FashBlog.com

When heroin chic and the seventies came in, I went out. I donned my sweats and allowed the fashion industry to exist without me. I knew I was not alone since our local newspaper ran an article revealing the dominant attire of our local high school students was either sweats or pajama pants. I even spotted more than one adult at the grocery store in what I would characterize as pajama pants. This pleasant course of events continued until my daughters reached their teens, then fashion forced its way back through my door. I managed to ignore its presence for at least a year until I picked up my daughter's copy of Seventeen Magazine under the guise of responsible parenting. Little did I know what a can of worms I was opening.
My first discovery was that they have fat girls in Seventeen. I realize this is a politically incorrect way to characterize the plus models that have been added to the teen magazines in a positive step to address all aspects of the teen population. The residual teen that exists in my Id, however, cannot get over the fact there are fat girls in Seventeen. In my day there were never fat girls in Seventeen unless they were part of a before and after article. I was a fat girl, at least by model standards, which we all knew were the only standards that mattered. If your thighs touched, you were fat. If you were fat, you were not pretty, boys wouldn't like you, you had no value in the social world. In my teenage world perfection was more important than self-esteem. In fact I was raised in the days before self-esteem was important. You were either good enough to make the team or you were out. I was out.
My daughters, of course, were not raised with this expectation of perfection. They were assured of their beauty since infancy and my efforts have paid off. I learned in college that a large part of beauty is the self confidence to project beauty. A woman who believes in her physical beauty is often perceived as beautiful by those surrounding her, even if she is not picture perfect. I have also met enough models to know the media illusion of beauty is just that, an illusion. I used to see a college acquaintance of mine every time I went to the airport; she was the face of a major car rental company. I knew what she looked like in real life, pretty, but not as pretty as the girl whose pictures I saw at the airport. I also knew the bitterness she had at the industry that provided her with the means to pay for her own college education. This bitterness was present in almost every intelligent girl I had met who had spent time in the modeling industry. So I kept my girls away from dreams of modeling and the idolization of media illusions. Their self confidence was built at home and if I had perceptions as to how they could be more perfect, I kept them to myself. Intellectually I knew the girls in Seventeen were not perfect. I worked to beak the cycle of insecurity that the fashion industry perpetuates.
Intellectual realization does not stop a woman whose parents had to throw away seven years of Seventeen magazines, from ordering Seventeen once her daughters came of age. I did not read it myself, recognizing my time for that magazine had passed. When I finally picked it up I did so as a parent, reviewing what was influencing my children. My adult reaction came straight from my Id, I yelled "there are fat girls in Seventeen". My daughters were not surprised by the existence of plus models in their magazine. In fact one of my daughters inferred she finds their inclusion reaffirming. Even girls who are not a size 2, as is her older sister, can be fashionable and are in Seventeen. It's not my kids who are having problems with the inclusion of plus models, it is me. I am finally being forced to emotionally deal with fashions demand for perfection, a demand fashion still makes from me but I would not allow fashion to make from my daughters.
A wider range of beauty is being presented to our daughters. While we intellectually demand and applaud this movement by magazine editors, we can not always stop the emotional response when the impossible standards of beauty we were raised with are challenged. Sometimes we need to let our hidden teen self read Seventeen, so she can learn she always was beautiful, she just did not know it. Maybe then we can teach our daughters with our actions, not just our words