Lovely that the Women’s Equality party is campaigning against underweight models, but how long have we been moaning about this? Since Twiggy in the 60s, then the book Fat Is a Feminist Issue in the 70s. And now here comes wretched London fashion week again, and more half-starved, spectral, bundle-of-twigs models will go tottering up and down catwalks dressed in oddities in size zero, that no one else can wear unless they’re very rich, very thin and driven half-mad by the dictates of fashion.
Fashion week’s website still features the same pasty coat-hanger waifs, looking glum and skinny as ever. Hasn’t it been like this for hundreds of years? Pain and discomfort. Nothing changes. Women have been plumped up, clamped flat and corseted; bosoms have been lifted, flattened, separated, squidged into a shelf; waists have gone up and down, but mostly squeezed in, with whalebone, metal and laces, making women breathless and constipated. More recently they’ve been dying of heart attacks and starvation, all for some crazed idea of what they ought to look like.
And look who is dictating their style – fellows such as John Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld. What bizarre and sinister-looking coves. Why would any woman take advice on how to look pleasant, from them? One was found guilty of racist and antisemitic abuse, the other sells sets of coloured pencils for £2,250. Meanwhile, even without these strange gurus, women have been trained up to independently wreck themselves. I used to see a young woman in the local supermarket dressed all in black with a very pale complexion and very red lips, and a waist about the size of my ankle. Where were her bottom ribs? Had she had them removed? How did her insides function? Is she still alive? What a worry.
“What do you think of London fashion week?” I ask Olivia. “I don’t think about it,” says she. “It means nothing at all to me.” Very sensible. Why drive oneself to distraction over the world of extreme fashion? We’ll be dead before it changes. I don’t usually despair, but good luck to the Women’s Equality party. They will need it.
