The Body Project, a book by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, outlines the societal pressure that women feel to perfect their bodies. Interestingly, she argues that changing fashion over time has a direct impact on the Body Project and how women perceive their bodies.
The argument is that fashion in fact dictates how women feel about their bodies instead of merely being a material representation of the time. Historically, people will point to the idolization of Twiggy (the mid-1960s British fashion model) as being the catalyst for our modern beauty ideals.
The pervasiveness of the ridiculously thin model that we have come to resent began arguably with Twiggy in the mid-1960s to early 1970s. If Twiggy became the most beautiful woman in the world, then so did all of her attributes (namely, her thinness).
“At sixteen, I was a funny, skinny little thing, all eyelashes and legs. And then, suddenly people told me it was gorgeous. I thought they had gone mad.” –Twiggy
Although it is extremely easy to talk about the negative impact that our modern fashion industry has on women, it is important to recognize (as The Body Project does) that each fashion era’s beauty ideal proved to be impossible for some women to attain. Having one beauty standard inevitably means that groups of women will be excluded, ultimately creating the need for the “body project.”
Due to the idolization of a certain body type as put forth by the fashion industry, women feel the need to treat their bodies as something that needs to be constantly worked on, changed, and above all, fixed.
It is certainly easy to attack the fashion industry; after all, there is no better example for putting women’s (and men’s) bodies on global display. The fashion industry’s role in the “body project” is evident, and the fashion changes over time have simply altered each generation’s unattainable ideal instead of eliminating it.
Photo Sources:
http://www.thebodyproject.com/
http://headedsomewhere.com/2012/08/16/throwback-thursday-twiggy/