Fashion was long a realm where ideals of beauty were so exclusive that only the rarest people who looked like the proverbial “Fashion X-Rays” could be deemed beautiful. Rare specimens had fleeting modeling careers during which time they made millions of dollars, based on their innate embodiment of almost impossible standards of beauty.
This aesthetic appears to have changed drastically, from what I’ve seen in my recent forays on the websites of Vogue, Allure, Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair. Having ignored fashion for several years, I was totally shocked to see how identity politics and the closely-related Body Positive movement appear to have overrun fashion completely. The webpages of the leading fashion publications have now become bastions for people and styles that would never previously have been called beautiful, quite the opposite. For example, morbidly obese women are now held out as “sexy” and people with acute gender dysphoria are celebrated as “fashion forward”. The fashion world has morphed from being the preserve of the Nazi Fat Police into a world that’s aggressively pushing the acceptance of ideals upon its readership which would have previously been deemed highly undesirable.
Jacob Tobia is a “Genderqueer” person whose videos are currently running in the pages of Vogue and Cosmopolitan, where s/he is seen describing the difficulties s/he faces finding a mate while affirming self love and self acceptance. It’s interesting to notice one’s reaction to Jacob’s talk.
The fashion world has never been a healthy place and I don’t know that the current trend is any less healthy than previous Fascistic iterations but it’s interesting to see where fashion has gone in order to stay relevant to the generation of Body Positive Identitarians.
