The reason people – women, mainly, if we’re honest here – get so especially upset by the fashion industry’s obsession with youth and skinniness is because it is echoing that dark, cruel voice that lives in the heads of so many of us, the one that encourages our own self-loathing. For all that people criticise fashion’s obsession with thinness, the fact is it is very rare to find any non-fashion magazine that doesn’t in some way validate this view, by using very slim models or running nonsense articles about “detoxing” and “clean eating”. What the fashion industry does, really, is exploit our own worst thoughts about ourselves. Look, fashion is a billion–dollar industry, and you don’t make a billion dollars by being stupid (although an obvious exception to that rule comes in the form of future US president Donald Trump.
You know, fashion gets a lot of grief from outsiders. Its fetishisation of skinniness, wealth, aesthetics, sexiness and, yes, youth, are all routinely used as sticks with which to beat it. Only last week Topshop was roundly mocked for using mannequins so skinny they barely made anatomical sense. And this is all perfectly to the right and well and good. Criticise away! Lord knows this column does it often enough.
But here’s the rather uncomfortable truth about fashion: all it actually does is take society’s own desires, own attitudes, and exaggerate them shamelessly. This is certainly not to excuse the fashion industry’s loopiness, stupidity and even occasional amorality. But it does explain why, despite the general consensus that fashion is demented, the industry is enormously successful. This also, I suspect, clarifies why people get so upset by it. If fashion items were sold on promises to make everyone, say, grow a third arm, no one would give a good god damn. Instead, they would look at the adverts featuring three-armed models brandishing wildly expensive handbags (an extra arm so you can carry more £1,500 bags – genius!), shrug, laugh and carry on with their day. They would not campaign against these adverts on social media and newspapers would not run long think pieces about how this three-armed fascism was corrupting the minds of our young.
