The Great Weight Debate
Just as the leaves turn brown and the daylight becomes scarce, controversy over role of weight in the fashion industry returns each year. Some event always seems to spark a pressing debate, this year we get the double whammy of the Ralph Lauren debacle and the role of models in magazines. The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan stirred up the bees’ nest this weekend with her piece on why thin is “in” and will remain so as long as we as a society remain comparatively much larger. Givhan’s piece drew all sorts of reactions across the blogosphere, a good chunk of it negative. I was with Givhan for most of the article - she scrapes the surface of my thesis by citing the fashion industry’s “knack for tapping into unspoken cultural obsessions and taboos.”
I’ve long maintained that fashion can be art. Good art is by it’s very nature provocative. It pushes our conceptions of what is normal and acceptable. These stick thin, frequently alien-esque models so beloved by the industry push our buttons. Occasionally you’ll see a designer send out a plus-sized girl or older women for the same effect. The fact that twig-thin women are the objects of such adoration the vast majority of the time certainly isn’t fair, but it’s an artistic choice that’s been deeply embedded in the culture of fashion. Despite this long-held fact of the industry, there’s much motivation to continue on as if these issues are new, breaking controversies. Debates over size garner incredible attention for the industry and there’s almost no such thing as bad publicity. The “high fashion as art” points will certainly be lost on most engaged in the debate, but to truly understand the industry, you must view it from all sides. The commercial and the artistic.
Is every ad and magazine spread “art”? No, absolutely not. But there is a trickle-down effect. The true geniuses of the industry set the standards and the mass-market follows - it somes cases taking things way too far (see the Ralph Lauren drama, above). It doesn’t create a healthy image for the rest of us to aspire to, but maybe that wasn’t originally the point.
