Chances are, when you think of models on the runway, a certain image of rows of tall, slender women strutting down and back comes to mind.
Perhaps many of them are even blonde and white women who easily come to mind. While that is not a representative image for the entire community, it is a common stereotypical body type associated with fashion from years of images on television, magazines, and other media.
Northwest Arkansas Fall Fashion Week challenged that very image with its choice of themes and representation of all body types, skin colors and genders on its stage. The day-long event of panel discussions and parades was held at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art on November 12.
Speakers that day addressed the changing landscape of clothing choices across genders, the influence of diverse cultures on American fashion, body positivity and neutrality, conventional beauty standards and how to change them, sustainability in fashion, and much more during the afternoon, before the catwalk. shows
PINK OR BLUE
If you’ve ever wondered why little boys traditionally dress in blue and girls in pink, you’re not alone.
Aubrey Costello, local queer fashion and costume designer, and Lisa Corrigan, Ph.D., professor of communication and director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Arkansas, kicked off the events for Fall Fashion Week at the NWA with this same theme: first by recognizing the existence of gender regimes.
Gender regimes are the many ways that gender affects the way we live, work, and interact with others. Corrigan described that gender regimes have structural levels, which means that there are cultural expectations around gender; as well as at institutional levels, causing people to behave in certain gender normative ways in families, church settings or workplaces.
Of course, the ways in which the two levels intersect are very personal, he said.
“There are different expectations at different times in history about how bodies are supposed to dress in different spaces,” Corrigan said.
In the modern era, the genre became a hot topic around the 1950s, just after World War II. That’s no coincidence, Corrigan said. The result of the war was what scholars refer to as “agency panic.”
“There was a big push to define something that was gender normal,” she said. “All the psychological literature, the business literature, the political literature of the postwar period is about what it is to become normal: what are normal behaviors, what are normal bodies, how we dress to make ourselves understood.”
Children’s clothing in particular is a way to map the anxiety of particular cultures at certain times, Corrigan said. The agency panic was a way of dealing with the trauma of war and its aftermath, and its result was to produce compliance.
Before this time, children wore the same thing as babies. Both boys and girls wore white dresses up to a certain age.
Costello added that the uniformity of dressing all children in white dresses up to a certain age was purely economic, making it cheaper and easier to dress children.
Once boys reached the typical age for colorful clothing, boys were assigned red as a symbol of masculinity and struggle, while girls wore light blue or other pastels.
“That changed in the middle of the century,” Corrigan said. “The fact that this hasn’t always been the case tells us that colors, clothing, and our expectations of bodies change over time.”
The emergence of other toddler clothing began as luxury items, so dressing them differently became a status symbol, Costello said. It became a major milestone when a boy received his first pair of pants, the last gender assignment at the time.
As Corrigan and Costello spoke, a few models took the stage, showing off Costello’s Spring 2023 collection, which they described as Art Nouveau with designs purposefully crafted so as not to be limited to a particular body type. Costello said they are inspired by fashion revivals, particularly the medievalism of the late 1960s.
The 1960s were an exciting time for changes in fashion, both say, as the feminist movement gave way to more androgynous looks for women, more pants, suits, etc., and more peacock for men, in where clothes were suddenly available in many more styles. colors and patterns and more detail oriented than before.
Costello is hopeful that current fashion will continue to move away from the binary and stop conceptualizing androgynous clothing as “light masculinity.” They noted that 21st century black drag queens laid the foundation for transgender clothing to eventually become a recognizable category.
Corrigan noted that the continued existence of anti-trans panic in the US is a dangerous part of the current climate.
“That’s scary because it’s really about policing bodies and punishing bodies for the way they move through the world,” he said.
Costello agreed, saying the same kind of thinking could lead to further alienation of people with disabilities, the elderly, or anyone outside of the narrow definition of “normal.”
BEAUTY STANDARDS
What is conventional western beauty and where does it come from? That’s the question that sparked a conversation between Walmart Beauty’s Sonia Spinx and Jess Whalen, filmmaker and storyteller, about quietly agreed upon beauty markers in the worlds of fashion, cosmetics, and screen.
In Spinx’s mind, it has a lot to do with your upbringing.
“It’s just important to challenge the things that people tell us, especially when it comes to beauty,” Spinx said. “It’s such a personal and authentic connection to the people of the world and the things you care about…and it’s also a way to make a lot of money.”
Start with what you listen to as a kid, Spinx said. What your mothers, teachers, and other influential people say about your appearance stays with you and sets the stage for your understanding of what beauty is in your life.
Whalen said she gets a lot of messages about beauty standards being judged by who makes it to the big screen. Even if she has strong inner voices promoting her unique personal beauty, that may not be enough to drown out the underlying message in the media of what people want to see.
“On the movie-making side, from the media, a lot of that voice of who’s worth seeing or playing the lead character in a movie, of wearing that look in the commercial or the photos in a magazine is a skinny, blonde cis gender binary appropriate person and only dressed a certain way,” she said.
Those messages are reinforced, for example, when larger sizes aren’t available in stores, or are priced at a higher price, sending a not-so-subtle message that the shopper may not be as worthy of wearing a given item, Whalen said. .
He urged the audience to think about the way those decisions are made in the larger system, which eventually comes down to the people in power. Those who have the money to commission parts or make marketing decisions for a company have biases that eventually become known as a standard ideal shape or appearance.
Spinx agreed that representation of all kinds is necessary for people to feel comfortable, beautiful, and worthwhile no matter what they’re buying or wearing to influence their appearance.
For example, in a recent photo decision to market boxes of hair dye to Walmart customers, he noticed that the hair images had textures common only to white people. Simply including images of all hair types and textures can make more customers feel like the product is for them.
“Just the ability to really transform how you look, to exude how you feel, connects people to you,” Spinx said. “We have a voice to hope that great companies and brands on Instagram reflect the things that make us feel better and worthy and recognize us as the beautiful, authentic person we want to see in ourselves and others, and not just Kate. Moses of the world.”
INTERFORM’s Model Citizen campaign led Northwest Arkansas Fashion Week in the fall of 2022. The campaign used its platform to promote civic engagement ahead of roundtables and runway shows by highlighting information and opportunities around model registration. voters and education. (Courtesy photo)
Speakers at NWAFW addressed the changing landscape of clothing choices for genders, the influence of diverse cultures on American fashion, body positivity and neutrality, conventional beauty standards and how to change them, sustainability in fashion, and much more. . (Courtesy photo)
Source: news.google.com