“Everybody’s beautiful, in their own way,” the Grammy-winning
but ungrammatical Ray Stevens sang back in 1970. A lovely sentiment, but to say
that everyone is beautiful means that
no one is beautiful. I think even
Stevens knew this, which is why he added the wishy-washy disclaimer, “in their
own way.” The harsh truth is that every culture has a standard of physical beauty
against which all are judged. In our time, the fashion industry is under fire for
pushing an impossible standard, but the truth is more complicated than that.
Hoping to whip up outrage over the industry’s photographic manipulation
of the female form, the radical feminists at Jezebel recently offered $10,000
for Vogue’s unretouched photos of Girls star Lena Dunham from a recent
shoot. Someone wasted no time forking them over, and Jezebel used them to
deconstruct the magazine’s artful depictions of Dunham, who is notoriously
dumpy by Paris runway standards.
But Jezebel miscalculated: first, people are no longer
ignorant of or shocked by the orgies of Photoshopping that go on in fashion
magazine editorial offices; second, Dunham herself was pleased with the results;
and third, its obsession with highlighting Dunham’s imperfections painted Jezebel
in a worse light than Vogue. In the
article’s comments section, readers overwhelmingly condemned Jezebel for making
a mountain out of a molehill.
In her response
to the fizzled controversy, Dunham no doubt ruffled feminist feathers further
by rolling out an inconvenient truth:
A fashion magazine is like a
beautiful fantasy. Vogue isn't the place that we go to look at realistic
women, Vogue is the place that we go to look at beautiful clothes and
fancy places and escapism and so I feel like if the story reflects me and I
happen to be wearing a beautiful Prada dress and surrounded by beautiful men
and dogs, what's the problem? If they want to see what I really look like go
watch the show that I make every single week.
“Yes, Vogue is fantasy,” Jezebel shot back,
but no matter how fantastic the
clothes or the setting or the lighting, the people in these images are
real — and yet Vogue has to take the reality of a human being's body and
make it part of the fantasy too. It's escapism, absolutely, but the message is
clear: while you dream of wearing that gorgeous dress, you should also dream of
physical perfection as defined by Vogue.
Slate’s Katy Waldman agreed,
finding Dunham’s justification “not terribly persuasive”: “[W]hile lady mags do
purvey luxuriant escape, there’s no reason why their dreams of ‘beautiful
clothes and fancy places’ must also feature punishing, unnatural body
norms. Why is that the fantasy?”
That is the fantasy because women fantasize not merely about
luxuriating in beautiful clothes and
fancy places, but about being
beautiful themselves as well. As Dunham suggested, “realistic” women don’t want
to see themselves in haute couture; they want to see their idealized selves in haute couture, which is why the industry’s tentative efforts to use
“realistic” women in advertising have met with mixed results at best. This is
simply human nature, not fashion industry brainwashing, and it goes for men as
well, which is why the “unnatural body norm” of David Beckham is a successful male
model and a “realistic” guy like, say, Jonah Hill is not.
But Lena Dunham’s point is also well taken: the industry creates
fantasies in which we are complicit because we enjoy them, because they inspire
us, because we yearn for beauty even when it is unattainable. Some may dream of
an egalitarian time when standards of beauty will be so inclusive that everybody’s
beautiful, as Ray Stevens sang; but meanwhile, rather than march on Vogue with torches and pitchforks, let
us enjoy the fashion fantasy while refusing to be enslaved by it.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 1/23/14)
