From BuzzFeed, on a recent poll which found that women don’t want to look like runway models and that men don’t want to be with women who look like runway models:
Let’s say it’s true (and it could be!) that women don’t want to be runway-skinny and that men aren’t most attracted to women who are runway-skinny. So then if women don’t want to look like waifs, and if men aren’t attracted to waifs, why are runway models — and Victoria’s Secret fashion show models, I don’t care how “curvy” I’m supposed to think they are — all waifs?
Please share your contemplations in comments.
Step into Realville. Here’s a quick explanation that is lost only on those who are paid to miss it:
Clearly, the gay guys who run the fashion world are choosing curveless, geometrically angular androgynoids to model their clothes. So the next time some dude brags that he’s dating a supermodel ask him which industry — Victoria’s Secret? Playboy? SI Swimsuit Issue? He’s banging a winner — those kinds of models are chosen for their direct appeal to men or their ability to model very feminine clothing (i.e., lingerie). Milan runway? He’s banging a prepubescent boy.
The proof is in the pudding on this one, but another way to hammer home the point is to point out that male runway models are generally the types of guys that regular women would like to be with find attractive, and also the types of guys that other guys wouldn’t mind looking like.
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Ahh, the original Roissy. I only came across the Heartiste blog around a year ago and still haven’t read too much of his archives. Nice article you hyperlinked to, and it reminded me that I have to sit down one Saturday afternoon and go through years ’08 and ’09 of his blog posts.
The present blog is still quite good of course, but I like the Gnostic God-man ethos, according to Auster’s opinion I think, that it gave off back then. And some of those comment sections were huge, running into the thousands.
I would note this particular supermodel as perhaps an exception, Sasha Pivovarova.
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/FamilyAlbum/Huntington2007/2009-09-15cl.jpg
(She’s on the left, that’s John D.’s daughter on the right; frankly, both of them are knockouts.)
So it’s heteronormativity and cis-privilege then? Cuz otherwise those weird skeletor-looking bitches would be banging.
They’re more ethereal and otherwordly than big-breasted, wide-hipped women.
Hetero men are not the target of high fashion.
Runway models are supposed to serve as basically hangers to garments they are modeling. They aren’t supposed to be prettier. They are only supposed to sell the clothes, which happens to be best done by tall waifs with very small breasts.
Giselle Bundchen is still my ultimate in beauty, though. Others may disagree.
I’ll give out some memes below:
“What can be theorized, can sometimes not be practical.”
A model may look good in the runway but horrible in real life.
“Fashion designers are secretly into underage boys and are gay pedophiles”
Possible? Yes.
“Being skinny is a sign of high-status”
In America and Europe, the skinnier a woman is, the more high-status she is and a lot of average chicks dream about high SES dudes. So they conform to elite beauty ideals and become skinny like a high status woman as an effort to become part of that group.
“Clothing over body proportions”
They are just concentrating on clothing instead of both clothing and how men and women look.
“But most male models are straight”
You mean straight as in she’s a real young woman, or a fake girl (a boy)? Is this post stupid? It isn’t. Both health and beauty ideals are important in our society and interact with each other.
And this comment from a Facebook female user from New York, New York is gold in its accuracy about how I think “transgenders” are:
Secondly, gay designers pretty openly concede that the clothes they design are the kinds of things they’d like to wear if they were women, not what they expect women to wear.
These dudes think that they are women, but they will never be them. It’s a form of twisted narcissism, delusion and the sort.
A gay dude teaching a woman about femininity, is like a single mother teaching a boy about masculinity.
Succeeds with a minority but is bound to fail as a generality.
Single mothers raise primitive savage uncivilized thugs. Gay dudes raise drag “queens”.
“In America and Europe, the skinnier a woman is, the more high-status she is and a lot of average chicks dream about high SES dudes. So they conform to elite beauty ideals and become skinny like a high status woman as an effort to become part of that group.”
I think there is a directional causality issue here. Being skinny generally doesn’t cause a woman to be high-status, but there does seem to be a competition for thin-ness in women who are born into wealth. It’s like some sort of parallel beauty contest where they don’t have to compete based on what men are attracted to, because they don’t have to. Middle-class bombshells like Kate Upton can’t play, because their continued good fortune is dependent on being attractive to men.
Homosexuals are sexually averse to the woman. This sexual aversion (a pathology rivaled by no other) is manifest in the runway models who appear to be wasting away becoming more alien and detached over time. The hatred for feminine beauty is self-evident and necessarily asserts that high fashion IS NOT for beautiful women. Subsequently, there is desire for “same sex.” To stunt a female’s path to womanhood is to diabolically increase the pool of “same sex” to your sexual benefit.
I never really bought this argument. I’m a pretty typical straight guy, and my first jerk material was Victoria Secret catalogues. I don’t think I’m the only one, either.
Tom Brady could have any girl he wants. Why’d he pick Gisele Bundchen? Is Tom Brady gay? Could be, but I really doubt it.
Problem is some people think being skinny and being curvy are mutually exclusive.
One group thinks having curves means looking like a big booty model or Kim Kardashian,
while another group thinks having curves means being a “BBW”.
So you have people who get repulse when hearing the word “curvy” and people who don’t think a woman fits the curvy criteria unless her breast and ass can break world records.
@jimmy conway
Reading comprehension. Look into it.
Runway models have bodies that accomplish their jobs. They’re hired to feature clothes and to a lesser extent to look good on camera. Tall, narrow bodies require more cloth and have less obstruction, which gives the cloth the best drape and bounce (their trained walk emphasizes this). Thin faces allow far more interesting light and shadow play in photography, thus the demand for very tall waifish models.
Scott:
A) Fucking yourself in your own asshole. Look into it.
B) I’m aware of the difference between runway models and Victoria’s Secret models, but the people who typically make this argument don’t hesitate to extend it to the latter. See, for example, this idiot on Heartiste’s blogroll:
http://www.femininebeauty.info/victorias-secret-gisele-bundchen
Moreover, even as applied to runway models, the argument doesn’t really hold up. Search “runway models” in Google Images. They might not have the ideal body type, but they’re hotter than the girls most men will fuck in a lifetime. If you look at who they’re married to, it’s typically very wealthy, very straight men with plenty of options.
But seriously, fuck yourself in your own asshole.
jimmy,
you completely mixed up victoria’s secret models and regular runway models and someone called you out on the idiotic conflation and now you’re sputtering to come up with some post hoc justification for your original dumb comment. however you want to slice it, there is a big difference between a victoria’s secret model and a fashion industry runway model. men will fuck both of them because a lot of men will fuck just about anything.
“most men will fuck anything.”
Scuse me while I shamelessly blog whore.
The two categories aren’t mutually exclusive, and there’s a fair degree of overlap. Bundchen, for example, does both. And you still haven’t explained why runway models tend to be paired with alphas.
This is a theory that I first heard back at 2Blowhards, which I think was a real incubator for some of the ideas that are bandied about these days in the so-called Manosphere/HBDsphere. Made sense to me then and makes sense to me now — A woman like Kate Upton is hot, a holocaust survivor is not.
People inculcated with feminist ideology are loathe to acknowledge the real reason for this (preferences of gay men) because, (a) Feminists aren’t very good at critical thought and are quick to blame anything they don’t like on ‘Patriarchy’ and (b) Feminists are politically allied with gays and they try to elide this schism by generalizing to ‘Patriarchy.’
@jimmy
Moving the Goalsposts
Waif-boy types or now horsey women who look like strapping ranch hands
She looks like that rapper Vanilla Ice.
OK, fine. you win.
Only partly. Women pay good money to look at pictures of runway models for similar reasons why men pay good money to look at pictures of basketball players slam dunking — they are both gender-appropriate fantasy images about overcoming the surly bonds of gravity.
The high-fashion models are really a mixed bag: there are some horse-whineying scary ones, some weird-cutes, and some girls who are traditional dazzlers. Most of them look at least a tad too thin for health, but many may retire out of that when they leave the runways.
I appreciate that this particular topic brings out some of Steve’s most oddly louche insights (his classic riff on what I might paraphrase as the cocaine-gamine wish fulfillment is a standout), but while there are puzzling aspects to the fashion business, to dismiss the girls are just ugly is too quick and glib.
Since most models hail from good antecedents (good breeding, at least) what does interest me is how this industry messes with their brains. The bizarre aristo-demotics of fashion (all sleazy hauture and byzantine rubbish) encapsulate Post-Modernism at its most creative yet most corrosive. There’s a perverse, novelistic fascination in a program that plucks up girls who look like they should be writing theses on the Rossettis and turns them into cokearexics flaked with small, cryptic cursive tattoos. What a nasty little hothouse world.
As for the readers: in my experience, the fashionistas really love the “wearable” androgynous DKNY/CK type stuff. SWPL girls reblog these runway looks endlessly. Designers like the Versaces make clothes for “Pimps in a royal whorehouse”, but pimps and whores know nothing about that. Mostly their high concepts are for the delectation of the wits who scribble for the glossies, and of course their own racy urges.
One last thing: pastries. Skinny fashion-followers adore pastry porn, a la the montages of Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette”. I don’t think it’s hunger, I think it’s a self-projection, but it’s a bit displaced. Something like “I am as light as a little fairy made of sugar.” It’s all so awful, somehow. Sweeter, more innocent, than Sailer’s coke riff, but false and troubled in its own way.
They are conflated in the post, in the buzzfeed quote. It explicitly says that men don’t want waifs and lingerie models are waifs, and Scott is right that there is significant overlap between these different types of models.
Do the google image search for runway models and clearly most of the women that come up are of above average attractiveness and don’t look like teenage boys, even if some portion of them look like the girl pictured above (who also doesn’t look like a boy, just weird).
The ‘boyishness’ of runway models is exaggerated, and so is the femininity of square-bodied, mustache-having women like Kate Upton based entirely on tits. Bolting fake tits on would instantly make these 14 year old girls more “feminine”.
K(yle):
“Scott is right that there is significant overlap between these different types of models.”
*ahem*
jimmy is right.
Some women are meant to be skinny and look natural and pretty with it. Taylor Swift, for example, she looks healthy thin. Leanne Rimes on the other hand lost her looks when she opted for the super thin body and had to replace the breast fat she lost with implants. Her face looks like a crack head’s. Lindsey Lohan looked better when she was naturally muscular in mean girls, than she does now. My favorite supermodel body is Stephanie Seymore’s. That is, thin but very curvy with a definite butt and waist. The brazilians have a term for women who appear thin but are actually really curvy. I hate the trend in swimsuit models wherein they have waists not too different in circumfrence to their hips. That is where the gayness comes in.
Obsidian is a chubby chaser.
I did mean jimmy, sorry about that.
Which is Kate Upton’s body type. The only reason that Upton isn’t thinner is because it would make her look more like a block, and the reason that she isn’t ‘curvier’ is because she gains weight like a man so she would fill out in the love handles and gut before she put it on her hips and ass. The only “curves” that matter to most men apparently are breasts apparently.
Some women can be incredibly thin and have ‘curves’ in the form of a high (even ideal) h:w ratio. Women like Lohan born to be more voluptuous can’t pull it off because it’s not in their DNA.
As for the tits on a plank look, that’s the stereotypical Jewess body type, so I’m confident that this oh so common body type on the runway, on TV, in Hollywood isn’t just a gay thing. It’s that in combination with the gold fever.
I think think the reason runway models are so skinny is because the designers want to show how good their clothes look on a coat hanger, so why not have the clothing draped around a human one? Buyers buy based in strong part by how clothes look on the hanger.
I agree with Steve Sailor on his “gender-appropriate defying gravity” idea. Also, complex clothes look great on tall skinny women. You can’t put multiple layers on a short or thick woman without making her look like a fire hydrant!
As I woman, I like the idea of spending a day or two that tall and skinny. It has nothing to do with men or attractiveness, it’s more an physical idea of moving through space…kinda hard to explain. I imagine suddenly being 6ft tall and 110 lbs would feel free and unencumbered, like swimming or riding a bike downhill.
The lines are crossed now. Just look at the models who walk in the VS show. Most of them are the same high fashion models who walk Marc Jacobs and Fendi three months before.
Karlie Kloss and Joan Smalls are both high fashion models who have done Victoria Secret. Both are very slim and Kloss is 6’1.
I don’t think Saskia de Brawn will walk for VS any time soon.
The weird looking runway models were first pushed by Muicia Prada because they grab your attention, you tend to look at them longer than the average looking models and true beauties.
I sometimes wonder where they find those men who care about a low waist/hip ratio.
I’m one of those, but the “tits and nothing but tits” type of dude is incredibly common.
When I see Kate Upton, I think “she’s cute but where the hell are her hips? why do her thighs start right where her waist ends ?”.
jimmyconway: “Tom Brady could have any girl he wants. Why’d he pick Gisele Bundchen? Is Tom Brady gay? Could be, but I really doubt it.”
And before Gisele, Tom was in a serious realtionship with, and knocked up, a woman SEVEN years his elder (Bridget Moynahan). No flash in the pan or fuck buddy, they were a public couple for two years. Since he can get any woman he wants, does this mean men find older women attractive?
Clearly you can see how pinning evidence of female attractiveness to Tom Brady’s dick is a specious argument.
Jack:
and if my argument depended entirely on what gets Brady hard, instead of merely using him as one illustrative example, you’d be right. But it doesn’t, so fuck you.
jimmyconway:
he’s clearly not a good illustrative example. thats the point.
you mad, bro?
Yeah, I’m mad.
1) Lots of men find lingerie models attractive. As K(yle), chicnoir, and I have pointed out, many lingerie models are also high fashion models. Therefore, many men find many high fashion models attractive.
2) High fashion models tend to be partnered with alpha males. (Brady is one example of this).
3) A google image search for “runway models” reveals many women of above average attractiveness.
Address the argument or stop talking.
I already refuted one of the supporting points of your cute little argument. The mate choice of any one alpha male doesn’t reflect male opinion. Do you think Robert DeNiro has good taste in women? Then shut the fuck up about Brady.
There’s overlap for lingerie and runway models only for a select few who are truly attractive. Most runway models don’t have that kind of overlap. You’re saying Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson blur the line between football and baseball, therefore football players can play baseball.
“The mate choice of any one alpha male doesn’t reflect male opinion.”
That’s why my (fucking adorable, thank you very much) argument never relied on the mate choice of any one alpha male. Read point (2) again. And yes, I think Naomi Campbell is/was attractive.
“There’s overlap for lingerie and runway models only for a select few who are truly attractive.”
Read the bios of these women and see how many have done high fashion runway work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria%27s_Secret#Victoria.27s_Secret_Angels
Thanks for linking to the select few I was talking about.
The average runway model doesn’t have the physique for Victorias Secret. Exceptions don’t disprove the rule.