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In response to the public outcry over Polo’s dismissal and photoshopping of model Filippa Hamilton, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic, Robin Givhan, claims that fashion is never supposed to be easy or average, and because people today are so obese, the models must be unattainably thin. She also writes that “the fashion industry’s preference for models has shifted from Mayflower society ladies to girl-next-door blondes to Brazilians to Eastern Europeans to jolie laide—often for no clearer reason than the zeitgeist.”
I agree with the general idea that fashion entails evidence of a struggle, or a cost—or the absence of a struggle or cost. There is something else at play in the skinny model controversy, however, and it has little to do with BMIs.
Recall that while America was pigging out, fashion was democratized. Once-exclusive brands began courting the hoi polloi and opening shops over the globe during the boom years. Magazines and brands invited us to the party. The Internet and the celebrity-fashion matrix turned the garment trade into entertainment. With Sex and the City, any Jane Doe believed she could slip into Manolos—and did not feel intimidated to walk into the Bergdorf shoe department to try some on. And even though the vast majority of women would never make a purchase in the couture ateliers of the Rue Saint-Honoré or high-end designer boutiques, they had designers collaborations from Target and H&M. Target and H&M gave women style at heretofore impossibly cheap prices, and—crucially—no designer was afraid to go “low” or “mass,” as they had been previously, after the licensing fiascos of the 1980s.
I wonder: Is it possible that fashion lags behind the times? Why else would women be vocalizing ire now, after decades of Photoshopping and superthin models?
Givhan’s analysis would be stronger if she considered the possibility that there may not be a single zeitgeist blowing around in this fine land, but two: one zeitgeist for the rich, another zeitgeist for the hoi polloi. (And probably another for the entirely hopeless or helpless; they also get dressed each morning, but that’s for a different post.) The major dichotomy at play is not, as Givhan’s observes, a tension between the aesthetics of common obesity/unattainable emaciation but, rather, the voicing of outrage over the failure of fashion to follow through on its promise to women, which was to acknowledge the needs of the average woman. And now that we are realizing that we can’t really afford the costs of high fashion, we’d like for fashion to make amends.
It would be more correct to say that because fashion has been democratized, regular women want to stay in the club. And right now we are craving insightful, honest media outlets that share our concerns and package them in an intelligent—which is not to say tasteless or uncultivated or unartful—way. And because the economy is tanking, women are easily pissed off at blatant falseness, manifestly clear in the photoshopped image of Filippa Hamilton. We are asking loudly and publicly: Is fashion for us, or is it not for us?
The major takeaway from the skinny/photoshopped model controversy is that fashion has been caught with its pants down as it straddled two very different worlds—the high fashion masquerade and the pragmatic/functional. Women are angry—we crave authenticity—and we are venting our ire at the obvious hypocrisies.
Perhaps fashion will catch up. Last night at the New York Public Library, Grace Coddington, creative director of Vogue, expressed her dismay over the use of skinny models and excessive Photoshopping. Lucky for us regular dames, fashion is reliably capricious and fickle. Perhaps sometime soon it'll bend to the desires of the average woman. (As for you and your anti-average antics, Mr. Lagerfeld, who do you think buys all that Chanel No. 5?)
Photo of a model showcasing an outfit by Kristian Dowling/Getty Images.
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More than half of adult women are mothers. It's not a lifestyle. It's not a trend. It's just one of those things—you know, continuation of the species and all that. A biological urge complicated by societal factors that has been, not incidentally, the subject of great art and literature over the past few centuries. Into that pantheon comes Motherhood: The Movie, promoted by a trailer full of worn tropes and painful moments. Want to silence Uma Thurman, the ruthless killer bride of Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2? Stick a binkie in her mouth. Motherhood, the Great Infantilizer. How did we come to this?
Thurman doesn't look particularly pacified in in the poster for her latest movie, but the film seems to have un-womaned her, putting her in the part of Manhattan mom, overwhelmed by the effort of caring for a pair of small children. Having kids doesn't necessarily have to reduce your life to nothing but dishes and alternate-side parking (even the Bride of Bill ends up with a 4-year-old), but you wouldn't know it from what's on view so far of Motherhood: The Movie.
The trailer plays like a He's Just Not That Into You-esque excuse to compile every clever moment from every good hipster mother rant of the last five years. But though the plot is vague, one thing is clear: Becoming a mother has sapped Uma Thurman of her energy, her sexuality, and her ability to get dressed before she leaves the house in the morning. She's surrounded by mothers who think they're better than she is, which really means they aren't, because they spend all their time competing while poor Uma is just busy parenting. There's a touch of mommy wars, a touch of gender wars, and an overall whiff of powerless incompetence, all in two short minutes. Didn't women once complain that the media depicted us as Superwoman, able to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and so forth? I suspect this character is a vegetarian.
I won't wholly indict the movie without seeing it, but so far Motherhood: The Movie makes me want to disown the word "mother" entirely. Can we not manage to procreate without losing the rest of our identity in the process?
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America is caught up in a frenzy of Heene-Hatred. So angry are we at the perpetrator of last week’s balloon-boy hoax, we pour out our wrath on him, his wife, cable news, reality shows, and every aspect of our celebrity-worshipping culture that rewards parents for exploiting their kids. We pledge to clean up the reality-show kid frenzy. To better regulate the exploitation of children on TV. To avoid speaking the name Heene out loud. To shun Kate and Jon and Octomom (at least until next season). And how do we express all of this outrage and contempt and disgust? In our Facebook posts, tweets, angry blog entries, and media appearances.
I am not here to defend Richard Heene, who clearly feels that reality television represents the very pinnacle of all human achievement. (Watch him here on his second run at ABC’s Wife Swap where, at 2:52, he calls being voted back onto Wife Swap “the best thing that has ever happened in our lives. Seriously.”) This man has a problem, and his willingness to co-opt his entire family into his quest for TV fame is tragic
But we also live in a time in which virtually everybody is willing to sell a piece of herself to be heard and seen in the media. It’s not really enough anymore just to wake up, eat breakfast, feed the cats, and go to work. We are all of us reporting our every thought and action in real time, and many, if not most of us, are as hungry as the Heenes to be acknowledged and heard. Given that 74 percent of Americans between the ages of 17-34 have a Facebook or MySpace page and 47 percent of us between 35-44 do as well, are we really being completely honest when we condemn the Heenes or the Octomoms for believing that the un-tweeted life is not worth living? We are different from them in degree, but not in kind, and it’s got to be a uniquely American phenomenon that in our weird self-obsessed way, we are all vying for scarce airspace so we can condemn the Heene family for their self obsession.
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It's easy to pity tech geeks for having to live with the stereotype that they're undersexed, sexist, tone deaf, and mean-spirited. Easy to pity them until you see that geeks are their own worst enemy when it comes to upholding this stereotype. The latest tech world sexism scandal—involving Yahoo-sponsored lap dances at a conference—inspired Gawker to compile a list of some of the most recent sexism scandals in the tech world. Why on earth does the world of high tech create so many occasions for its ugliest members to send signals that indicate that they think that men are for thinking and women are for shutting up and stripping?
No doubt sexism deniers would say that the incidents listed on Gawker—which involved strippers, jokes about strippers, booth girls, and mean-spirited jokes aimed at a woman whose body didn't fit the exacting standards of audience members whose exposure to actual women is debatable—are not a matter of aggressive sexism. We've heard all the denials before: Feminists should get a sense of humor. What's wrong with a little sexiness at a tech conference? Geeks don't realize that lap dances send the signal that women aren't welcome. Et cetera. But incidents like the lap dances don't occur in a vacuum, but in an industry where women often face vicious treatment from some corners if they dare present themselves as the equals of men. Take the treatment that tech guru and blogger Kathy Sierra attracted, seemingly for no reason other than her willingness to be a woman with respect and authority in the industry. In this environment, conference entertainment that implies that there are no women in the audience certainly sends the message that the tech world is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club.
It's too bad, really, because many male tech geeks want a culture that's more welcoming to women. The "no women allowed" message many women perceive is being sent by a minority of men in this world. But men who find this kind of sexism disgusting still feed the beast when they quietly roll their eyes and move on. Sexists see silence as consent. Male geeks who want a culture more welcoming to women need to speak up when they see sexism, or this kind of thing won't end.
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