Many of you have probably heard of the CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch’s controversial and flat out rude comments that the company doesn’t sell XL or XXL sizes for women because they want “cool” people to wear their clothes. Well, this blogger wrote an open letter to Jeffries and included these photos of herself and what is considered a “typical” male model body type.
Some quotes from her letter:
“The only thing you’ve done through your comments (about thin being beautiful and only offering XL and XXL in your stores for men) is reinforce the unoriginal concept that fat women are social failures, valueless, and undesirable.”
“This is largely attributed to companies like yours that perpetuate the thought that fat women are not beautiful. This is inaccurate, but if someone were to look through your infamous catalog, they wouldn’t believe me.”
“P.P.S. You should know your Large t-shirt comfortably fits a size 22. You might want to work on that.”
This has to do with fashion, though perhaps not in the way this blog has so far posted. But this sort of confidence is the sort of thing that we want our choices in clothes to reflect. You should be able to wear whatever you want and feel confident – no matter what other people may say or think.
SHE MADE THE NEWS!
http://omg.yahoo.com/blogs/celeb-news/blogger-spun-abercrombie-fitch-ceo-comments-chance-change-191920774.html?vp=1This is awesome, and here’s the thing (other than ‘Abercrombie is kind of evil’): as a society, we are woefully, alarmingly unaware of how completely the camera controls our gaze, and therefore our perceptions.
We see tall, stick-thin models with makeup painted on their faces to accentuate their hollow cheeks everywhere. This is beautiful, right? Media tells us so. Movies with heroines who look like this. The covers of our novels. The posters and ads for clothes and makeup, shoes, hygiene products, household cleaning products, toys (the moms always seem to be hot), fashion catalogs… These women are everywhere, and we know they’re beautiful and desirable because their makeup is flawless, their hair is perfect, they’re wearing expensive, beautifully accessorized clothes and in a lot of cases there’s a hot man lurking around hanging on them, or possibly the camera is angling down their cleavage and up their legs and throat to show us where we’re supposed to be looking.
Same for men. But an interesting thing I’ve seen with men: lately we’re getting a lot of scrabbly, fluffy-haired dorky-looking guys with protruding adam’s apples suddenly becoming sex symbols. Or short guys with life lines prematurely engraved on their not-especially-classic features. A guy like Andrew Garfield, previously cast as a series of scrawny geeks, gets a superhero role and is repackaged as a male sexpot.
The point is NOT whether a Cary Grant jawline is inherently more attractive than a Toby McGuire jawline. It’s that this repackaging can happen, regardless of whether a person (a MAN) fits into socially constructed ideas of attractiveness.
The POINT is that think about that, and then look back up at the photos of this woman. She’s cute, right? Yeah, yeah, ‘wouldn’t want to date her,’ she’s a got a stomach, everybody knows thin girls, etc. But she’s stylish, edgy, cool-looking and adorable with her impish smile and cute button nose, her awesome haircut and tats, her smoky eyes and dude, if I could get a guy who looked like that to look at me that way?
And that easily do the gaze and our perceptions begin to change.
So, 1: Stop with the ‘fat girls are ugly.’ Fat people, particularly women, are PORTRAYED as ugly, undesirable, the natural butt of jokes, or at the very best non-sexual beings, and therefore that is how we perceive them. There’s nothing ‘natural’ about it. It’s a manufactured perception.
2: It really concerns me whenever I see the opinions of a large swath of society being influenced by external forces without their even realizing it. What you don’t know, you can’t fight back against. This is propaganda, folks. This is how it works: the power of the media to control minds by controlling what gets fed into those minds. Accept it or reject it, but don’t do it blindly.
