[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="137" caption="Image by bloomsberries via Flickr"]
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Excuse me for showing some pride in my current country of residence, but Canadian designer Mark Fast put average-sized women in super-clingy knits at this week's Fashion Week in London. Gasp!
"I think it's time really," Fast said in a telephone interview with CBC News. "There's such beauty out there and it's unfortunate that it's only representative in one size … so it's just a new celebration of all women."The good news is, Naomi Campbell approved:
"If the girl's beautiful and she can model, why not?"The bad news is that Fast's stylist walked off rather than help such a scandal take place. London Fashion Week abuzz over larger models. The other news is that we can no longer ignore the relationship between the idealized images we consume as models and movie stars and how damn bad we feel about our own bodies. There's a huge amount of research at this point that shows a correlation between consuming images of extremely thin models and feeling dissatisfied with your own body. Most girls feel dissatisfied with their bodies by 5th grade. The more women's and fashion magazines girls read (i.e. the more models they look at), the worse they feel about themselves and the more likely they are to want to diet. Actually, this same study has been repeated on all sorts of people- older people, men, straight, gay, etc. at Bristol, England's Centre for Appearance Research and guess what? We all feel worse about ourselves if we look at the extremely thin models who grace the pages of these things. That's a good thing for the advertisers, right? "Look at me, I'm perfect and skinny and I use this toothpaste and if you would just buy this toothpaste, you might be skinny and perfect too" is how advertising works. It makes us feel insecure about ourselves, creates artificial needs for consumption, and so we buy it. Perhaps the relationship between beauty, femininity, advertising, and transformation is best summed up by artist Nichola Constantino's 2005 work, “Savon de corps. ” Constantino literally means BODY soap since she used 3% of her own body fat obtained from a liposuction procedure to make torso shaped, flesh-colored bars of soap. She also constructed an advertisement for the soap using herself as a model to underline the fact that when we buy a product we are actually consuming the image of the person selling it. What Constantino offers with her soap is the opportunity to consume not just her image, but her actual body. What Fast is offering with his fashion is the opportunity to want to consume women who look like us. A desire for ourselves. It is a radical move, and one that might help Fast sell more clothes. But without selling us a body never achieved but always promised just around the corner if only we buy this product, how will consumer capitalism continue to work?