Why is fashion once again glorifying thinness and the infantilization of women?

Numbers fail again in fashion.

At least, those of diversity.

Those of the representation of women, if you prefer.

“With more than 75 designers presenting their collections this season, around 3,200 models have walked the runway in New York.

Only 31 of them were considered

, compared to 49 in the previous edition.

Please, what is happening?" Felicity Hayward lamented in mid-February.

The British model, champion in her country of the

movement (a social cause that advocates the acceptance of the body regardless of gender, ethnicity, size, appearance or disability), has spent the last month calculating the anatomical disparity on the catwalks of the

capitals

and the accounts do not come out.

Especially in Milan, where of the 2,400 mannequins, convened by 60 creators, only 14 (one less than six months ago) gave a size above 40. "My favorite sport is fighting against pressure regarding that toxic body image that society tries to impose on us.

We must stop this resurgence of thinness because it is a step backwards.

Our physique should never be the subject of a trend”, exposes the also author of

(Greenfinch, 2022), which she began her account of herself last September under the hashtag

.

Bella Hadid poses before parading for Givenchy.Gregory Scaffidi (Launchmetrics.com)

The alarms went off, precisely, during the round of women's fashion shows between the end of September and the beginning of October 2022, which gave an account of the proposals to wear this spring-summer 2023. Or not to wear.

Because, according to what has been seen, the great trend for this season is the body itself, the exact mass index to reveal bones, cavities and tendons.

At Givenchy, the exposure of skin taut as a drum went from the tiny top-bras to the waistbands of skirts or cargo pants that hung from hips that offered no grip.

Flat stomachs, even concave ones, were the specialty of Miu Miu, Prada's sister label that set a similar standard last fall-winter with that viral outfit of a sweater cut below the bust line and a miniskirt at pubic level.

In Fendi, however, the protagonists were the ribs, protruding under pieces of knitwear or low-grammage tulle.

Meanwhile, skintight jumpsuits by Stella McCartney (crystal mesh), Burberry (lace) and Prada (stretch poplin) receded into profile.

“I'm fed up.

I know that exalting thinness again is not the intention, but I can't take it anymore", the journalist Tyler McCall, fashion editor of the Fashionista.com portal, trilled then in a tweet quoted ad nauseam that, surprise, has been deleted .

Model Shalom Harlow at the Schiaparelli show, where women have been portrayed as "pieces of big game." Estrop (Getty Images)

The return to the glorification of this unbearable lightness of being has been observed since the fall of 2021, the zero season of a new more or less extreme thinness associated with the end of the restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The need to recover the previous normality, after long months of physical-dietary abandonment and dressing wild, would be behind the disinterest of the clothing industry to continue the social policies that it seemed to have embraced in a display of responsibility, on pain of falling into the billing.

, says the litany installed in the sector since then, referring to the economic debacle that can mean for a brand to trust its narrative to the speeches aligned with the parameters of the current political correctness.

That everything has been a paripé bienqueda is something that, in addition, the models themselves denounce.

“They have come to ask me if he was part of the hairdressing team.

Because, of course, how was a girl like me going to parade.

They choose us because they have to meet a quota, but then there are no clothes for us”, wields the American Grace Breuning, a size 42, who made her Chanel debut last October.

The fact that the same garments are not found in all sizes in stores or that many firms still offer their items above 42 only in electronic sales spaces should also call for reflection.

Yuri Escudie showed the marks of her mastectomy at Balenciaga.Balenciaga

The mirage worsens because, on top of that, the figureheads of

are repeated over and over again in parades and campaigns, evidencing the scarcity of

names (between 42 and 56) with which to identify: Paloma Elsesser, Precious Lee, Barbie Ferreira, Denise Bidot, Jill Kortleve.

The issue is aggravated in the Afro representation, which borders on racism in the conception of its image.

The debate over whether the classification of obesity is fair when it comes to women of color (in America, the proverbial image of anatomical morbidity) is far from settled, because the standard body mass index is based on measurements of Caucasian people, according to a study in the

.

That is not to mention the sexualized look that prevails over the body of the black woman.

The problem can be transferred to the so-called dissident bodies, those that put identity in a difficult situation.

It is true that the business no longer daunts when it comes to feminizing men;

in fact, the presence of male models, binary or not, in women's shows has increased exponentially as brands and designers try to show that, indeed, gender is also conventionalism in clothing.

However, he resists showing the masculinization of women: it is not easy to find on the catwalks mannequins like Yuri Escudie, who opened the muddy Balenciaga show this spring-summer bare-chested, the scars of her recent mastectomy visible ( a surgery that, says this lesbian activist, does not alter her condition: "My appearance does not define me for gender purposes"), or Minttu Vesala,

spectral androgynous figure of 52 years.

The representation of age, of course, would deserve a separate chapter.

Yuri Escudie showed the marks of her mastectomy at Balenciaga.Balenciaga

Meanwhile, the message that the industry sends cannot be lost: between the infantilized image of the Y2K aesthetic, the inexhaustible

of the style of the first decade of the two thousand that praises thinness and the barrage of corsets, crinolines and crinolines that once They were a symbol of oppression. We have been left with a season that is not retro, but retrograde.

A

, an advertising story that ends up identifying empowerment with the sexist culture that equates being a sexual object with self-expression and self-confidence.

Take a look at Schiaparelli's trophy-women, pieces of big game to be exhibited like rugs at the feet of men camouflaged under a speech of presumed ferocity.

The bestial designs —with lion, wolf and leopard head-sculptures— would, on the other hand, be allegories of sins according to Dante's Inferno, Daniel Roseberry's inspiration for this spring-summer haute couture collection.

"In all civilizations, and even today, the woman inspires the man with horror," wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949).

In fashion it seems that it still happens.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber