Early on in my research for the exhibition I attended a presentation by
the nonprofit organization Open Style Lab. We're gonna hear more about the lab
this afternoon but what they do is create clothing solutions for people
with diverse abilities. They pair designers with clients and over the
course of several weeks come up with a product that addresses a specific
challenge a client faces in daily life. When I visited them back in 2016 I was
very much struck by one of the clients who got up to speak at the end of her
groups presentation wearing the coat that they had designed for her. She was
quite moved and expressed how she had had the most incredible experience at
the lab because before she had always felt like her body was wrong and the
clothes were right. This really stuck with me. How many of us have had this
feeling to one degree or another? Buying a garment in a store or online, trying it on,
we can't get it on. It doesn't fit. We can't move in it and we feel terrible
about ourselves. We tried to fit our bodies to the clothes to the ideals we
see promoted in the magazines and the media rather than the other way around.
Rather than even as an industry thinking of clothing as something that's supposed
to fit bodies, that's supposed to enable our bodies to work with our bodies and
indeed to celebrate our bodies. It's not our bodies that are wrong. It is the
current fashion system that is flawed. Now of course there's been a growing
cultural conversation about the need for greater body diversity in the fashion
industry and also body positivity in general. My hope with this exhibition and
also today's proceedings is is that the exhibition can contribute a historical
perspective to the discourse. It can help us understand how we arrived where we
are today because I truly believe that until we understand how the current
system developed we can't begin to fix it and effect
permanent change and this issue isn't just about size. This is about age,
ability, mobility, race, and gender identity and each of these issues will
be touched on in today's conversations. At its core the exhibition examines the
history of the idealized fashion body. The ideal fashion body is a cultural
construct. It shifts and changes throughout history to emphasize
different shapes and proportions. We can see this in the design of garments in
the way a designer uses certain strategies to draw the eye to areas of
the body both concealing but also revealing. For
example by changing the placement of a waistline, the fullness of a sleeve, the
volume of a skirt. So in part this is a history of silhouette but this issue
goes far beyond silhouette. It is about body politics, about how bodies have been
portrayed and treated by the fashion industry, about how certain bodies have
been celebrated but also how others have been marginalized and even stigmatized.
In the exhibition, which is across the street and I hope all of you guys will
have the opportunity to go check it out today, the garments are paired with
images from the fashion press, the popular media, film clips, videos, workout
videos, and other digital elements to demonstrate how this issue permeates
across culture and society. As can be seen here the exhibition begins in the
18th century and then flows chronologically to culminate in a
display of looks by contemporary designers who embrace a more inclusive
vision of the fashionable body in their work and I believe are setting an
example for the industry. Among them are Christian Siriano, Becca McCarran Tran of
Chromat and Lucy Jones and I'm thrilled that each one of them are here
to speak a bit more about their work today.
When you first enter the gallery visitors are greeted with a display of
dress forms on the very first platform. At the center is Martin Margiela dress
form tunic hovering almost floating above the platform. Surrounding the
Margiela piece are our historical dress forms from the 18th and 19th century.
These come from I'm sorry from the 19th and 20th century. The Martin Margiela
piece is Margiela's comment on the artificial nature of the fashionable
ideal. Instead of tricking the eye through silhouette it literally
transforms the model's body into a dress form into a tool used during the fashion
design process to drape and fit garments. The juxtaposition of the Margiela piece
with the historical dress forms is here to demonstrate how much even the ideal
dress form shape is a historical construct. It too has changed throughout
history. As visitors move through the space they'll immediately see that all
of the objects are dressed on dress forms throughout the show. I made this
decision very consciously for two reasons one is because dress forms given
that they don't have heads or often arms and legs they make the garment the focal
point of the display. It seems almost floating on the platform. But dress forms
themselves are also an integral part of the fashion design process and they're
deeply related to the relationship between design garments and the bodies
that wear them. When considering fashion and physique garments cannot be
separated from what they're dressed on even in the space of the museum. With the
Margiela display I wanted to address this issue head-on in the very first
room of the gallery so that the dress forms become as much a part of the
history and the consideration of the display as the garments themselves. For
some of the pieces on view our conservation team did incredible work
building out specific forms for the garments. These images here were taken by
our conservator Marjorie Jonas as she built out the form for a 1913 evening
dress. We did this very consciously in order to
highlight and celebrate the wearers of these garments, the original wearers. We
did this because there is a common misconception that all women in the past
were thinner than we are today, that they were all one size, that all women in the
19th century had 18 inch wasp waists and this is just not true. Body diversity has
existed throughout history. No two bodies are the same and our bodies go through
many different stages throughout our lifetimes.
So for this exhibition we wanted to embrace this diversity and through the
display highlight the diversity of sizes contained within our collection that
span from across history. One issue that recurs throughout the display is the
issue of how fashionable silhouettes are translated into impossible body
standards in the fashion press. This is displayed in 2D materials such as the
book seen here but also in different fashion plates and imagery on the walls
of the exhibition and on iPads throughout the display. We can understand
how the body is manipulated quite easily when looking at fashion plates from the
18th and 19th century where illustrators used pen and paper to manipulate the
body. In a particular example from the 1830s which echoes a pair of garments on
display the proportions are exaggerated to an unnatural degree. The mans and
womans wastes are drawn smaller than their heads. The shoulders are impossibly
broad. The feet impossibly small. Such extreme manipulation still occurs today
but it is much more difficult to detect due to advancements in photo
manipulating software like Photoshop. I'm about to play a clip another short clip
from a video on display in the exhibition that demonstrates the extreme
alterations that can be achieved using programs like this.
This video was created in 2011 to advocate for legislation that would
require advertisements to include a warning label alerting viewers that the
image had been altered. Such legislation has come up in debate again and
hopefully we'll see some movement with it but it's not just imagery from the
fashion media that impacts how we think about good and bad bodies, how we judge
bodies. It's also about how clothing how fashion is used throughout the popular
press throughout popular culture to judge bodies to critique bodies and this
is particularly apparent in depictions of so-called fashion victims. Women
rendered ridiculous by their clothing. Here are a couple of examples of
satirical cartoons from the 18th and 19th centuries that are on view within
the exhibition. On the left in an illustration titled "A Little Tighter" a
woman is forcefully pulled into stays by a notably slimmer man. Here it is not the
stays that are being portrayed as unfashionable but her body. The joke
being that no matter how hard the man pulls, no matter how tight the stay has
become, she will never be successful in looking fashionable because of her
physique. Similarly a cartoon from the British satirical publication Punch
uses fashionable dress to mock women because of their age. At the center we
see a young woman asking her grandmother if she can try on a
similar shoulder bearing style of dress to which her grandmother scoff saying
don't be ridiculous you would look a fright. However here the joke is placed
firmly on the grandmother for it is implied that it's the younger woman's
physique that is actually more appropriate to show off while the older
woman is frightening, grotesque. This issue of what is appropriate or
inappropriate underlies a lot of our attitudes towards bodies and I believe a
number of our speakers later today are going to touch on this in different ways
but what constitutes a fashionable body isn't as simple as thin versus not thin.
It cuts deeper to social views on modesty propriety and what is and is not
considered appropriate. In 1913 caricature artist George Goursat published
the book "Le Vie et Le Faux Chic" which quite literally means the true and the
false fashionable. What we see in the subsequent illustrations are old women,
short women, fat women, each rendered ridiculous by their attempt to dress
fashionably. Their bodies immediately comparable to the longer, leaner, younger
bodies of the women Goursat deems the le faux chic. It is not the clothing that
changes between the images but the women making it the women or more precisely
their bodies that are playful not the particular garment or ensemble. Sadly I
think we all can attest that this sentiment of these images does not feel
so foreign to us. It feels very familiar. We still see body
shaming thinly-veiled a sartorial judgment today in tabloids on television
across the internet. As Laird Borrelia of Vogue recently put it on a visit to the
exhibition these images prove that trolling is anything but a new
phenomenon and indeed the Internet has become the new frontier of body shaming
but it has also given rise to the grassroots body positivity movement that
has disrupted and challenged the status quo and
fashion. Overall the internet and social media have completely upended the
hierarchy of the fashion system. Fashion information no longer flows in a linear
way from designers to magazine editors and buyers and then to consumers.
Now people outside traditional fashion institutions can post images of their
outfits, share style choices and tips, even comment on a brand social media
account or organize a viral campaign against a retailer that will affect
their profits. There's power here and many women and men with bodies typically
excluded from the mainstream fashion press have harnessed the Internet to
cultivate a community that's dedicated to body positive imagery. Through their
blogging, Instagram, YouTube posts, and other platforms they challenge body
image ideals and also societal norms of what is an appropriate way to dress
different sized bodies. They showed that bodies of all sizes and the clothes that
they wear are fashionable and they are the ones who are truly pushing this
conversation forward. It's the industry that needs to listen and catch up. But
while there are many designers and individuals out there who are making
moves in the fashion industry today it's important that we remember there have
been points over the last hundred years when plus-size fashion for example has
been a more visible part of the mainstream fashion industry. Lauren
Downing Peters, one of the scholars speaking this afternoon, will elaborate
more on this later but during the 1910s and 1920s retailers like Lane Bryant for
example pioneered fashionable ready-to-wear in extended sizes. Today we
would call this plus-size but then it was referred to with the darling term of
stoutwear. We have a rare example of 1920s stoutwear on view in the
exhibition just at the center here this vibrant orange and purple evening pajama
set would have likely been purchased ready-made from a higher-end department
store or boutique and worn at home to entertain guests.
Several decades later during the 1980s and early 1990s the fashion
industry again witnessed a blossoming of the plus-size market and in fact this is
the period when the term plus-size was institutionalized. Lane Bryant continued
to be a significant force but retailers like New York's The Forgotten Woman made
headway into the mainstream fashion conversation and high fashion labels
like Givenchy for example began to introduce their own lines called Givenchy
en Plus. The images here are from a special advertising section that Vogue
ran at this time which was dedicated exclusively to discussing plus-size
fashion and its forays into the industry. But these moments of greater inclusivity
or visibility I should say proved to be just that
moments. Moments that did not move beyond mentions a few mentions or well-placed
advertisements in the mainstream fashion press before they faded back into the
margins of the industry. We need to learn this history. We need to know this
history and remember this history because we need to be vigilant right now.
We need to make sure that the current conversation surrounding diversity don't
fade that this doesn't become a passing trend that we can gain strength and
effect permanent change in the industry. I'd like to conclude with a quote from
psychologist and leading body image expert Thomas Cash. According to Cash our
basic sense of identity as people comes from our experience in our bodies. In his
own words quote the body is the boundary between you and everything that is not
you end quote. He explains that becoming aware of our
bodies as children is how we begin to see ourselves in our own eyes. As Joanne
Entwistle stated in the video clip that I played at the beginning of this talk
clothing is the way that we make our bodies social.
If we cannot find clothing that fits our bodies that works with our bodies it
celebrates our bodies if an industry is telling us that our bodies are wrong
that is going to deeply affect our sense of identity, our sense of ourselves, and
it's going to impact how we view and treat our own bodies and view and treat
the bodies of others. Everyone deserves to participate in fashion and I hope
that conversations like the ones we will be having today and the exhibition
across the street can help us to one day have a truly inclusive industry. Thank you.
[Applause]