Tag Archives: fashion

Beauty, Fashion, and Architecture: Diseases Change Worlds

Laurie and Debbie say:

Emily Mullin wrote “How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion” for Smithsonian Magazine in 2016. It’s not a big jump to figure out why this article is reappearing now.

Despite the title, Mullin’s article covers not just fashion but also the underlying conceptions of beauty (all in Great Britain and the United States).

“Between 1780 and 1850, there is an increasing aestheticization of tuberculosis that becomes entwined with feminine beauty,” says Carolyn Day, an assistant professor of history at Furman University in South Carolina and author of  … Consumptive Chic: A History of Fashion, Beauty, and Disease, which explores how tuberculosis impacted early 19th century British fashion and perceptions of beauty. …

Among the upper class, one of the ways people judged a woman’s predisposition to tuberculosis was by her attractiveness, Day says. “That’s because tuberculosis enhances those things that are already established as beautiful in women,” she explains, such as the thinness and pale skin that result from weight loss and the lack of appetite caused by the disease.

Without having read Day’s book, we’re not completely sure that thinness was such a strong standard of beauty pre-TB, but TB was certainly a factor in fixing the equivalence of being thin and fragile with being beautiful.

Clothing trrends weren’t exempt

“We also begin to see elements in fashion that either highlight symptoms of the disease or physically emulate the illness,” Day says. The height of this so-called consumptive chic came in the mid-1800s, when fashionable pointed corsets showed off low, waifish waists and voluminous skirts further emphasized women’s narrow middles. Middle- and upper-class women also attempted to emulate the consumptive appearance by using makeup to lighten their skin, redden their lips and color their cheeks pink.

Then as now, women in danger of dying will be considered beautiful as long as their dying appearance can be made aesthetic. Women can be socially rewarded for looking like they are dying when they are healthy. We saw this again in the emergence of “heroin chic” in the early 1990s.

For a foray away from personal appearance and fashion into the built environment, listen to the “Body Meets World” segment of the July 24, 2020 episode of On the Media, which uses the fresh-air cure attempts and the tuberculosis sanitarium to provide context for the changes in architecture provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and then speculates on the architectural changes which COVID-19 calls for, to allow for ventilation, social distancing, and alternatives to crowds.

COVID-19 is already affecting our buildings, our streets, and our parks. Because the virus does not have a consistent or beautifying effect on people’s appearance (as tuberculosis did), it seems unlikely to deeply affect general standards of beauty. We can already see how it is affecting fashion–primarily in the way masks are becoming personal statements. From the masks at Black Lives Matter protests saying “I Can’t Breathe” to the fringed and bejeweled masks matching outfits, to solid colors or tiger stripes, we choose the items we use every day to make us feel like ourselves, and to present ourselves to the world. Some high-fashion runway models — whatever form the runway returns in — will sport extreme masks, possibly very wide or very high, and certainly very remarkable.

Plagues have shaped cultures for all of human history: watching this happen is both gruesome and compelling.

 

 

Melania Trump: The Language of Fashion Obscures the Real Story

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Laurie and Debbie say:

Far too much attention has been paid to Melania Trump’s stiletto heels as  inappropriate attire for floodwater. Writing at The Cut, Rhonda Garelick makes a much more important point about the First Lady’s presentation:

The problem is not that Melania Trump wore an unsuitable, blithely out-of-touch outfit, although she did. The problem is that this administration turns every event — no matter how dire — into a kind of anesthetized luxury fashion shoot, which leads us to some disturbing political truths. …

[Fashion] photos exist to cast the fetishizing spell of the commodity over us. They create, that is, a dissociative relationship with the viewer. And while Melania Trump was known to have been somewhat stiff as a model, she has clearly mastered that squinty, middle-distance gaze, which she regularly employs as First Lady.

The camera lies, even before the Photoshop manipulation begins. The  person being photographed and the photographer have a vast array of decisions to make, decisions that can humanize or commodify, that can create intimacy or invoke power, that can equalize or separate.

Photographs of Donald Trump veer between the two. He isn’t any good at humanizing himself. Nor do his photographers often seem to have that in mind. Still, he has a certain level of wanting to be, or seem to be, Everyman, and there are pictures of him that convey that desire. But the women in his family, and the women in his administration, never cross that gap. They are always the (mythical) unavailable woman of Everyman’s dreams, the woman too desirable to be attainable, too arrogant to be the least bit interested in anything around her.

Here’s Garelick’s conclusion:

On Tuesday, this meant that instead of being a supporting presence in the president’s trip to survey flood damage, Melania became the star and the trip morphed into a simulacrum, a kind of Vogue shoot “simulating” a president’s trip. In other words, the realness of everyone and everything else (including hurricane victims) faded and the evacuated blankness of the commercial overtook the scene.

And this is how something as apparently trivial as women’s style reveals a profound truth at the heart of this administration and its relationship to America’s citizens: It is as dissociative as a fashion advertisement, brought to power by manipulating and rechanneling the electorate’s desires for wealth and possessions. This truth seeps out of every photographed occasion, including and especially those featuring the Trump women.