Fashionable People

There are people who follow fashion and then there are also people that fashion follows. This page is a brief look at what makes people fashionable.

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Fashionable Genes

The current fashionable genes seem to be the super-mongrel genes. The ideal of beauty in the twenty first century seems to be the accidental mongrel. People who look like a mixture of many races, without having the stigma of actually being mixed race. Look at the contestants in the Miss World or Miss Universe contest, they all look very similar, the ideal the judges seem to be striving for is an average Homo sapiens who looks like an average between all the races. The most beautiful women in Bollywood films look just the same as tanned brunettes on Baywatch. Looking at Japanese TV would give you the distinct impression that Japan was full of mixed race people, they are not, but they look as if they are, those with the fashionable look get preferred over those that look more normal for the Japanese population.

Many white models are now having lip enhancement surgery as well as having their teeth capped and their breasts enhanced. The new ideal woman has the full lips of a mixed race African-European woman, although if that can come without being mixed race that is to be preferred, actual mixed race people have that neither fish nor fowl question mark over them, nobody is quite sure whether or not they are fair game. There is still that very big unspoken taboo, most people are happy to have a black man (or a white man, if they are black) as a brother (neighbour, friend), but are a bit squeamish about having one as a brother-in-law, although most people don't like to talk about it.

How has this come to pass? I think it is simply the effect of familiarity. When we see people regularly we take on board an image of them as a member of our species and that has a small effect on the stored ideal type information about people that we all have. If we only see a certain type of person rarely or in peculiar circumstances then their image does not intrude on our average perception. That explains why I don't find Australian Aboriginal women attractive, I don't see them very often, I have never met one face to face, and when I do see them they are usually in an unusual setting (such as sitting down with sagging breasts, covered in dust and representing the category of "victim of white prejudice"). So aboriginal women have negligible effect on my stored image of "legitimate woman to crave sex with".

In contrast I do see women of black African origin on a regular basis, face to face and through various media outlets, including obvious "look at me I'm sexy" portrayals. (Thank you MTV). As a result I find many black women very attractive. Similarly with women of Asian origin; Chinese, Japanese and Indian. I have not had much contact with native American people (the wife of my alcoholic Canadian "bobtailed cousin" was far too old to have much of an effect on me) and so such women do not do a lot for me, unless they look atypical for their race, although several white American men who have written to me have talked of their crushes on native American girls they went to school with. I am quite sure that a couple of months in a mixed community and my interest in such women would shift from curiosity towards lust.

I would like to expand on this idea of the stored ideal type information a little. Our brains do not work in a binary, on or off, way. Our brains work on firing rates and weighted averages. As we take in more information we change the mental categories we hold. All children have great difficulty in learning the extent and limits of the category of "dog", it is a wide one, containing Great Danes and Yorkshire Terriers, hairy and hairless, heavy St Bernards and scrawny whippets and Greyhounds, but excluding cats, goats, foxes and wolves. It is a tough one to judge. But we have brains that are well capable of the task, through trial and error we refine our concept of what is and what is not a dog. (My sister was taken to a zoo at slightly too young an age to appreciate it and apparently saw rather a lot of gee-gee-wow-wows)

My contention is that the categories we hold for such things as beauty and legitimate mate criteria are also affected by an averaging process. If you live in a prejudiced community of whites surrounded by black people your search image can remain stubbornly white-only because you have two categories of woman, white woman and black woman. I would conjecture that even the most hardened Ku Klux Klan fanatic would be able to spot the difference between an attractive and an unattractive black woman, although they would use different mental labels. However now we are supposed to be colour-blind, not to notice people's races. If we actually manage to do this our search image would consolidate into a single image, and would condense on an average of averages; round eyed and medium-full lipped café-au-lait. As there are relatively few people who actually are mixed race this process seems well designed to make most people unattractive, and gives them an impossible image to conform to. Perhaps the melting pot is not the best analogy for the happy future community, and we would be better off going for the salad bowl, in which each ingredient is free to taste of itself while coexisting alongside other flavours. Or best of all, the curry, in which some flavours blend and some do not and the whole is substantially better than any of the parts.

Shape

In Big Women I suggested that the ideal shape for women had been strongly influenced by gay men. This was a bit of a stretch for rhetorical purposes. The reason why the accepted search image for women has been shifted so heavily over to the thinner type is due to the averaging process. Thin women first became fashionable in the 1920s. How many straight men were consulted over this change do you think? I doubt many were. The flapper was a tall woman, athletic, tanned. A woman who had been well fed through her childhood to allow her to grow tall, but never required to work for a living, unless she chose to, as a lark. You had to be rich to be a flapper, you had to have a rich daddy to finance your beach holidays and tennis lessons. This image had a profound affect on the fashion industry which started a self-catalyzing process. Rich women were taller and thinner than the average woman, so their models were taller and thinner than they were; nothing exceeds like excess. So tall and thin was a class thing, a mark of wealth and status. Incidentally gay men were less repulsed by designing for boy-shaped women and so many gay men found their way into dress design as it could satisfy many of their creative urges and their work was appreciated by the fashionistas. As the twentieth century went on the trend continued and a new element entered into the equation, the association between obesity and poverty.

In previous centuries poverty was associated with short stature and emaciation. However the huge changes in agriculture leading to food that was cheaper than ever before meant poverty no longer implied starvation, although the diet of the poor was still not ideal it did allow them to become obese. Comfort eating is very easy to get into when your life is relatively devoid of pleasure and opportunity. Few upper class women are obese.

Aspirational figures were tall and thin, models were tall and thin, this image fed back to the average perceptions of the people. Women's magazine have hardly any women in them who are average size, all the models are taller and thinner than average. Even the models used for outsized (i.e. big enough to fit women one size above the modal size, one size above the most common size) clothes are only fractionally above the average, in fact it is standard practice for many clothes manufacturers who cater for larger women to make a special version a size smaller so that it will fit their "outsize model". This process has fed into the aspiration image of women. Women are trying to conform to a tall and thin ideal that is in reality very far from the true average, although it is the average of media images to aspire to.

Another factor determining the obsession with thin role models is the fact that to be thin when surrounded by cheap food requires effort and dedication. Anything achieved by effort is given more weight than perhaps it deserves. Natural beauty is nothing to get excited by, because their is no moral dimension to it, if it comes easily it is worthless. Breasts just happen, so, to women, they are of little worth. In contrast a toned stomach takes effort. So women strive to look toned and sculpted, they want to build themselves a body to be proud of, to feel good about themselves, morally. Men don't give a stuff about toned stomachs, men know what they like, and that is not generally a muscled woman but a natural woman, soft curves, natural breasts. Women are trying to look like a better woman, but they are not doing it very rationally, they are trying to look worthier. Women measure themselves in moral terms. Food contains evil spirits that make them fat. Men don't care how their women feel inside (well, not in their head...) men just want attractive women, but the ideal that men are looking for is different from the women that women are trying to be. Women look at toned thin women and think that they are better women, because they have striven to look like that.

Men just know what they like.

Another factor in the creation of the new thin ideal is the rejection of the freak. Nobody includes freaks in their averages. Statisticians often use elaborate ways to remove freakish data before calculating and presenting their averages, people do it instinctively. Just as the prejudiced Southern boy doesn't let any image of black women intrude on his perceptions of female beauty many people now exclude fat people from their perceptions of normality so their internal view of average, normal, healthy or acceptable does not include any information about fat people. They are beyond the pale. Is it any wonder that if the idea is spread around that you can never be too rich or too thin is joined with the idea that people above average size are not people at all then the ideal image that is aspired to is shifted way over to the thin side of the true average for the population. By labelling fat people in such derogatory ways it becomes significantly more socially acceptable to say “she's a disgusting fat porker” than to say anything about a person's race. Nobody is allowed to express their prejudice using “the n word” but people are regularly having their anti-fat prejudices socially reinforced and they try to outdo each other in expressing this fashionable fascism.

There needs to be some exclusion of the freak otherwise we start down the crazy road of looking for people who are averagely disabled. However the current situation is untenable in that it sees anybody as fatter than average as being a fat freak, excludes them from the average and redraws ever thinner averages. There has got to be some action taken against this trend, either by rejecting the too thin just as assiduously or by widening the definition of acceptable and normal to include more fatter people, probably a bit of both. If no correction is done a higher and higher proportion of people will feel themselves beyond the pale, and that can lead to them giving up on the idea of trying to conform. If the acceptable range of sizes was drawn wider more people would be able to conform to it, which would be healthy for individual and society alike.

Fashionable looks

Other things about appearance can be subject to fashion as well. One obvious one is complexion. If you read any fiction or biography written before 1900 you will probably come across some references to pale complexions. It used to be the height of beauty to have a very fair and pale complexion. This was partly a class thing. To be pale required you to avoid the sun, which required you to avoid working in the fields like normal people. Princesses not only could feel a pea through mattresses and feather beds they also had a milky white skin that was never exposed to the sun. A good and clear complexion is always a mark of health, in previous centuries a pale complexion was a mark of wealth.

With the onset of the industrial revolution things were bound to change. Just as moths began to appear darker the workers inside the mills and factories started to look paler as they worked inside from dawn 'til dusk. It took fashion a while to catch up. By the 1920s suddenly they caught on, an all-over sun tan was the mark of a hedonist who didn't work in a factory or office. Centuries of prejudices reversed. There is still a trace of this class based prejudice about, in the form of the disdain shown towards the obvious bikini line in the overall tan, the freshly acquired tan with burned patches and white shadows around bikini straps and sunglasses shows the person to be fresh to the hedonistic life, the experienced hedonist shows off the most even tan on the beach.

Hair colour

What colour is my hair? I'll give you a good clue. Go down to a shop that sells hair dye and arrange the shades in the way that girls arrange their colouring pens and crayons, in sequence of colour and shade, then space them out to take account of all the shades that are not available. My hair is in one of those big gaps, a greyish brown mouse. Nobody ever pays to have hair this shade. Why? Why can you buy palest platinum blonde to darkest blue-black or the reddest of reds but you can't buy my shade? Simple. Vibrant colours are typical of youth. Children who are yellow-blonde at five are often mousy by thirty, carrot tops lose the brilliant colour and it washes away towards a dull mid greyish brown. Hair colour fashions ebb and flow but mouse is never in fashion, just as the fashionable complexion may be luminous pale or glowing golden tan but never, ever, dull and wrinkled.

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