Spare Some Change? I Want To Buy Beauty

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As Australian Fashion Week draws to a close, we enter or finish the debate (depending on when you started) about beauty and the role it plays in body images issues.

When I think about body images issues, I do tend to think of something that I can and do try to eliminate from my life, but it is still something that creeps into the back of my mind from time to time. But one thing I know that I can do unequivocally, if I so choose, is to eliminate anything in my life which may cause those feelings of paranoia or general vanity. We all know that women’s magazines and fashion does tend contribute to these feelings, but if we didn’t have them would we not still manage to find some other source of them?

It is perfectly sensible to want to change the way in which we view an idealized view of beauty. Certainly, we can always change the idea of beauty to include someone who is fatter or rounder-headed or maybe even someone with a spinal problem, but isn’t the concept of beauty itself something that is unattainable? 

The reality is that as soon as we create an idea of beauty we are immediately polarizing society – no one society can be represented in one image. As soon as we say overweight is beauty, we say that being skinny or slightly overweight or slightly underweight is not.

I know for a fact that if I wasn’t picking on myself when I look in the mirror about my weight or my poor posture or the bags under my eyes (that are inexplicably always there no matter how much sleep I get), it would just be something else. Because that’s what beauty does – it presents us with something we couldn’t possibly have and then says ‘buy me!’

Surprised that this has argument has come down to capitalism? You shouldn’t be.

My point is that if we all ignored this idea of beauty all together and just said it’s fine that I’m weird and different – because we ALL are – then we would probably not have this problem at all.

The fashion industry wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have some sort of desire to make ourselves closer to what the current concept of beauty is – it is built on it. I don’t think realistically there is any solution to this other than to accept that it IS unattainable.

The closest thing I have ever heard to a solution was introduced by a political group in Britain, in which it was suggested that there is a conscription in modeling in which a member of the public is chosen at random and must be called up to model something – like jury duty. I think this is a fantastic idea!

However, I personally prefer a world in which there is unattainable beauty for the same reason that I like to look at a sunrise - when you see it presented in the right way it can be breathtaking. I don’t feel that I have to embody a sunrise, instead, I can admire it from afar. Then when the feeling is gone, I can get on with reality.

Beauty will always be something that people will look for because it is in our nature – if some things are bad, then by definition other things must amazing. A world in which you personally thought everyone was unbelievably beautiful would get boring for the same reason that a world covered in sunrises would get boring.