(Untitled)

[idiosyncracy]

I've been looking through my husband's textbook from the art history class he took his first quarter at school, and I noticed something. In the majority of nudes of women throughout history, including in depictions of the goddess Venus/Aphrodite, women are shown having relatively small breasts (by today's standards), softer, rounder stomachs, and

Comments

[dyfferent]

People with tight bods used to be those who worked for a living, so having a tight bod was low class. Nowadays, people with tight bods are the people with money to go to a gym and buy healthy, non-processed, expensive food, so having a flabby bod is low class instead.

[bluetara2020]

The concept of feminine (and indeed masculine but we'll save that for another time...) beauty has always been fluid. Part of the reason that nudes in particular have that structure is that for a long time (about a century or more) artists' models were actually male. Only a female of, shall we say, little virtue would pose for a male artist in the nude

[nanimo]

I'm completly with you on your first three paragraphs, although I think the fashion world is a little more nuanced than you imply towards the end. Americans, especially, have a tendancy to be socially influenced (in both aesthetics and mores) by the lower classes. In fact, Americans can pretty much thank the labor class for us having a hetereosocial culture. A few generations of social and fashion change occured from college women emulating lower class women and the rest of the country looking to the college women as the most hip... That dynamic is no longer quite in play, but still there are a considerable number "fashion scouts" sent to area like spanish harlem--affecting both what throwaway manufacturers like Mossimo produce AND what makes it onto the Milan runways.

[bluetara2020]

Which is a good point. It is (much) more nuanced. I was thinking the colors of clothing more than the actual style. Although we get into the whole role model dynamic here, when it comes to fashion. Which is not a discussion I want to have, it tend to make me upset. Mainly when I think that Paris Hilton is considered a role model, for example.

[nanimo]

Bluetara up there has a pretty good handle on the history, but it may also be worth mentioning that the aesthetic fashion ideal is not necesarily the sex ideal. For example, women in pornography tend to have more meat on them than models of actresses. A couple of years ago a study asked men and women to look at three silhouettes of women's bodies and vote for which they thought would be the most attractive women. Almost all the women voted for the skinniest silhouette, while a slight majority of men voted for the middle figure and a fair number voted for the largest.

[bluetara2020]

There was a study done a while back on what was considered sexy to men in terms of physical attractiveness in regards to women. About 25% went for the supper skinny girls, 25% went for heavier ones and about 50% went either way or didn't care.

The aesthetic fashion ideal is in part influenced by the fact that it is harder to make mass produced clothing for larger women mainly because of the sheer differences in the way they are larger.

[eyelid]

It's really all speculation. I could advance any number of theories.