Fashion cares?

From: Rachel Giese
To: Katrina Onstad
Subject: Fashion police

Hi Katrina,

Have you seen the latest Dove ad (you can check it out below) with the little girl being bombarded with about a billion freaky images from the fashion and cosmetics industries? It reminds me of those dire warnings about TV that were so prevalent during my 1970s childhood. This time, though, it’s not the boob tube desensitizing kids to violence and war, but Victoria’s Secret billboards and liposuction turning little girls into botox-addicted anorexics.

If I sound the eensiest bit sceptical, well, it’s because I am. I don’t doubt that the “you’re fat and ugly” mantra chanted by fashion magazines and advertisements can mug women’s souls and psyches, but I wonder about the source of the critique. Three years ago, Dove launched its Campaign for Real Beauty, a feel-good series of ads featuring a rainbow coalition of bodacious babes and smokin’ grannies. (Check out more Dove ads here.) While the whole campaign exudes a kind of ya-ya sisterhood feminism that’s a little too precious for my taste, three cheers for Dove for recognizing that beauty can come in bigger and more colourful packages than the ads of most cosmetic companies would suggest.

But — or should I say “butt,” and a big, “real woman”-sized butt at that — Dove, it should be pointed out, is owned by Unilever, the maker of the diet shake Slim-Fast (so much for real beauty) and Axe cologne, perhaps the douchebaggiest product ever invented. So you’ve got to ask: is Dove’s alterna-beauty campaign truly revolutionary? Or is it just a brilliant marketing scheme? Or some combination of the two?

From: Katrina Onstad
To: Rachel Giese
Subject: Re: Fashion police

Hey Rachel,

I like the size 10 women, even though they’re hardly radically obese. I like the little girl. I like the morphing face. I also like Dove, but mostly because my dermatologist recommends it — seriously. I’m currently looking for a dentist who recommends Trident.

But in my darkest hours (a.k.a. 7am-11pm), I, too, realize that we are just cogs in the great churning capitalist machine, even if that machine makes really good products for combination skin. You’re right: the people who make those boring, I-can’t-tell-sexist-from-sexy ads for Axe (a product recently used by teens to set themselves on fire, and also to stink) simply can’t be concerned, first and foremost, with our wounded psyches as women and mothers. But should we really be looking to the beauty industry for healthy images of women? The second part of that phrase is “industry,” and profit-mongering goes back a long way. As Chaucer wrote: I got relics over here for ya! Cheap!

What I like about the latest Dove ad — and man, these ads have legs; this one’s been viewed about 600,000 times — is how it puts the onus on parents to talk to their kids about being savvy to the spin. The online workshops and guides are interesting in that way, too; at least they’re suggesting that something can be done about the prevalence of these negative images above and beyond purchasing soap. Yes, there’s hypocrisy in this campaign, but it’s prescriptive in some way, too, rather than just parading white-underwearing women for blatant profit.

From: Rachel Giese
To: Katrina Onstad
Subject: Re: Fashion police

Hi Katrina,

What’s particularly interesting about the Dove campaign is that it coincides with a moment of reckoning in the fashion industry. After two models died in 2006 as a result of their starvation diets, designers like Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld and organizers of Fashion Week events around the world have begun banning ultra-skinny models. That was very recently followed by a chorus of criticism about the dearth of black and brown-skinned models in prominent runway shows and mainstream fashion magazines this season.

There have always been outsiders who have attacked the industry for its rarefied standards of beauty, but this is the first time I can think of that the strongest calls for change have come from within. One reason that designers might be more responsive now is that many of them, like Isaac Mizrahi, Viktor and Rolf and Vera Wang, are designing budget lines for a mass market. They’ve been forced to consider not just what looks good on a lanky teenager wielding her daddy’s platinum card, but what’s also going to work on a five-foot-two-inch receptionist with saddle bags.

A model walks the runway at the Rosa Cha spring 2007 fashion show in New York. (Diane Bondareff/Associated Press)

Like a lot of women, my feelings about the fashion industry ping-pong between fascination and frustration, titillation and disgust, yearning and anger. Of course, it’s a good thing for designers and advertisers to be held accountable for having abetted eating disorders, or discriminatory hiring practices. But watching this smoke-and-mirrors business struggle with real-life issues of racism, body image and anorexia is a little like watching Paris Hilton audition for a role in Hamlet. I’m not sure the fashion industry — which is built upon artifice, aspiration and illusion — is equipped to police itself on these issues, or whether it should even be expected to.

What do you think, Katrina? Is it fair to expect reality from an industry that traffics in fantasy?

From: Katrina Onstad
To: Rachel Giese
Subject: Re: Fashion police

Hi,

Well, I ping-pong alongside you, Rachel. Part of me yawns at the shocking news that models are too skinny. Extra, extra. Skinny models sound a media alarm once in a while, then it’s back to silence and envy. I’m not really surprised when high-end fashion people brush off these blips with the defence that fashion is a kind of art that has nothing to do with the world, and we shouldn’t merge our real-life expectations with their fantasy. I get that idea, and certainly what Comme des Garcons does on a runway is a form of performance art that has nothing to do with keeping one’s body hypothermia-free. So yeah, maybe fashion is a world of ideal forms, not something attainable, and the barely-bodies are part of that un-reality.

But then again: ick. Those commercial images of emaciated women aren’t, in the end, divorced from reality. Some of the women in those pictures are dying, and that is reality, one that’s extremely troubling.

So I guess I’m with Dove. I do believe in that other kind of modelling: when people see themselves represented — or modelled — in the media, it’s empowering. When Beverly Johnson became the first African-American on the cover of Vogue in 1974, that probably meant a lot to a black girl who had never seen her own face reflected in the media. The fact that we’re fixated on these see-through, straight-haired, cadaverous models right now does seem alarming. Is this fear of the brown “Other” a response to 9-11, the Patriot Act, recent declarations of the new Canadian bigotry? Something’s up when designer Diane von Furstenberg, who used more models of colour than anyone else during New York’s Fashion Week, sounds like a revolutionary by making the simple, almost banal statement in the NY Times: “I can make a difference. We all can.”

From: Rachel Giese
To: Katrina Onstad
Subject: Re: Fashion police

I think you’ve gotten to the crux of it, Katrina: role models and representation. I admit I always find myself of two minds on this point. One part of me — the cranky, contrarian, Camille Paglia part — is loath to give too much power to the fashion industry. If women hate themselves when they read fashion magazines, then they should stop reading those magazines and look for other models of strong, beautiful women.

On the other hand, as you point out, the images we see on screen and on the page have tremendous power to affect how we understand our place in the world — whether we like it or not. And now, more than ever, we are swimming in these images. I wonder if it’s even right to single out the fashion industry for condemnation. I suspect that the hoochie girls dancing in music videos might be a bigger influence on the self-esteem of young women than any fashion models.

British model Naomi Campbell in 1997. (Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images)

Back in the 1990s, supermodels had lean but healthy proportions and black women like Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks and Veronica Webb graced high-profile runways and magazine covers. In the last 15 years, the average sample size has been reduced from a six to a two and models have devolved from frisky divas to blank-faced coat racks. Whether this is just a passing trend or something more sinister — see: Faludi, Susan — it’s downright creepy.

Creepier still is that most of the “women” on the catwalk are actually girls. Twelve-year-old Maddison Gabriel from Australia — a four-year veteran (!) of the industry — is a highly sought-after runway model. Aren’t there child labour laws to prevent such a thing? And aside from the obvious aesthetic and artistic considerations, should the fashion industry be allowed to discriminate in its hiring on the basis of race, height, age and size?

You quoted Diane von Furstenberg, who suggested that it’s up to everyone to address these issues in the fashion industry. What do you think, Katrina: how much are we responsible for the images we’re bombarded with? Are we in some way culpable because we buy the magazines, watch the commercials and covet the purses?

From: Katrina Onstad
To: Rachel Giese
Subject: Re: Fashion police

Hey Rachel,

Culpable? Maybe. Still, I have to believe that one can enjoy fashion with some modicum of awareness, and pick and choose whom to throw cash at. I won’t shop at American Apparel, because, sweatshop-free or not, I take issue with their ad campaigns of slave-trafficked, date-raped, coffin-dwelling, retro-porn fantasy toddler-babes in legwarmers. But I do buy Vogue. Ah, well.

At least you and I — a generation (or two?) removed from the Top Model hopefuls — have the ability to synthesize some of these images. I’m more anxious for young girls absorbing this stuff in the new media age. What a time to be young and female, trying to make sense of the walking dead on the runways and anti-obesity campaigns in schools. These mixed messages must make girls — and probably, boys; what are they thinking about their bodies these days, anyway? — feel like that kid in the Dove ad, with her hair blown back from the onslaught.

On the upside, fashion is nothing if not fickle and transient. Models can’t get any whiter, any thinner — as you once said to me: “Is there anything smaller than a size zero? A negative two?” — or any younger, unless agencies start scouting daycares. So maybe the next big thing in fashion will be multi-culti size eights who start modelling after a year or two of university.

Then again, there’s this: L’Oreal Fashion Week is starting here in Toronto, and the big space downtown in front of the former city hall is filled with white tents where local designers are showcasing their work. The big draw on the first night was a Joe Fresh show featuring a rare appearnce by Heather Marks, a 19-year-old from Calgary who’s one of the biggest models in the world. Downside: She started modelling when she was 12. Upside: She’s a size four.

It’s something…or not.