Thursday, April 24, 2008

Never mind

Someone is wrong on the Internet, and that someone is me. Almost a year ago I remarked that the more thinness matters in the fashion industry, the less race is an issue. If beauty requires being 5'11" and 100 pounds, you'd think there wouldn't be enough 'beautiful' women out there to allow for discrimination on the basis of anything else.

Yet the Slavic countries--or more accurately, the Slavic middle schools-- came through. Race still matters, only now it helps to look Aryan (or close enough) and anorexic. If women have long wished they were a bit blonder, a bit thinner, a bit younger, the trend in models is for them to be as blond, thin, and young as physically possible. So, never mind.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well... Sasha Pivovarova is a blond Muscovite. And she is thin. But she's also 23 (not insanely young) and really good at what she does. She's been the face of Prada for 6 consecutive seasons and has appeared in 9 ads for them. She's also practically your neighbor (she lives in Brooklyn).

You want young and blond? There's Karlie Kloss. She's 16, 5' 11" and from Chicago but how to explain her hair often being dyed black on the runway?

And then we have Chanel Iman who as a 3/4 African American is hardly what anyone would call an Aryan ideal. Same goes for Chinese model Du Juan

I dunno Phoebe. I don't see a new trend here. Other than the usual use of impossible to achieve standards of beauty meant to foster lack of self confidence and insecurity for fun and profit.