March 01, 2007

Fashion Models: Standard of Beauty?






An email forwarded to us carried these photos of models. After I had cycled through feelings of revulsion (God! That's horrendous) and disbelief (Must have been Photoshopped), I was forced to think.

I guess most of us assume that fashion models establish a standard of beauty. Yet in this case, the eye gives a lie to our assumptions. Is modelling at all about good looks? If beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, whose eye is it?

Even if we assume a purely functional, than aesthetic, view of fashion models - that they serve to drape the clothes, hence thinner is better - that raises another question. Which customers are the designers designing for? When I look around, I am hard pressed to find stick-thin figures. Increasingly, fashion modelling starts looking like an exercise in creating fanstasies, perhaps like playing a game of 'dungeons and dragons.'

Does anyone know what is going on here?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

daddu, commenting on weight lately ? but yes, it is difficult to fathom what kind of people like such anorexic bodies ..and such people get sponsorship to attend fashion events is even more weird.