Each time that London Fashion Week rolls around, it seems to be sadly inevitable that the mass media – broadsheets and tabloids alike – limps lamely after it, putting up the choicest ‘trends of the season’ in the daily pickings from their lucky-dip bag of superficial similarities between the big-name shows. These newspapers, as if to compensate for their absolute inadequacy in engaging or in-depth reports from the catwalks, choose to supplement their ‘fashion reports’ with pieces from bleating female journalists (see FEMAIL daily for such articles) criticising first and foremost the body shapes of the models walking down the runways. This is conducted under the guise of fellow female concern for the impact that such models (with the media’s prefix of ‘role’ placed heavy on their heads) have on teenage girls who, they presume, are as insecure and narrow-minded regarding the fashion industry as the journalists themselves appear to be.
Lara Stone
Such a finger-pointing implication of the impact of these ‘role’ models on the apparent corresponding body image issues of teenage girls, right up to the extreme of anorexia, is both a reductive presentation of the fashion industry as a whole, and a wholly unflattering insight into the ignorance of the journalists who write such reports.It is through such ignorance that the ludicrous gulf between ‘stick-thin models’ and ‘normal, curvy women’ has been constructed in relation to the fashion industry, and which is wheeled out each Fashion Week not only to fill the scant content of the newspapers themselves, but to make up even the filler stories that prop up the flailing safety of middle-ground ‘opinion’ pieces. When Mark Fast sent a (shocking!) size 14 model down the runway a couple of seasons ago, it was bland media forums such as the BBC among others that leapt upon it, seeing it as seemingly revolutionary. A similar reaction greeted the Dove ‘Real Women’ campaign when it began a few years back. Both such furores came about only because the media chooses to emphasise these two extremes of the fashion industry and thereby push women to, in effect, pick sides.
There are firstly the women who draw comfort from these ‘plus-size models’; there is a fine line, though, between such women feeling thereby more positively connected to the fashion industry, and it becoming simply another exercise in the mould of Heat Magazine to feel better about themselves only in relation to the flaws (‘Madonna’s looking old!’, ‘Look at Rihanna’s double chin!’) of those in the spotlight. Secondly, there are those who seek to transform themselves in deference to the other extreme of the reams of skinny runway models, images of which are splashed across the papers following each and every fashion week.
It is the misrepresentation of these two polar extremes of the fashion industry’s choice of models that creates an unnecessary culture of body-obsession and self-consciousness. Runway models are chosen as canvases on which to display the clothes of a designer, and yet the media endlessly misses the focus of the show, choosing to discuss the models, right down to their BMI’s and juddering walks, rather than the true creativity of the show – the music, lighting, production, and of course the clothes themselves. The French use the word ‘mannequin’ to describe a model, which is precisely what runway models are intended to be. The catwalk environment is intentionally artificial and thoroughly alien to the world of ‘real women’, and is designed simply to showcase innovative design and remarkable creativity. It is such designs and creativity that ought to stir aspirations back in ‘the real world’, and not the blank bodies of the mannequins on which they were presented. That it is the other way around is a matter for the mass media to address, and not the fashion industry.
Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat Kill KIll
The designs first presented at runway shows are certainly not intended only for those with similarly waif-like figures, despite what such scare-mongering rags as the Daily Mail would like to protest to the contrary. Magazine editorials increasingly use models with very different body shapes to those who walk down the runway – the success of such models as Lara Stone, Emiko Mihalik and the relatively new face Linsey Wixon testifies to this, all of whom are large-breasted, curvy, long-legged, sexy women, and all several dress sizes larger than regular catwalk models. The fashion industry is filled with models, muses, actresses and real, intelligent women, all of whom are photographed and celebrated both in mass market magazines such as Elle, which actively caters to the concerns of their immense audience of ‘real women’, and in smaller magazines such as i-D and Dazed through personal photography and frequent street-casting. The euphemistic term ‘curvaceous’ bandied around in so many articles should not be used to describe a size sixteen and above (and falls little short of patronising when it does so) but rather should be applied to truly attractive, well-proportioned, healthy women.
Marilyn Monroe, that endlessly referenced pinnacle of female beauty, was famously a size fourteen, with a perfectly proportioned body that ought to be used as the mould to the true meaning of ‘curvy’. 
This curviness is taken to brilliantly camp extremes in the films of Russ Meyer, packaged under such hilarious titles as ‘Faster Pussycat Kill Kill’ and ‘Wild Gals of the Naked West’, while in the hyper-titillation of Tinto Brass’s distinct brand of heady erotica, women’s bodies are presented in every shape and size, headily made-up and dressed in everything from the most unflattering body-suit to nothing but a wispy necklace. The photography of Juergen Teller, Nan Goldin, and Larry Clark in the late eighties and early nineties (Terry Richardson’s style and ethics have degenerated so much since that time that he ought not to be included alongside such thoughtful photographers as Teller) entwined the aesthetic of real young friends having fun doing nothing at all (see Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker, which preceded his far more popular film Dazed and Confused, for a brilliantly beautiful evocation of this nothingness) with the exposure and fast-pace that the fashion industry commands.
Sevigny in Kids
This mix is strikingly caught by Chloe Sevigny in Clark’s 1995 film Kids, after she and her boyish cropped hair and wardrobe were cast from the streets of New York alongside the rest of the young cast, leading to her later working as stylist for Harmony Korine’s Dogme 95 film Julien Donkey Boy. Sevigny’s persistent success to this day as both an actress and model indicates that such
Teller's Go-Sees
projects are able to infiltrate and influence the mainstream consciousness of fashion, and that creatively engaged, truly attractive (and far from ‘size zero’) men and women can overturn the sterility of the basic preconception of the model as a mannequin in editorials. Juergen Teller’s ‘Go Sees’ project, in which he snapped quick photographs of everyday girls, still in their coats, who arrived on his doorstep in the hope of working with him, takes this connection between the real and fashion world further, as does his ongoing involvement with the Marc Jacobs campaigns. It is from the cinema, the looks and sensibilities of bygone eras, street culture and everyday life that the fashion industry draws immense inspiration, both explicitly and implicitly, transforming them into thoroughly modern, intelligent ideas, images and design.
What the mass media lacks is subtlety, relegating attractive women to the unspoken gulf between their preferred bleating about the two extremes on either side of such women. For the media to so jubilantly celebrate such models as the (again ‘revolutionary’) size sixteen model Crystal Renn is to encourage as much of an unhealthy body-image and health culture (‘if she’s overweight then it’s ok for me to be too’) as to focus on the thin models of the runways. Neither extreme ought to comfort or inspire young girls. Until the media begins to present the middle ground between these two ends of the spectrum, women’s body image hang-ups in relation to the supposed ghoul of the fashion industry will never subside.
Louise Benson was fashion editor for Varsity in Michaelmas 2010. She publishes her images and ideas at http://louisebenson.blogspot.com/.
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