One recent evening, on Park Avenue, in Manhattan, fashion editors lined a white runway in the Seagram Building as models walked past on high heels, wearing embroidered eyelet jackets and lace cocktail dresses by the designer Isabel Toledo. The models were presenting the spring line that Toledo had created for Lane Bryant, the plus-sized-clothing chain. They were not thin.
Vogue called the models “astonishingly lovely,” as if they were a previously undiscovered species. Fashion has long been dominated by a familiar figure: unusually tall, yet childishly slender. The main point of variation tends to be whether models are athletic or waifish; Kate Upton counts as an outlier. But some brands are finding that people will applaud even their most timid efforts to deviate from the standard model physique. Earlier this year, American Eagle Outfitters, which sells clothes to teen-agers, unveiled an ad campaign for its Aerie lingerie line by saying that “the girls in these photos have not been retouched.” The models had small tattoos or bellies that had not been hollowed out by a computer program. “It’s a selling point,” Jenny Altman, American Eagle’s “fit expert,” told Juju Chang, of “Good Morning America.” Typically, she said, customers “don’t get to see what girls their age really look like.”
Betabrand, an online clothing company in San Francisco, had a spring collection modelled by women who were Ph.D.s or doctoral candidates. They included a nuclear-engineering student from the University of California, Berkeley. “Showing a young student that Ph.D.s can be pretty—that there’s nothing inherently unattractive about intelligence and success—may encourage her to widen her academic ambitions,” Alexandra Brodsky, a law student at Yale, wrote on the Web site Feministing. (She added, though, “It’s not the models’ intelligence that makes them beautiful: It’s their beauty.”)
These brands are playing with “authenticity,” a marketing buzzword that has lately been applied to a remarkably wide range of products. The task is putting together a compelling tale about a product’s or a brand’s transparency, simplicity, or honesty. This is the reason that every big brewing company wants to present itself as a maker of craft beers. It’s why some Tostitos chips have packaging that refers to them as “Artisan Recipes.” As Adam Sachs wrote in Details, “From roughly the time of the Renaissance artist to the era of the J. Peterman catalog, with its absurd consumerist prose poetry, we’ve been entranced by provenance, tethered by narrative to things we covet and consume. What’s new is the astonishing ubiquity of the aesthetic.” One explanation for the widespread appeal of ostensibly artisanal products is that owning handmade, small-batch goods conveys status and exclusivity at a time when just about anything mass-produced can be purchased down the street at Costco.
And so clothing retailers, struggling for sales, have joined in by presenting their apparel on “authentic” bodies. In the case of Lane Bryant, this is achieved with models who are somewhat the same size as its customers. (The industry standard for “plus-size” models starts at a size eight, while Lane Bryant’s store sizes generally begin at a fourteen. “I did raise my eyebrows at a couple of models who didn’t look to be bigger than a size 6 or 8,” one reviewer wrote.)
Most stores, however, have been only willing to slightly reshape the mold, rather than break it. The models for the American Eagle and Betabrand ads are generally thin and conventionally attractive; most are white. (More than one in three Americans are not white.)
Even these small changes can earn companies marketing attention. Upworthy, the popular feel-good Web site, is known for promoting content that addresses body image and other social issues. (One recent Upworthy headline praising Verily, an upstart women’s magazine: “Look at These Beautiful Women, Then See How Much Photoshop This Fashion Magazine Chose to Use.” Answer: none.) Upworthy’s tone can feel like pandering, but there’s no denying its ability to make a video—like this one, of a model in a wheelchair during New York Fashion Week—go viral.
Upworthy is new, but the attempt to use feminist values to sell fashion and beauty products to women is not. Almost as soon as images of women became prominent in the mass media, at the beginning of the twentieth century, marketers began trying to blend representations of women as independent and intelligent with traditional feminine notions of beauty. It was an awkward fit. In 1924—shortly after women got the right to vote, and long before Betabrand’s Ph.D.s—the Woman’s Copy Department at the J. Walter Thompson ad agency recruited distinguished women for a campaign for Pond’s cold cream, according to Kathy Peiss, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture.” Women such as Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who were chosen for their cultural significance rather than primarily for their beauty, gave testimonials about the benefits of Pond’s.
But many people didn’t understand the point, and consumers reported that they most liked the photographs of Princess Marie de Bourbon, a young and conventionally pretty endorser. In the Pond’s ads, the marketers “maintained that beautifying and achievement need not be mutually exclusive: caring for appearance could be seen as an aspect of women’s self-expression and dignity,” Peiss writes. “But this was a subtle and difficult argument to make, easily submerged in the celebration of female beauty as an end in itself.” For the most part, advertisers reverted to a simpler, more conventional message.
Defining a “beautiful” woman or a “real” woman is a contentious puzzle, and always has been. Some recent marketing that has aimed for authenticity has eventually faced a backlash. Last year, Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” campaign showed women—pretty women, with neatly applied makeup—describing themselves to a forensic artist, then viewing his sketch based on their explanation side by side with another sketch created from a stranger’s description of their looks. Inevitably, the second drawing was more attractive, and some of the women were moved to tears by the comparison. The Dove video has now been viewed sixty-two million times on YouTube.
Much of the reaction to the ad was positive, but critics pointed out that the experiment was rigged; the artist knew its goal, so he was predisposed to make the first sketch less appealing than the second. Further, as David Zweig pointed out at Slate, Dove’s representation of “real” women was unattainable for most people. “I kept picturing all of the women I see on the subway, at highway rest stops, in suburban malls,” with their botched dye jobs and acne scars, he wrote. “In a way this ad campaign is even worse for them than conventional ads because it has the pretense of representing them, and yet they still must notice they fall far short of ‘real’ (real being defined in this context as average).”
Any revolution in the depiction of women’s bodies is not going to come from marketers, whose job it is to construct a narrative in which a person is incomplete until a product is purchased—and so must create feelings of unworthiness and desire, as well as an impulse to change. The problem with looking to companies, even well-meaning ones, to determine ethical standards is that the effort will always feel cynical at some level. And so, as it ever was, the representation of the female form will continue to be a battleground.
Photograph: JP Yim/Getty
