“丰满”的现实压迫出骨感的模特?_大学英语阅读

“丰满”的现实压迫出骨感的模特?

In 1920s, New York, the uptown retail stores employed svelte models while the downtown wholesalers used fuller-figured ones, especially to model fashions for “stouts”. As with display dummies, the first fashion models represented a range of body shapes and sizes, but these were standardised to correspond with the increasing standardisation of mass-produced clothing sizes. In Paris, Coco Chanel chose models in her own, slender, image, even fitting the fuller-figured ones with a whale-boned brassiere to flatten their bosoms. The fashion for extremely thin and androgynous models lasted from 1924–8, peaking in 1926. After that, the press announced that “boyish form is passé”, spurning the stick-thin flapper. One Paris newspaper contained an apocryphal account of 200 mannequins who had lost their jobs because they were too thin. But, in reality, the slender ideal was well established by the late 1920s and has varied only slightly in the intervening decades. (In fact, the first calls for a slenderised body came not from fashion designers but from doctors who attempted to make a medical case for dieting from before the first world war.)

By the 1920s fashion writers were generally advocating a slimmer figure. Presaging today’s fashion for a lean and youthful physique, the Countess de Noailles wrote in 1926, “our epoch favours the appearance of permanent youth”.

Clearly, the debates about models’ bodies and their influence on the rest of the population have been raging for more than a hundred years. In all this time, while it has often been asserted that skinny models are the cause of extreme dieting and exercise in pursuit of a slim, toned, and youthful-looking body—and in recent decades whether models’ bodies inspire eating disorders—there is little hard data to support the claim, and we still await a definitive, scientific study. There is unarguably a relationship, but whether it is causal is moot. As the fashion sociologist Agnès Rocamora says, “While images of thin women may well influence us to desire certain clothes, and even thin bodies, whether that translates into actual eating disorders is another issue. I don’t know if it’s ever possible to substantiate .”