I seem to be doing a lot of quick thoughts these days. It works well for me.
I was talking to a friend yesterday about clothing and weight and size. She’s into vintage clothing and works in theater, so does costumes on occasion. We were also out shopping, and wandered into a consignment shop with a high percentage of vintage clothing. In the course of our conversation, she mentioned that a large part of the reason many of the vintage pieces available are so teensy is that the larger pieces were often recut or retailored or otherwise reused.
Think about it.
This makes sense, right? Larger clothing has more fabric, therefore, it is more likely to be cut up in order to make more clothing.
Another additional thought: Before the days of ready to wear clothing, everything was hand made, and took time and effort to create. People wore their clothing out. If something still exists today, 50 or 100 years later, it probably wasn’t worn as often.
I’m not saying that we aren’t at all larger on average than the human race was in the past, but again, we’re taller, too, and many of us have access to better nutrition. Comments like “people were so much smaller ______ years ago” just don’t fully encompass the changes that have occurred in the elapsed time.
Fairly straightfoward here. From the medical side, I’ll add:
People live a lot longer now. My grandmother died before I was born because of a relapse caused by having rickets as a child. Malnourishment fail.
People are also a lot taller now. At 5ft 9, I’m not very tall, but 50 years ago I certainly would be.
We have access to much better communication and travel technology now. So the “bigger milkmaid” would have been considered normal in agricultural-dominated times, but because we can travel more and see patterns more, we’re now terrified of an “epidemic”.
Give it another 100 years, we’ll have a different body fashion that stigmatises normal people - only people will be complaining that the vintage clothing is bigger, or smaller at the hips showing “less defined hips” is healthier and various other silliness. And probably scarier, the male pressure will be more developed so we’ll *all* be under more pressure to be things we cannot be.
Marjane Satrapi makes an interesting point in Persepolis (the novel rather than the film, which doesn’t get the time to go into detail): in that if you’re constantly paying attention to how you look out of fear - in her case, whether your hair is covered, making sure you have documentation that your companion is actually your cousin and not an illegal boyfriend, whether your clothing shows your bum wobbling and hence could invoke punishment, you stop asking the big questions. Like, where did my rights go? Surely the government should have dropped *all* of their bombs by now? What information do I not have access to on my television or computer and why? How do I protest?
I think that the fear of feminism is based on this idea: if you’ve suddenly got a ton of people paying attention to their surroundings again, and they’re not happy with the status quo and want change, specifically, your power or money to go… yeah, I’d be scared too.
Yeah, I just used this reblog as an excuse for a little body-image post. Oops.
