The synthetic ideal : the fashion model and photographic manipulation

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14 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

It is here, finally, that we can speculate beyond the immediate concern of this article to ask why fashion, apparently content to entertain a multitude of created forms in the body of the model, is so resistant to the multitude of actual bodily forms that exist beyond the parameters of its image world. Why does it not respond to those critics and observers who ask where are the non-slim, the non-young and those who are not able-bodied? Certainly, in part, the answer lies in fashion’s industrial base, the realities of the market-place and an economy of desire. But it is also the case that fashion cannot incorporate all body shapes in a gesture of politically correct egalitarianism. If fashion were to allow the body to take over, to be just anything, any shape, any age, it would have no power. The sign of its authority—artifice—would fade. The point here is that fashion does not supplant the natural body with an ideal body but with an imagined one, one nearer to it’s “heart’s desire.” In the synthetic ideal we witness, on the body of the fashion model, fashion’s metamorphosis, “a world made malleable by imagination.” If fashion were to forsake these transformations it would face the same fate as if it were to respond to those critics who ask that it arrest its interminable permutations and settle for one perfect form. By imposing its economy of perpetual alteration on the body of the model, it ensures that it will not suffer the fate of other despotic regimes that have allowed hubris to make an enemy of change; eternally changing, it will not atrophy, it will not fossilize, it will not die.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)407-424
Number of pages18
JournalFashion Theory
Volume9
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2005

Keywords

  • fashion
  • models (persons)

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