15th
Ralph Lauren’s Global BMI Battle
Note: the misspelling in Filippa Hamilton’s name has been corrected.
When apologizing last week about the Photoshopped Filippa Hamilton photo, Ralph Lauren neglected to mention that they had fired Hamilton in April 2009.
Bad story, I know. But this morning I discovered that the Photoshopped image ran in Japan. Bingo.
Japanese young women are notoriously thin — anorexic really. Thinness is a lifestyle in Japan.
According to MyNippon, the average BMI of a Japanese woman is 16 to 20 and an obsession with thinness in women is sweeping Japanese culture.
Is this news ALL bad? After all, scientists are studying calorie-restriction diets in labs around the world.
Anorexia kicks in under 18.5, but not every Japanese woman is unhealthy. What’s piling on the pounds in Japan is American fast food.
One must back away and consider the cultural aspect of this trend and the health aspects. We all know that Americans are too fat collectively, and we’re facing a national health crisis.
Thoughts going through my mind right now:
1) Japanese culture is not known for favoring women’s rights. A certain patriarchal misogyny continues to run rampant in Japanese culture. Japan was just cited by the UN for backwards views on women. See A of C When the Subject is Women’s and Whale Rights, the Japanese Fall Far from Grace.
2) I must investigate Chinese and Indian attitudes on women’s rights. Clearly, women’s lives are evolving in those parts of the world but they are generally considered to be governed by patriarchal practices and customs.
3) What are the BMIs of women in these new ports of luxury? Thin.
While luxury markets deteriorate in America and Europe, they are revving up in China and India. I must check the status of luxury sales in Japan. With the bad economy they should fall, but the Japanese young women are known for continuing to invest in a few good things.
The Japanese young women adore designer culture and will follow designer trends religiously.
4) I don’t excuse designers for promoting anorexic models for one moment. But I sense the entire topic is much more complicated, and it’s a global conversation that encompasses differing cultural visions of beauty, patriarchal attitudes, healthy eating, and a luxury market that is being redistributed globally.
5) I have absolutely no time for Karl Lagerfeld. He is a talented but most likely tyrannical, perverse man on the subject of female sexuality. He prefers men sexually — that’s no secret — and I sense that a loathing of women runs in his soul.
To reduce this conversation to “a bunch of fat mummies who sit with bags of potato chips in front of the television saying that thin models are ugly” is the statement of a tyrant.
But the issue is also much wider than the cultural views of American women, even if Ralph Lauren is an “American” brand. If you dig beneath the surface, there’s lots of global business topics, simmering in this conversation.
One assumes that global fashion brands can accommodate more than one vision of beauty. But in the interests of saving money and presenting single images of beauty, sizes are shrinking. For designers who prefer coat hanger bodies to show their clothes, smaller is always better.
AND, I do believe that many fashion designers want to wipe any sense of a powerful female sexuality off the face of the globe. So this trend is all working for them, exactly as they want it.
6) What do Diane von Furstenberg and Donna Karan say? Anne
