WHAT about that poor girl who cut off her own circulation in a pair of skinny jeans and couldn’t walk for four days? Just another fashion casualty eliciting no sympathy whatsoever? Or a silent wave of guilt-ridden empathy from us veterans who’ve soldiered in fashion’s wars (and bear the scars) to whom comfort is the last consideration so long as we look well.
The true fashion victim is the one who’ll espouse any trend however ugly or outré, whether or not it suits her. Which accounts for the current high visibility quotient of female hips and thighs vacuum-packed like Christmas hams into skintight denim or leggings.
For many it’s only a policy of containment, but “better out of the world than out of the fashion”. Watch the young ones, all shapes and sizes, stagger out of nightclubs in vertiginous heels, bandage-wrapped in ‘bodycon’ dresses, “… like a mass exodus from A and E,” the Loving Spouse described it.
Watch the 50-plus female fall into the ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ trap. “I’ll risk the short skirt,” she muses. “The legs are still good.” Good, but sinewy or lacking muscle tone.
The sleeveless top reveals the dreaded bingo-wings, the tight trousers create the muffin-top waist. There comes a point when, (unless you’re Joan Collins) suggestion is wiser than statement and a policy of concealment is best under a garment that bypasses everything without stopping on the way down.
Nature is crueler to woman than men. Grey hair and crinkly eyes are roguishly attractive in George Clooney. On women they declare ‘past sell by date’.
There’s no woman so perfect that she doesn’t feel the original design can’t be improved upon. Riddled with self-doubt about our appearance, we obsess over the bits of ourselves that deviate from the ever-changing criteria of beauty. In my day, our elders briskly informed us, “Get over yourself. There’ll be nobody looking at you anyway.”
Now, it’s called ‘body dysmorphia’ and you can get counselling for it. Life’s so unfair. Almost everything that enhances a woman’s face and figure turns out to be a health hazard. From hair-dye to high heels, from cosmetics to corsetry, we’re irrevocably damaging ourselves.
It was ever thus. In the hokey-cokey history of women’s fashion, bust, waists and hips went in and out of vogue and, whatever our natural shape, we meekly and often painfully accommodated ourselves to it.
We morphed from pouter-pigeon breasted Edwardian to flat-chested flapper in two decades; from wasp-waisted Victorian to today’s bride tight-laced into a Coke-bottle silhouette.
Apart from a brief 20th century excursion into androgyny (the waif-like Twiggy), erogenous zones shifted north from ankle to bosom and remained firmly lodged there till Jennifer Lopez and Kim Kardashian decided to capitalise on the generous dimensions of their assets.
Fashions flicker by, transient as pictures in a kaleidoscope. Distance lends disenchantment. Did we actually wear those ridiculous deck-of-an-aircraft-carrier shoulder pads? And wasn’t Princess Diana’s wedding dress really just a big, creased mess?
Yet slavishly, we follow the latest trends, emulating in chainstore chic our new icons, even though we aren’t gifted with the same equipment, anointing ourselves with hope-in-a-bottle serums and maiming ourselves with ‘treatments’.
There’s never been such an orgy of tooth-bleaching, facial peeling, liposuction and cosmetic surgery. We’ve wrecked our ankles with platforms, distorted our feet with stilettos and, far from abandoning the corset, we’re sheathed in constricting Lycra from neck to knee, one and all gullible targets for seductive advertising that panders to our vanity.
Early feminists set little store by the visible tokens of femininity. This generation, for all its preoccupation with style and appearance, is just as determined to further the cause. Permit us a little foolishness. A fondness for fripperies isn’t necessarily the sign of an airhead.
It’s perfectly possible to fight for equality in lipstick and a pencil skirt. Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did… only backwards and in high heels.
