|
|
| Beastly tales |
“A woman can never be too rich or too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor had once remarked. But recently, the organizers of the Madrid Fashion Week took their courage in both hands and said that you can, in fact, be too thin to make the grade. They went ahead and blackballed as many as five female models because their body mass index was below 18, and anyone with a BMI below 18.5 is supposed to be underweight, according to the World Health Organization.
Cut the jargon — BMI is your weight in kilograms divided by your height in metres squared — and what the Madrid Fashion Week was really saying was that it would no longer serve as a platform for gaunt, famine-thin models who set an impossible ideal of feminine beauty — an ideal that spurs thousands of young women in the West to starve themselves and turn anorexic to try and achieve it.
The step taken by Madrid has to be commended. For this is the first time that an international fashion event has dared to fly in the face of the tyranny of the fashion industry which insists upon models who are skinny to the point of being skeletal.
Of course, Madrid’s move immediately set off a caterwauling on the catwalks as the denizens of the $200 billion global fashion industry reacted sharply to this so-called assault on their “creative freedom”. The creations of designers look best on reedy models, they said. What right had people to try and mess with that golden rule? This was discrimination against thin models, they cried.
Discrimination? Oh please. The simple fact is that the cult of thinness that pervades global popular culture — a cult that the fashion industry feeds and propagates relentlessly — has become a terrible stick to beat women with. And it claims its victims every day. Last month 22-year-old Luisel Ramos, a South American model, died of a heart attack in Montevideo, Uruguay, minutes after she stepped off the ramp. Her modelling agency had told the already thin girl that she needed to lose some more weight. Ramos had apparently been surviving on green leaves and Diet Coke for two months before she fell down dead.
Naturally, not all stories of famished models turn out to be quite so spectacularly tragic. But many of the rail-thin fashion icons of today — supermodel Kate Moss, celebrities like Victoria Beckham, Lindsey Lohan and others — do admit to suffering from eating disorders. Crucially, they also present an almost unattainable ideal of thinness that affects thousands of women worldwide. It is a body image that is unrealistic and artificial in the extreme. But because it is tirelessly celebrated in the media, it has become a standard for beauty to which millions of women aspire.
There is a huge body of research to suggest that the images of abnormally slender women we are bombarded with daily have led to the rise in the number of women who fall prey to eating disorders like anorexia nervosa or bulimia. These women make starvation a way of life — all in order to attain that wasted look so beloved of fashion glossies and FTV. Nearly 10 per cent of anorexics are said to die of the disease. And according to a recent estimate, each year approximately five million women are affected by anorexia in the United States of America alone.
These are shocking figures and ought to have brought on a ban on skeletal role models long ago. And one must remember that anorexia is just part of the problem. Even those who are not indulging in binge-eating and then puking their guts out to purge themselves of those offending calories find it hard to counter the pressure to be thin. They jump giddily from one fantastical diet to another in their endless — and mostly unsuccessful — pursuit of a sylph-like shape. Or go under the knife to remove that stubborn roll of fat round the middle.
Of course, it may be argued that since so many women in the West are overweight, the tyranny of thinness is often exaggerated. But the fact remains that though many of these women have given up the fight to remain fat-free, it is more than likely that they loathe their bodies and suffer from low self-worth because they do not fit the prevailing notion of beauty and attractiveness.
Nor is the problem confined to the first world alone. There have been reports of late that eating disorders are on the rise among teenage girls in urban India. Many of them are going hungry because they are terrified of “putting on weight”. And what could be more calamitous than that?
Thinness as a barometer for female beauty is of course a 20th century invention. Earlier, a beautiful woman was almost always a plump woman. From the round bellies and voluminous thighs of the women in Renaissance paintings to the well-endowed odalisques of Matisse, or even the voluptuous women of Bengal’s Kalighat pata paintings, femininity was always synonymous with a certain amplitude — that which suggested health and fertility. Even in the Fifties, Marilyn Monroe, who wasn’t thin by any stretch of the imagination, was celebrated as the sexiest woman on earth.
So why did the ideal female form suddenly become shorn of flesh, pared to the bone, its cheeks hollowed, its rib cage showing? More than a decade ago, the feminist writer, Naomi Wolf, suggested that this new ideal of beauty was perfected so that women — just when they had achieved economic and sexual freedom — could be severely undermined in mind and body. By keeping a woman constantly insecure about her weight, “…by redefining her womanly shape as ‘too fat’…it countered the groundswell of female success with a mass conviction of female failure,” wrote Wolf.
It is tempting to agree with this theory, especially since today women have a new and improved ideal of thinness to genuflect to — the Size Zero. A ridiculously small fashion fit flaunted by the likes of Victoria Beckham, Kate Moss et al, Size Zero is the newest measure of a hot bod. The term is revealing, to say the least. It is almost as if women are being invited to become insubstantial to the point of non-existence. The ideal woman is a zero. A zilch. A mere nothing. Pouf! And she’ll be gone — vanish into thin air without a trace.
And that is why Madrid’s decision to ban super skinny models is so very heartening. In a milieu where women are admired for their ghostly shapes, it is a move in the direction of sanity. Of course, the London Fashion week that followed soon after ignored calls for a similar ban on grossly underweight models. Still, a beginning has been made. Becoming beautiful is not about turning yourself into emaciated dressmaker’s dummies. If Madrid’s trail-blazing attempt to dispense with these damaging role models is not taken up by others, perhaps we need legislation to put an end to the practice. Clearly, that is an idea whose time has come.