Beyond perfection : the fashion model in the age of digital manipulation

Artifice lies at the very core of fashion’s existence. At every appearance, fashion throws down the gauntlet to nature, mocking its claim over the aesthetic and moral high ground, goading it into submission. With its intimate relationship to clothing, the human body has long been the battlefield where this struggle is played out. Throughout history, the body appears as a malleable form, bowing to fashion’s superior armoury, surrendering to its often extreme vision of beauty – padded out, pulled in, shortened, extended in almost unimaginable ways. Meanwhile, fashion’s inability (or refusal) to settle on one absolute form of beauty has earned it the vitriolic condemnation of its critics. Its attempt to create and re-create over and over its shifting image of beauty on the canvas of the human body, it is charged, is responsible for manipulating the physical structure of the body by methods that are, at the very least, ugly and, at the worst, mortally dangerous. However, fashion, which has been credited with a power and an aesthetic logic that operates independently of any one individual, can also wear, along with its reputation as a despot, the mantle of an artist. Viewed in this light, its determination to ignore the precedents set by nature can be characterized as a creative impulse. Unable to find, as J.C. Flügel has put it, ‘complete satisfaction with reality’, it creates a new world ‘nearer to the heart’s desire’ (Flügel 1933: 237).