Excerpt from Mark C. Taylor's book, \"Hiding\" 1997
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
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fashion once again is wearing thin. It's not about light clothing, but fading bodies. As models have followed designers by emerging from an amenity to celebrity, fashion has become as much a matter of stylish bodies as of styled apparel. For the past several seasons, runways have been dominated by mega models like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington, whose presence is unmistakable. But recently things have been changing. In place of Cindy, Naomi and Christy. We now have Claudia Mason, Lucy Dale Afellay's Amber Valetta and, above all others, model of the moment. Kate Moss, upon whose fragile body Calvin Klein has hung his future. The smaller and thinner, the better to heap on more clothes, Calvin confidently declares. It seems we have been down this road before. In the 19 sixties, Twiggy was a shocking side track from the womanly, fully packed models of the day. Bert Stern, one of VOCs photographers, was practically a solo voice in a forest of negatives. She's perfectly pure and clear, like freshwater, he gushed. Twigs. Tiny teeth had chomped into the notion of conventional beauty. Her minimal hair and her major makeup were copied. Her figure, this figure launched a glut of madly dieting wannabes. But thin like fat, is not always the same. There are different kinds of fat and thin, and to confuse them is to miss their point. Twiggy is slender. Figure appears to be virtually sexless. In the 19 sixties, it was indeed more comfortable to think of Twiggy as a child like woman without a sexual history, as if her thin this made her neuter. It was widely and approvingly reported, that she slept with teddy bears. Twiki seemed familiar and reassuring. The longer you stare at Kate Moss, the less like Twiggy she appears. Gazing back at us from resolutely black and white, adds slight. Kate does not look familiar and reassuring, but hauntingly ghost, like her body, is unreal, ethereal, even illusory. It is as if Madley dieting wannabes had become gaunt anorexics. Moreover, anorexic bodies seem to reflect an anorexic culture that is obsessed with fat and intent on becoming lean, if not always mean. It is not merely clothing that has become transparent. The body itself is rapidly becoming a material, the latter day aesthetic worshiping a god that no longer appears. Kate Moss transforms herself into skin and bones, nothing but skin and bones. Here is an inner beauty that is finally indistinguishable from death