Hmmm! what is normal or the norm when is comes to the body? ... as my first ballet teacher said to us, what you're about to do to your bodies are not 'natural', you're about to train and do things to your bodies which is fare from 'natural' ... and I think, as for dance, the same goes for modelling, but either way it's normal or not, for me it's not about contrasting body types or defining what should be the norm, because I think there is something beautiful, expressive and interesting in all body types.
Hussein C's naked female body has as much expressive and creative energies and 'value' as the next ... and to claim that he's, through the use of this type of body, is telling us this is the norm or we should all strive for this type of body, as suggest in his s/s 07 collection thread, is to easy. Especially a designer like Hussein C is clever enough to avoid any statements suggesting that what he shows us is the norm, because wouldn't this exactly take it's creative energies and potentials away, and become an imitation, instead what I believe, any artistic expression should strive for, reinvention ... reinventing reality!
I also think Iluvsja makes a really important point, that the real concern is not the imagery perse, but what is more concerning is how the consumer interprets it, reacts to it or by in to this fantasy, with no sense of critical thought, and I think the problem lies elsewhere than just what the media is bombarding us with, which is not to say that oversexualized body or the overexposure of sexual imagery is helping, but I just think that there more constructed ways of attacking these issues...
One thing is the subject obsession, another thing is the how the media is persued as a reality. I think Baudrillard puts quite radical, when he came out after the first Golf war saying "The Golfwar never took place". What he is saying is really not that the golfwar never took place, but the experience most people had was through media created gulfwar. What we witness on tv was more like a computer game, than a reality. It's in this context where the media is interpret as a reality, which is quite concerning or atleast it's concerning that people don't ask critcal questions about what they see ...
Reposting some of the thoughts, with slight moderations, I suggested In the Weight thread, because unfortunately the discussion turned into a discussion about which model looked anorexic or not, and I also think it deals within the same context:
One thing is the body trends in the fashion industy, but I think we have to look at this in a much broader context, as you also suggest Mutterlein, because I think to change these trends, we have to look at our society/culture, because the fashion industry doesn't just operate by it self, but is connected to much broader trends of embodiment in general. If we look to the media of everyday life(newspapers, advertisements, television programs, mall handouts, magazines etc.) it signals ways in which the 'natural' body has been dramatically refashioned through the application of new technologies of corporeality. This relies on a reconceptualization of the human body as a boundary figure belonging simultaneously to at least two previosly incompatible systems of meaning - 'The orgainic/natural' and 'the technologiacal/cultural'. At the point at which the body is reconceptualized not as a fixed part of nature, but as a boundary concept, we witness an ideological tug-of-war between competing systems of meaning which include and in part define the material struggles of physical bodies ...
This construction of a boundary between nature and culture serves seceral ideological purposes; most notably, it guarantees aproper order of things and establishes a hierarchical relationship between culture and nature. At a basic level, this socially constructed hierarchy functions to reassure a technologically overstimulated imagination that culture/man will prevail in his encounter with nature. The role of the body in this boundary setting process is significant because it becomes the place where anxieties about the 'proper order of things' erupt and are eventually ideologically managed. techno-bodies are healthy, enhanced and fully functional - more real than real. New biotechnologies are promoted and rationalized as life-enhancing and even life-saving. Often obscured are the discipling and surveillan consequances of new body technologies ...
In our hyper-mediated techno-culture, body awareness is amplified such that we can technologically witness, if not yet manage, the molecular functioning of bodily processes. Medically authorities encourage us to monitor consumption of sugar, caffeine, salt, fat, cholesterol, nicotine, alchohol, steroids, sunlight, narcotics etc, through the use of such devices as electronic scales, home pregnancy kits, diabetes tests, blood pressure machines, fat calipers etc. These devices function as a set of visualization techniques that contribute to the fragmentation of the body into organs fluids and 'bodily states', which in turn promote a self-conscious self-surveillance whereby the body becomes an object of intense vigilance and control ...
What scares me is the much broader context of this know-your-body obsession and how it manifest it self our contemporary culture, which also includes the fashion industry ...
I don't think dismantling predefined norms of the body image is a way to change or defining what should be portrait in the media, but instead, I think, the most important thing is to learn people how to be critical in there respons to this constant bombardment of imagery and text we are faced with in everyday life, because isn't quite scary how easily people buy into these "fantasies", how we react to this bombardment with no sense of filtering? ...
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