Eye massage anyone?
Perfect Christmas gift for anyone you happen to know who has eyes. Here for more
posted by UK plc at 5:15 PM
1 comments
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Saturday, December 11, 2004
Shapewear
Thankfully, efforts to return Britain to Victorian family values are unlikely to be taken too seriously outside the Daily Mail for the time being, and the Home Secretary probably won't want to make too big a thing of it for a while. (For the last 3 years, see "Blunkwatch" in the current Private Eye.) Not everyone is safe from the spectre of the last century, though, and things look especially precarious if you have the misfortune of being female.
If £5000 seems a bit pricey for a wrist-watch, then you can be pretty confident the FT Weekend section is not aimed at you. Nonetheless, developments in clothing fashion tend to trickle down through the income/class filters so that styles currently the preserve of the improbably wealthy are to be found not long after for consumption even by the lumpenproletariat, from outlets like TK Max or H&M...
Any ladies out there not fortunate enough to have an abdomen constructed out of an elastic but solid material (reinforced aluminum might do it I suppose) ought to beware of the return of the corset, masquerading under the decidedly un-Victorian guise of "shapewear" [sic].
For the coolest kids, this is nothing new, apparently; the FT's reporter claims to have been "hooked" on "shapewear" since 1990. "It's a great trick," Gwyneth Paltrow is reported to have said. So am I worried about nothing in particular? And am I two decades too late, are we already at the point of no return for the mass-marketing of shapewear?
Maybe, but this seems like another step in a particularly disturbing direction, forming a general trend that seems to have some Victorian roots, but also with very modern charecteristics. The trend is an increasing divergence between aesthetics and nature. Perhaps humans have never really been happy with our natural form, and consumerism gives us more power to alter it than we had before. Rather predictably, though, the more we're able to alter our natural form, the more we aspire to taking a form ever more different from our natural one.
Shapewear "sucks women in like sausage casing" apparently; "It is a compression garment, so by definition you are being squeezed" says Maurice Reznik, the president of Maidenform, a US company which is trying to flog it; Reznik goes on: "in shapewear, function is critical - a woman has to make some comfort compromises to have an hourglass figure."
Birkenstocks aside, I have never heard of a man wearing shoes that make his feet bleed because they look "good." I cannot imagine even the most comitted metrosexual altering the shape of his body, enduring long term pain and (one imagines) risking serious long-term spinal damage in the interests of looking "good." And yet for women to do these things goes entirely unnoticed.
If conceptions of female beauty - on the part of both men and women - diverge any further from the real world, then the consequences could be seriously dire. We are beginning to move in to a realm where women are expected not only to change the surface of their bodies (to remove any trace of the existence of hair from anywhere except the head, ensure their skin is uniform all over - no blotches, no blemishes, no spots) in order to look something like this (even for the committed supermodel, this is impossible without the aid of computers, but girls, you are to aspire to it anyway; also, anyone aroused by something this synthetic is likely to have more fun on their own in Madame Tussauds than they possibly could with a woman) to a position in which women are expected to change the +shape+ of their bodies in order to achieve the right "look". Nothing compared to implants for lips, breasts or arses, you might say, and in some ways you'd be right. But moving beyond gratuitous plastic surgery is a crucial step in normalilsing it.
Feminism isn't fashionable any more, but even those committed to having women focussing on how they look should be concerned, because it seems to me that the further away one moves from nature, the more the appeal declines.
If £5000 seems a bit pricey for a wrist-watch, then you can be pretty confident the FT Weekend section is not aimed at you. Nonetheless, developments in clothing fashion tend to trickle down through the income/class filters so that styles currently the preserve of the improbably wealthy are to be found not long after for consumption even by the lumpenproletariat, from outlets like TK Max or H&M...
Any ladies out there not fortunate enough to have an abdomen constructed out of an elastic but solid material (reinforced aluminum might do it I suppose) ought to beware of the return of the corset, masquerading under the decidedly un-Victorian guise of "shapewear" [sic].
For the coolest kids, this is nothing new, apparently; the FT's reporter claims to have been "hooked" on "shapewear" since 1990. "It's a great trick," Gwyneth Paltrow is reported to have said. So am I worried about nothing in particular? And am I two decades too late, are we already at the point of no return for the mass-marketing of shapewear?
Maybe, but this seems like another step in a particularly disturbing direction, forming a general trend that seems to have some Victorian roots, but also with very modern charecteristics. The trend is an increasing divergence between aesthetics and nature. Perhaps humans have never really been happy with our natural form, and consumerism gives us more power to alter it than we had before. Rather predictably, though, the more we're able to alter our natural form, the more we aspire to taking a form ever more different from our natural one.
Shapewear "sucks women in like sausage casing" apparently; "It is a compression garment, so by definition you are being squeezed" says Maurice Reznik, the president of Maidenform, a US company which is trying to flog it; Reznik goes on: "in shapewear, function is critical - a woman has to make some comfort compromises to have an hourglass figure."
Birkenstocks aside, I have never heard of a man wearing shoes that make his feet bleed because they look "good." I cannot imagine even the most comitted metrosexual altering the shape of his body, enduring long term pain and (one imagines) risking serious long-term spinal damage in the interests of looking "good." And yet for women to do these things goes entirely unnoticed.
If conceptions of female beauty - on the part of both men and women - diverge any further from the real world, then the consequences could be seriously dire. We are beginning to move in to a realm where women are expected not only to change the surface of their bodies (to remove any trace of the existence of hair from anywhere except the head, ensure their skin is uniform all over - no blotches, no blemishes, no spots) in order to look something like this (even for the committed supermodel, this is impossible without the aid of computers, but girls, you are to aspire to it anyway; also, anyone aroused by something this synthetic is likely to have more fun on their own in Madame Tussauds than they possibly could with a woman) to a position in which women are expected to change the +shape+ of their bodies in order to achieve the right "look". Nothing compared to implants for lips, breasts or arses, you might say, and in some ways you'd be right. But moving beyond gratuitous plastic surgery is a crucial step in normalilsing it.
Feminism isn't fashionable any more, but even those committed to having women focussing on how they look should be concerned, because it seems to me that the further away one moves from nature, the more the appeal declines.
posted by UK plc at 4:50 PM
1 comments