Now, the catwalk fashion industry might say, "But we don't sell clothes to those people", and maybe they don't. Not directly. But the $1000 designer-label business is a tiny fraction of the whole, and they're dismissing a huge market.

Actually, I found the penthouse apartment funniest.

I knew the fashion world is bizarre and detached from reality and the sort of people who actually wear clothes, but this is really weird.

Love the youtube video. Somebody should make one for Slashdot...

Kelly

"[Author] says the joke is that there has never been a major women's fashion designer who was actually attracted to women.

"No. The joke is that there was one: Coco Chanelle."

and lazy and greedy, which is kind of a humorous thing for someone who's been making a living wearing clothes for her entire adult life to say perched atop Rod Stewart's alimony checks.

"The drive-in will never die!"
- Joe Bob Briggs

Neat links.

The problem is when people start seeing "two wire coathangers" as a standard of beauty.

(Well, maybe the Parisian designers are as well. But they're not Chuck Schumer's constituency.)

I suspect it's related, somehow, to class. Thin is in when the poor are plumper than average (as in America today). When the poor are starving curvy girls become the rage.

Of course these fashions may depend a lot on the audience. I suspect (although have no real evidence) that fashion models are thinner than, say, the models in (male heterosexual) pornography, partly perhaps because the audiences have different standards of beauty.

Unless GrandOpening has something else arranged, they're likely to get a visit from The Law.

(Yes, I know Cory et al. might disapprove--and I might join him on the barricades, at least phosophordotically--but current law remains current law.)

I really hate the fashion industry some times.

I've always felt that it was Grossly Unfair that so many talented fanartists were also excellent fanwriters, when I'd have happily settled for being either, but I suppose it has something to do with (graphic) Artists needing to both see and understand things.

Have any of you ever seen a fashion designer's sketchpad? I remember being struck by how freakishly proportioned their (theoretically ideal) models were: eight or nine heads tall, with waists about half the width of their hips. No wonder they pick such inhuman-looking models--they're just trying to match their vision as closely as possible! Maybe our fashion industry's ills could be alleviated by something as simple as requiring life-drawing and anatomy classes for all Fashion majors.

But I suppose the point is that the catwalk-design phenomenon is pretty firmly divorced from the real-people-wearing-clothes phenomenon.

Maybe our fashion industry's ills could be alleviated by something as simple as requiring life-drawing and anatomy classes for all Fashion majors.

it's more insidious than mere ignorance. they teach you in fashion illustration not to use the generally accepted rules of figure drawing. the instructors/textbooks will tell you right out: adult humans are eight heads tall, fashion figures are ten.

(i always objected to the "eight heads tall" rule anyhow; it seems to be suffering from the six-foot-man curse discussed here not long ago. i think it's better to just draw a lot of people from life until you get a feel for it.)

I'm cursed?

I'm cursed?

you are cursed, serge! with PRIVILEGE!

The privilege of growing up banging my head against the pipes hanging from the basement's ceiling.

Bonk!

*Though that kind of rule is still helpful when a drawing is just looking inexplicably weird and you can't figure out why. So thanks!

* Actually it's the legs and arms not matching with the body that's my real problem. Being, um, 6'5", I always had a tendency to add a bit of extra height to figures I drew.

In that interview, Jen Hunter talks about being so tall that men are generally not interested in her. I have an impression that tallness is much less of a detriment for women than it used to be.

Am I just plain wrong? Right about the US, but it doesn't apply in Britain? Women get more slack for tallness but 6' (or possibly 5' 11") is Just Too Much?

I think you're right, as it seems to me that the tall women I know are less ignored by men than they used to be. It's hard for me to tell though, because height in women has never been a problem for me, and I have trouble understanding how that problem affects the way men see women.

I think everyone's going at this backwards. What should be happening is that you get someone Rubens-sized in life class, and then there is the assignment "design clothes for *this* woman", and oh by the way, you must also make them stylish.

(Actually, there's a lot of stuff that could/would look good on rounder women, but the current red-carpet favorite of silk charmeuse draped tightly across the belly--see one of the pictures in the link--just is not it.)

Sorry for the tennis references! Just can't help myself, at least until the baseball playoffs begin.

oops. i am probably wrong, then. i just knew that there was a "rule," & then fashion illustration had a "rule", which was like two heads taller. it's probably six and eight, then. didn't bother to look it up; i'm sorry.

like i said, i don't use the rule anyhow. also, i'm no good with numbers.

Now with LOL catz...

In all seriousness, this is why I will never, ever get rid of my old Mode magazines...

Does any man think these walking skeletons are appealing?

Does any man think these walking skeletons are appealing?

i think we can deplore the treatment, & appreciate the beauty, of jen hunter without resorting to epithets against people with other body shapes.

on the one hand, i don't think it really discourages anorexia or the temptation towards anorexia. on the other hand, i think it is needlessly hurtful towards people who happen to be skinny.

(i'm comfortably sitting on the upper range of "not overweight," but my dad has almost no visible fat on him. he's built that way & it's healthy for him, but it doesn't stop random people from making moronic, offensive comments about his body.)

Speaking as a tall woman (six feet tall when I'm barefoot) who is in her mid-twenties, being tall is no advantage in some areas. One of those areas is romance, particularly when one is younger. I had most of my adult height when I was 13. High school was a date-free wasteland. In all fairness, I was an introvert with a large vocabulary and a volume of T.S. Eliot in her backpack. Even if I had been six inches shorter, I probably would still have been too scary for most of the guys I knew.

It seems to be a general rule that the older my male peers get, the more attractive they find me. I attribute this to growing confidence on their part. Another observable pattern, men who are around my height tend to find me more intimidating than either shorter men or very tall men. (Though there are exceptions to both these rules -- one of the longer running relationships in my past was with a man an inch shorter than me, and the current guy is three years my junior, though he is five inches taller.)

Finally, the only remotely appealing quality about Gaius Baltar is that he carries on a relationship with a woman several inches taller than he is.

Using the ten-pounds-per-inch-of-height standard, you weighing 178 is like me weighing 128.

I would need to be hospitalized for malnutrition.

Yes, I'd say you're skinny. Not as scary-skinny as C. was at 16, but then teenagers aren't constructed like adults (they have much less bone mass, for one thing—perhaps that also explains why you're not in the hospital at a build that would be dangerously underweight for me; I have fairly massive bones).

Sniff... My only consolation is that Hugh Jackman is almost as skinny when he's not beefing up to play what's-his-name that TexAnne likes to see shirtless.

One of the things that happens a lot in discussions of women's body shapes and size acceptance is that people (and it's not always men, either) will come in and start talking about "REAL women" vs. "sticks with tits" and stuff like that. Now, this is usually intended to be complimentary toward women like me, but in the process it comes out sounding just as nasty and hateful toward women who are naturally slender as descriptions like "pig" or "cow" are to large women. Those of us who have heard this happen over and over again tend to develop a bit of a twitch about it.

Everybody has personal preferences, there's nothing wrong with that. Just... go easy on the disparaging language, okay? "Size acceptance" IMO means for skinny women too.

As to whose aesthetics are supposed to be pleased, I'd say it's those of the fashion designers, who demonstrably don't inhabit the same reality as the rest of us!

Torn out nose, ripped up clothes,
Zombie yes sir! one of those.
Has anybody seen my girl?

Now if you run into, a six foot three,
Covered with fur,
Werewolf claws and razor-sharp teeth,
Bethcha' life it isn't her.
But could she munch? Could she devour?
Slurp my brains like a whiskey sour?
Has anybody seen my girl?

(repeat)

I'm not sure I'd describe Serge as skinny. He's actually filed under "muscular but not bulky" in my mental tagging system.

He sounds like Christopher Lambert, though that isn't really germane to this discussion.

I like the sound of that. Meanwhile, here is how my 5-year-old nephew sees me. I also like the Kryptonian "S".

So ordinarily I wouldn't approach matters from this angle at all. It's just that it seems weird to me that since the point is to present the clothes attractively, one would deliberately prefer a figure that calls attention to itself as being ill-suited for the display.

I would point out another dynamic in play here: that men are both more and less interested in female appearance than women would have them be. The end result is that under rigorously controlled laboratory conditions it is impossible for a man to say the right thing about how a woman looks unless she feels like it.

I think that was what I was getting at in #39: the clothes should be designed for the women, rather than using women that don't fit the clothes.

I guess I shouldn't have strapped her down on an operating table, with electrodes attached to her neck and a death-ray projector aimed at her forehead, while I exclaimed "It's alive! It's alive!"

I'd bet that most fashion designers have taken life drawing classes. I know from personal experience that Cartooning majors at the School of Visual Arts take life drawing as a freshman year requirement, but that doesn't insure that their cartoons have accurate anatomy later in their careers.

I'm not sure, but the head might have been in addition to this, which is then in line with Avram. I do remember from reading "So you want to draw SUPERHEROES!" or similar in a doctor's waiting room that 8 or even 9 heads is good if you're trying to create some kind of generic X-Men clone**.

* Or maybe our standards of perfection, as promulgated by my art teacher
** That's the look of the superheroes you'd come up with rather than the content of the plot.

Don't forget that the camera is widely rumored to add ten pounds to what you see in the mirror.

"Au cabaret! To the cabaret!"

Very dashing! You don't look nearly terrifyingly skinny.

When I first started going to my gym, there was a digital scale with three settings: kg, lb, and sts. It took me quite a while to figure out what sts were.

I just stumbled across some broken links on the website, and I didn't know who to notify. Do you think you could help me out?

Thanks,

Jessica
[Email address deleted -- JDM]

It would be surprising if there weren't broken links after six years.

I'll be happy to help you, though, if you tell me whether you write poetry.

(I've deleted your email address from your comment. Too many spammers out there....)