I've been thinking a lot lately about what body style the fashion industry has been pushing in recent years, that very, very skinny and elongated body type. Some of those models look like normal people that have been stretched until they are about 25% taller than they should be for their width. Some of those girls (actually, a lot of those girls) look downright freaky. Almost no one looks like that in real life. It is a very unnatural set of proportions for any woman. That the fashion industry has managed to round up the 50 Caucasian girls and a token few Asians and Black girls with those proportions to populate the runways and dominate the fashion mags is freaking amazing. I've never seen anyone with those proportions on the street in my life, and I'm sure I've seen millions and millions of people in my years. All of this leaves anyone looking at a fashion mag promoting the current aesthetic horribly depressed. Even if we could afford the clothes, they won't come in our size and, even if you are a size 0, you probably still aren't 6 feet tall, 115 lbs with 32 inch hips and no shoulders or breasts, so the clothes would never look like the image that you are presented with in the magazines or on the runway. It seems to be a conspiracy by fashion designers and the promotional arm of the industry (i.e., the fashion media) to promote a universal feeling of inadequacy, despondency, and self-hatred about how you, as a woman, look. If you buy into what they are trying to sell you (literally and figuratively), about all you can hope to purchase are some horribly overpriced accessories from the season's trendy designers and sign up for plastic surgery, lipo, gym memberships and mostly worthless cosmetic products, none of which, no matter how hard you try and how much money you spend, will ever have you looking like a model and able to wear the current fashions. When are women going to show some self-respect and let the industry know that we have had ENOUGH? When are we going to keep that plastic in our wallets when presented with trends that flatter almost no one? When will we see that we are buying an image of ourselves, as fashioned by this industry, that is distorted and sick and has no more basis in reality than most of the clothes that grace the runways? Why aren't women smart enough where fashion is concerned to take control of their own image and use fashion to promote their personal image rather than letting the fashion industry continue to use them? Women are smart enough to be CEOs of companies worldwide and some even run entire countries, so why can't they be smarter about fashion? (stay tuned for my upcoming blog on the idiocy of fall shoes, at least as proposed by the fashion industry)

i love it.