Why this shocking catwalk picture betrays all women
Designers promised an end to painfully thin models on the catwalk. But this was the Yves Saint Laurent show yesterday. What a sickening betrayal, says SARAH VINE
This is the age of diversity, or so we are always being told. An age where colour, size, gender, sexual orientation no longer matter, where notions of oppression and exploitation are swept away by global movements such as #MeToo.
Everywhere you look, in print, across social media, on prime-time TV, individuals who buck the stereotypes are proudly proclaiming their right to be relevant. Diversity is the new black.
With one notable exception: high fashion. When it comes to clothes — and especially couture — the catwalks are still hopelessly hung up on an impossible notion of what constitutes beauty. And it is — literally — the narrowest definition.
Despite countless denunciations, promises and corporate handwringing, designers are still selecting and promoting extreme thinness as a benchmark of style. Only last week British model Edie Campbell, 28, (5ft 10in, 24-and-a-half inch waist) was told she was ‘too big’ to open a show at Milan fashion week.
‘And by “too big” i don’t mean “too famous”,’ she joked to her instagram followers, posting a picture of herself tucking into a croissant. ‘i mean “too fat”.’ Campbell didn’t name and shame the brand that rejected her — but it could be any of the big labels. They all indulge in the use of perilously skinny models, seemingly unable to kick their addiction, returning endlessly to the same aesthetic of gaunt
cheekbones and rickety knees, like an alcoholic to the bottle. The latest to fall off the wagon is Yves Saint Laurent. Owned by parent company Kering — which also encompasses Gucci, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta — YSL pledged in 2017 to restrict use of super-thin models.
In the words of Kering’s billionaire chairman Francois- Henri Pinault, they wanted to ‘inspire the entire industry to follow suit’.
If the latest pictures from Paris Fashion Week are anything to go by, they’ve a funny way of showing it. Not since the Nineties’ so-called ‘heroin chic’ have I seen such a disturbing collection of knobbly knees, emaciated calf muscles, jutting collarbones and sunken eyes.
What’s worse is that the clothes are styled to make the girls look even skinnier. Oversized jackets with disproportionate shoulders that emphasise the girls’ twig-like legs; huge bows over scrawny chests; voluminous shorts and baggy leather boots topping and tailing reed-thin thighs.
ON A real person, these shapes would look clown-like. The entire collection seems to revel in the impossibility of anyone with the barest hint of a bosom or a bottom being able to wear a single one of these creations without looking like an undercooked sausage trapped in a jam-jar.
We all know fashion at this level is a chance for designers to express their more daring side, to create a fashion fantasy, if you like. But what we see here is no dream; it’s the stuff of nightmares.
It’s not only that it plays into the idea of ultra thin-ness as a benchmark for beauty, with all the potential for harm — eating disorders, low self-esteem — that entails.
It’s also that it shows a lack of respect for the female form in all its shapes and sizes. It reduces women to a single, narrow stereotype — one few of us would be able to achieve, even if we wanted to.
Thus fashion, which ought to be a source of inspiration, if not fun, becomes instead a source of misery, just another stick with which women — and particularly young girls, who care more about these sorts of things than grumpy middle-aged journalists — must beat themselves. The irony is that as well as doing us no favours, this kind of look does fashion no favours either. Because it plays into the prevailing narrative that all fashion houses are run by misogynists who despise ordinary women and design for their own narrow definition of what they find alluring.
We are dealing with a deeply ingrained culture in an industry that, for all the fine words and gestures, is as rampantly sexist as Harvey Weinstein, and just as unrepentant.
It suits fashion to keep things as they are — not least because designing for rail-thin waifs is easier (and cheaper) than catering for curves, which requires expertise, training and talent. Why bother with that when you can bully women into hating themselves — then flog them the solution?