Fashion's ultimate insult to women: The latest way of demeaning real women is a male model dressed as a girlBy Amanda Platell
Last updated at 1:42 AM on 25th February 2011
For years now the debate has raged over size zero models, yet each year they became skinnier and less like women. No breasts, no curves, so desiccated by starvation they’d be unable to have a child even if they wanted to.
They became utterly defeminised.
But by whom? Real women started to love their curves long before Christina Hendricks wowed the world in Mad Men with hers. And by all accounts men love them, too.
So who drove this obsession to strip women of their femininity?
It was an edict by the fashion mafia — buyers, trend-setters, photographers, but especially the designers. They decreed that to look good in their creations a model couldn’t look like a woman.
She had to be flat-chested, devoid of hips, with collarbones you could hook a clothes hanger on. In fact, she has to look less like a woman and more like a boy.Size zero turned out to be an apt term as the most feted designers, mostly brilliant gay men, effectively tried to squeeze women out of the fashion equation. And now they have.Who could have predicted that the ultimate solution to the Size Zero Debate would be Zero Woman. Because that’s exactly what we have with London and New York Fashion Weeks, and Couture Week in Paris.
The new darling of the catwalk is a man. The Serbian-born model of female beauty is an androgynous lad of 19 from Melbourne.
With his long blond hair, huge almond-shaped eyes, Angelina Jolie lips and a body as flat as a surfboard, Andrej Pejic is the toast of women’s high fashion the world over.
A beautiful teenager with the face of a girl and the body of a boy — the perfect expression of beauty for these top fashion designers.
It’s the ultimate in woman hating, to create a half-man, half-woman creature because the girls are simply not up to the job. They’re too, let’s face it boys, womanly, even when they’ve been starved to within an inch of their lives.
What an act of abject misogyny.This betrayal of women has been brewing in the fashion world for decades now. People point to the Sixties and Twiggy, the skinniest model in the entire universe, but she was a one-off, not a trend-setter.
Most women then would still have wanted the perfect hourglass figures of Ava Gardner or Jane Russell. And so would their men.
No, the obsession with models who looked like boys really took hold in September 2006 when a 22-year-old model collapsed at the Milan shows after stepping off the stage.
For months Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos had fasted and drunk virtually nothing to reach her target weight —she weighed less than 9st at 5ft 9in. She had the body mass index of a teenager ten years younger.
Another model, Brazilian Ana Carolina Reston, died shortly afterwards. The 21-year-old was 5ft 8in and weighed just over 6st when she died.
But like many models, to work and keep the body shape required by the designers and the bookers, Luisel had to fight nature with starvation, with slimming pills, with laxatives — anything and everything to stay skinny.
You would have thought that would have been a wake-up call for the fashion industry but no, the designers wanted them even thinner — as demonstrated this week when Samantha Cameron sat in the front row of the Erdem show at London Fashion Week, watching a pair of chopsticks walking down the catwalk.
Chloe Memisevic, the model, was so thin she did not have an ounce of fat on her body. Caved in cheekbones, arms — if you’ll forgive the analogy — that belonged to a concentration camp survivor.
I was at London Fashion Week and I saw some of the women for myself. In the flesh they look even more hideously gaunt, legs without a defining muscle on them, knees that knock together as they walk, chests devoid of any femininity save the occasional pert nipple.
How did we ever get to the stage where we allowed a small group of designers — however talented — to determine that this is what is beautiful in a woman?So step by step the elite of mostly gay designers has been creating catwalk designs for pre-pubescent teenagers, and each year wanting models who looked less and less like women.
And the ridiculous thing is no woman can maintain a body mass index of around 18 — which is what a tall woman needs to look like a skeleton — without abusing their body.
The designers were wanting women to look more and more like young men. That, I am afraid, is the uncomfortable truth. So it was not a big step for them to start replacing women with teenage boys then, was it?
And so step forward Andrej Pejic. And
in what must be the ultimate misogynist’s in-joke, his explosive arrival on the elite fashion scene was at Couture Week in Paris last month when he was chosen by Jean Paul Gaultier to wear his show-stopping, semi-see-through wedding dress.The bride with no breasts and a lunchbox was more like the bride of Frankenstein. You’d have thought the one walk-on part a woman could have in a designer’s fantasy was as a blushing bride.
Don’t get me wrong. Andrej does not look like some Soho drag queen. Quite the contrary. The 19-year-old Australian is beautiful. He is clever too.
The son of an economist father and lawyer mother, he eventually aims to go into law himself. But he is still a fake. One of his admirers recently commented that he was beloved in the fashion industry because he is ‘so at home in his own skin’.
Nonsense. He’s at home in a woman’s skin.
The truth is, it doesn’t have to be like this. As Andrej was having his Brazilian wax in preparation for his catwalk appearances, the designer Roland Mouret was quietly opening a huge salon at 8 Carlos Place in Mayfair.
It owes its existence to a dress he designed some years ago — the Galaxy. He has been a phenomenal success because he understood that women have curves they can’t do much about and men by and large like them, especially when they can be transformed from a muffin-top waistline into Marilyn Monroe.
And this as Mad Men shoots another series, mainly off the bosom of Hendricks, and Debenhams reports a 225 per cent sales increase in clothes that give women hourglass figures.
Even the original stick insect Victoria Beckham has jumped on the real woman bandwagon and designed her entire range around feminine curves.
It is not all hopeless. I went to the designer Amanda Wakeley’s show and was moved almost to tears (very uncool I’m told) by the most sublimely beautiful clothes unashamedly designed for women.
They nipped in waists, complemented curves and celebrated cleavage. Andrej would have looked a right twit in them.
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