes, with clothes that basically don’t fit; but jeans are terrible to find because they’re (ironically) the most tailored form of common clothing.

This might just be useful for explaining why the ultra-thin ideal is ‘stuck’; even in the 1950s, rather a lot of middle-class women’s best clothing was made by little local shops or seamstresses. Then 1960s clothing was rebelliously unfitted (Rabanne?!), and we got Twiggy who looked great in it, and mass everything, and mass manufacturing, and globalized profits, and now it’s too tasty for the system to change. Systems of mass customization are regularly proposed, but it’s very difficult to do well.

Has there been any discussion of the sociobiological…oops evolutionary psychological…theory that underneath all the diversity of ideal female body types across the ages and cultures is the magic or golden waist to hip ratio of 70% shared by Marilyn Monroe and Kate Moss and appreciated by even Yanomami males. There are any critics of sociobiology, I mean evolutionary psychology. One of my favorites is Jonathan Marks. His website and blog are a blast.

I am leaning towards the standardized cloths hanger theory

It’s really weird to me how almost everyone on this thread seems to accept this kind of fashion-centric explanation.

Just look around. There’s this enormous weight loss industry. Every magazine at the drugstore is telling you secrets of how to get thin. Overweight people — an elastic category whose boundaries don’t have any identifiable relationship to health research — are stigmatized as disgusting if not immoral. Not just fashion models but entertainers of all kinds are expected to be much thinner than the average person. Weight and income have a strong negative correlation, especially among women — a striking reversal of the pattern in earlier times. It just seems wildly implausible that this deep-rooted feature of first-world culture could be the result of the whims of a handful of fashion designers.

I mean, doesn’t it?

What make it apparently puzzling is that this isn’t just a subculture, it isn’t just social pressures on people who are vulnerable to stigmatization, it isn’t just expectations for entertainers; it’s also commerce. Corporations that sell clothing (and not just art-clothing, but ordinary clothing that they expect tens or hundreds of millions of people to buy) seem to think that they’ll make a bigger profit by using a single body type in their ads.

Are the corporations right in thinking that? Either a yes or a no answer seems a little puzzling, albeit for different reasons.

@82 I understand the marketing angle, and that was implied, I think, in my (and others’) idea that ideals are impossible. It’s well known that advertising often seeks to create a need for products to fill, and clearly an impossible ideal works for that.

But I’m uncomfortable with language that implies a consciously designed conspiracy on the parts of everyone in the fashion, medical, entertainment, manufacturing, and advertising fields to make women miserable.

There’s a problem with cause and effect, too. If we decided that big hands were sexy, I suspect that exercises and surgeries and medication would be developed to combat the shameful, hideous micromanusy (small-handedness, according to some lame Latin translation site). Do the industries above follow and reinforce the grotesque ideal, or do they create and direct it?

Matt: I don’t think that it’d be very unusual for there to be a lot of money the clothing industry is passing up, so long as getting it means any extra expense or reduction of profit in the short term. Look at, for instance, the banking industry saddling itself with a lot of foreclosed properties to handle and substantial costs associated with it, because it works out to be cheaper to do that in the short term than arrange more manageable mortgage terms for people short on income. Heck, look at the Federal Reserve and its equivalents elsewhere obsessing over inflation and not caring at all about unemployment. Passing up great wealth is sort of a modern capitalist pastime, fun for all the elites to play.

When I first developed autoimmune problems and was having test after test, Dad recalled this joke from his Army Air Corps basic training in 1944: You were allowed to have two kinds of illness. You could have athlete’s foot, and get your foot swabbed with iodine. You could have strepthroat, and get your throat swabbed with iodine. If neither of those worked, you’d be thrown in the brig for impersonating an officer.

A lot of business decision-making reminds me of that.

What is striking — to me — is how little difference there is between the originals and the altered images. It would appear that the standard ideal of beauty in Europe is actually pretty constant. In fact, it seems to me that differences in standards over time are less than differences within the standards.

I am also rather suspicious of explicitly functional explanations of thinness of fashion models. They seem a bit just-so to me.

@82 “It’s really weird to me how almost everyone on this thread seems to accept this kind of fashion-centric explanation.”

I agree. Fashion is following the culture of cosmopolitan capitals, where being thin, tall, and white are markers of high status. It’s not illogical that these features are prized when the consumers for clothes, movies, and television include vast numbers of people of color and overweight people; they, too, find those high status markers attractive because high status is attractive. On the contrary, it’s the discrepancy between the relatively small number of people who are high status and the masses who aren’t that explains the value of those markers (thin, tall, and white).

Even literary value works this way: people in the cosmopolitan capitals set the standards that those in the provinces have to respond to (absorb or conspicuously react against in a way that gets the attention of the cosmopolitans) in order to be seen to have literary value. See Casanova, The Republic of Letters.

Popular music is an interesting case. Although country music has a large share of the US market, it’s black-influenced music that has global reach and vast markets. Much of the innovations in black music comes from non-affluent kids. But while there are music stars who aren’t thin, it seems pretty clear that, even amidst the other counterculture signifiers that acquire glamour through a “street” aesthetic, artists feel intense pressure to try to match the thin body type that governs white elite culture. It’s very common to see singers like Mary J. Blige, the women in Salt n Pepper, Jennifer Hudson, and Jennifer Lopez become markedly thinner *after* they become pop stars and begin mixing with the cosmopolitan elite of Paris, LA, London and New York.

Seems to me that, once thinness became a mark of wealth and status (starting in the mid- to late nineteenth-century), the die was cast for fashion, even if the visual industries of fashion and film have increasingly taken this value to extremes.

I believe that the beauty ideal according to evolutionary psychology is one of health. Two factors are right-left symmetry and a 15% difference between waist and hips.

As for anorexia, the ideal there is thinspiration. One site: http://thinspirationforme.blogspot.com/

Note also the ascetic ideal of thinspiration.

Nancy @92 makes the argument much better than I was able to.

I’m under the impression that the whole Linux thing involves trying to undermine this business model by distributing products with the same feature for free.

There are a lot of articles at _Threads_ magazine detailing how to sew curves; the instructions are different for different kinds of curves, on different fabrics, with different machines, with different payoffs in flexibility/durability. _Threads_ is written for people who sew for themselves; for art; and for wedding gowns and adaptive clothing, the two cases too demanding to have been made industrial. Why are we supposed to be thin? It’s a big part of the profit margin of everyone trying to sell us clothes.

Also I think it is a mistake to put too much emphasis on sexual attraction when talking about models. As Cocker put it, if fashion is your trade, then when you’re naked, you must be unemployed.

JW Mason: I think you have to treat the thinness as an aesthetic ideal and the valorization of weight loss as two very different phenomena, even though they’re obviously related.

For one, health is more important to weight loss than just aesthetics. Obesity is broadly unhealthy, (even though there’s a lot of caveats to that statement) and then because body weight is highly visible and because people don’t really understand nutrition or science very well, that idea gets massively generalized into more questionable territory of fad diets and trying to lose weight quickly and such, and also leads to demonizing fat people for making “unhealthy decisions.”

More generally, the desire for weight loss is sort of a subset of the more general desire to be able to control one’s appearance, which is a pretty widely held desire across history. (Although in a modern society people have more time and resources to spend on such things.) Since body weight is an aspect of the body which is relatively under one’s control (weight loss is hard, but it’s much easier than trying to change your bone structure with lifestyle changes) it’s understandable that people would focus a lot of attention on it, even if weight isn’t really their top priority. Aesthetic preferences then step in to say which direction people should move their weight in (it wasn’t that long ago that gaining weight was the popular choice) but that doesn’t mean the popularity of weight loss is because of the intensity of such preferences.

Ed: speaking as a freakishly pale individual myself, I am glad to hear it.

George Hamilton’s entire life has been for naught.

And thin has been in for a long time.

Has it really been that long? I feel like the superthin / heroin chic look has been around for maybe 40 years tops. Seems like a very short time — so short one could simply view it as a fad, for now. For how long was the fuller figure look, as seen in the unedited classic paintings, considered the standard of beauty? Centuries? And given the historical context, are we certain that today’s superthin look is more destructive or morally questionable than the full figure standard was in its day? Wasn’t the daily consumption of extra calories literally impossible for a huge swath of the population for centuries and isn’t that precisely why fuller figures were put forward as the “standard” during that time? I’m not absolving either in any way. And today’s eating disorders may indeed make the superthin standard on balance more destructive. I just find it strange that someone would condemn one and praise the other. They at least seem similarly arbitrary and harmful to society.

Perhaps, then, the real measure of any standard of beauty is in how unattainable it seems. Assuming that is the case, here is one simplistic explanation for how the superthin standard could have emerged: It is entirely too easy these days to consume excess calories. The difficulty is in not doing so. However, class still matters here; thinness due to involuntary starvation does not seem to qualify under the standard. The new unattainable standard is therefore someone who actually does consume as many extra calories as the average person, but who does not put on extra weight as a result. Hence eating disorders. And the constant and irritating claim made by rail thin female celebrities that they just love chowing down on cheeseburgers and fries or whatever. What, I’m very thin, you say? Why, I’ve never given it a second thought!

Marcellina (4): yes, mostly. John Holbo (7), no. The problem with fitting is not that the clothes aren’t built for an average body, the problem is that there is no single average body. Women in particular are all over the map with respect to torso length, bust-to-waist ratio, waist-to-hip ratio, etc. Incidentally, if you want to know what the models themselves think (something that is generally overlooked by the millions of people who believe themselves entitled to an opinion simply because they have a body and wear clothes), take a look at Nicole Trunfio’s tattoo.

Vacuumslayer, there is a technical definition of curvy, ably explained at Fashion-Incubator.com. John Holbo, the fact that curvy and fat are not the same is demonstrated at the linked post.

The Raven (18), “Could it be that it is simply more expensive to manufacture more styles?” Yes, and more sizes. Sizing a pattern to different sizes (called “grading”) requires very technical specifications that change according to target demographics. Bodies morph as they get fatter in different ways. Most add more to the front than to the back; some become pear-shaped (no, not like that, you English k-niggits), and some become top heavy. So simply sizing for multiple body shapes explodes the manufacturing costs exponentially.

Torquil (19): Very astute. You could sell tickets to that event.
Anderson (22): Not. Same for the rest of you who make this wild guess observation. The gay designer meme is not representative of the overall clothing industry. Interesting how you all think that you know that the fashion industry is manipulative, but have overlooked how the entertainment industry has manipulated your sense of how that other industry actually works.

The photoshopped nudes don’t look groteque, they look totally hot.
(I wish I were joking, but I’m not.)

De gustibus, ajay. De gustibus.

While you’re at it you should apologize to me too, ajay, for forever ruining my image of Botticelli’s Venus. Thats’ quite an eyeworm.