“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?

大众的审美是随着时代的变迁而改变的。原来模特不是一直都如此骨感，丰满的模特也曾在时尚舞台上走俏，一如唐朝崇尚肉感美。如今模特的体脂含量一路下降，但这些看似不食人间烟火的衣架子们真的要为那些病态追求身材的虚荣心负责么?

In the early 20th century, the first professional fashion models were called “living mannequins”. They took their name from their 19th-century predecessors , the display mannequins used by dressmakers. The term suggested that these early models were no more than animated dolls, and this was born out in reality. Uniform in their mechanical modelling styles and standardised body shapes, they stared glassily ahead, paying no attention to onlookers. One critic in 1910 described their “industrial smiles”. Forbidden to speak unless spoken to, when asked by the client, “What is your name?” the living mannequin would answer not with her own name but that of the so-called model dress she wore: Pleasures of Love, or The First Yes, perhaps. Resembling both a talking dress and the inanimate mannequin she mimicked, the fashion model cut a disturbing and uncanny figure in the luxurious couture salons of Paris.

Among the first women to go uncorseted in the early 1900s, fashion models were slender and supple, but nowhere near as thin as today’s models. The fashionable ideal remained statuesque until 1910-14 when it became tall and willowy, in tandem with the burgeoning craze for dance and sport. The new, slimmer silhouette was spearheaded by professional models whose narrow skirts and flimsy fabrics put the body on display in novel ways. Then as now, both journalists and the public complained that models bore no relation to ordinary women. The British designer Lucile advertised in an American newspaper for “the thinnest model in the world” to drape in heavy fabrics. She found “Arjamand”, described by Lucile’s assistant as “a slender, swaying reed, so thin, I often feared, as I watched her pace the long rooms in the divinely draped brocaded gowns, she would bend, then break, and dissolve into a graceful, luxurious heap upon the floor”. Far from it: Arjamand so hated being thin that she was on a constant diet to gain weight.