link Video – Kate Upton and the Rise of the Curvy Customer – WSJ.com.
Years ago, a business associate remarked that the Hong Kong women were all so stylistically avant garde. When asked why, the retort was that they were all getting breast implants to make them look curvier. This was an odd observation to me because I had never known that curvy women had ever NOT been in fashion.
I tell this story because it illustrates the difference between what’s considered fashionable and what’s considered attractive. As we know, the two can be poles apart. Of course, different cultures will dictate distinct preferences as well. In the African Masai culture, women with elongated necks are considered attractive. In asian cultures, big feet on women are unappealing. In many cultures, thickness is an attractive trait of otherwise ugly men…thickness of wallet that is. In modern western culture, preposterously large breasts on an otherwise slim body are considered attractive in women.
For decades, western culture has been coerced to believe that a thin, almost boyish profile was the ideal for fashionable women. This has much to do with the fact that the fashion industry is dominated by gay personalities and so their tastes become our tastes. In the extreme case, ‘heroin chic’ was the look desired for many runway models only a decade ago. Even now, women still strive to attain a weight profile more resembling that of a 12 year old boy than a normal female.
Growing up, it was Farrah, Raquel and Sophia, not Twiggy or Kate Moss that jump-started puberty in young boys. To this day, women can aspire to be like Gwynneth, but speaking for all men, Christina Hendricks would likely be a more ideal dinner date. The linked article implies that women are now accepting the ‘curves are good’ paradigm espoused by Kate Upton. While you’d have to be awfully nearsighted to mistake Upton for a boy, she is hardly Rubenesque by any stretch. Women may finally have come to realize that men are generally attracted to curvy women…at least straight men.
Perhaps the tyranny of the boyish look for women is coming to an end. And this is a good thing. Women can’t do it and men don’t like it. To be candid, we’re talking curvy here, not completely round. That’s another discussion. Now if we could only do something about tattoos….