I have been thinking about the comments under Anna Wintour and American Fashion:  Lots of thoughts about the intersection of weight, age, and fashion, and my thoughts are all over the place, but I’m  a sociologist, not a philosopher (Rob!) and I am in a bit of hurry, so here goes.  Rob is correct about the press needing to better separate out the issues…and there are a number of them besides size and age (alone). There are the problems of branding and rabid consumerism; fashion is aimed at the youth market (and those determined to stay ‘young’), in part, because younger people are more likely to buy not save, and to purchase trendy clothing and luxury brand accessories, even if they have to go into debt to buy them.  Accessories are where the ‘real’ money is.  There is also the conventional wisdom of designers & editors that fashion/beauty is aspirational and that women are hypocritical when they complain about the hegemony of skinny young models on the catwalk because when women like themselves are selected to model the fashions they are being sold, they reject them for not being beautiful, tall, young, or skinny enough!   Ageism is rampant in pop culture where there is a general rejoicing of  the aging of beauty icons and celebrities, who come to ‘power’ in their unlined, slender youth but like everyone else gradually show wear and tear, cellulite and wrinkles.  The glad rag tabloids eviscerate Kate Moss for glamorizing skinny, true, but more often now for looking her age, or “worse,” looking older than her age, i.e., haggard, ‘past her prime,’ ‘replaced’ by younger models at Burberry. Consumers, entertainment, and pop culture since the 1960s have been focused on youth culture–in film, tv, art, and music, as well as fashion.  Youth is status and aging is viewed as a ‘deformity’ which can be corrected by surgery,  injections, exercise and diet.  Signs of aging–absent from the catwalk–are thought ’unnatural,’ scary reminders of mortality in secular society where the older you are the closer you are to meeting the grim reaper and annihilation of self, and being replaced by someone younger and less expensive at work.  The very young are also less likely to be fat, and fat is another source of morbid fear in societies where a chubby figure is easy to achieve simply by getting older in the sedentary land of plenty, and a slender one more of a challenge to obtain or retain. There is also an aesthetic-based sexism on the part of some designers, stylists, and photographers, who let’s face it, are not particularly enamoured of the female form, who favor the male or the androgynous body over the curves of a woman.  For them the model is an inverted triangle, a hanger (no hips, wide shoulders).  She must not upstage the fashions on the catwalk.  Hence the overall more anonymous look of runway models with interchangeable figures and faces, a response to the 90s supermodels, who did upstage the fashions they wore with their unique characteristics. Isn’t it interesting that style guides for the over 40 and for the average to plus size figure complain about the design formula of young and skinny while selling advice about how to appear younger and slimmer, not  fleshy, middle-aged, or, for heaven’s sake, old and/or fat? 

Jacque Lynn Foltyn