To disagree with the narrative that gay male fashion designers design for slim androgynous women because they want them to look like young men?

[Carla786]

I've seen this argument on several MN threads recently as well as other places, but I don't think it fits the facts.
Gay men can definitely be sexist but this particular argument (that gay male designers design for slim androgynous women because they want models to look like young men and don't care about impacts like anorexia) doesn't fit the evidence imo.
Gay male designers have obviously been prominent in fashion but I don't think there's a clear pattern of them designing only androgynous slim women, nor that they secretly want their models to look like men.
If you look at fashion history, the 1920s slim, androgynous gamine look was popularised by the flapper subculture and designers like Coco Chanel. The similar look in the 60s (Twiggy etc) doesn't seem to have been only popularised by gay male designers.
There's also a clear pattern of gay male designers designing for very curvaceous women. Dior's New Look in the 50s, obviously. Then in the 80s,

Versace, Dolce & Gabbana didn’t emphasise androgynous looks, models like Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford etc were not exactly androgynous!

Another example would be Gia Carangi. She wasn’t androgynous physically (though in her private life she was more so) and she was supported & promoted by gay men.

The 90s heroin chic era was the one which caused eating disorders : afaik 1920s & 1960s trends did not do this. But was this masterminded by gay male designers? I'm unconvinced. Kate Moss' look fit the grunge-era rebellion against flamboyant 80s looks, it seems more like extreme trend cycling and pendulum swinging to me.

Anna Wintour (Vogue), Isabella Blow, and other influential editors also share the blame for unhealthy standards promoted.
Fashion editors, critics, and journalists — esp magazines like Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar — were largely women. So we're models, clearly. I think male designers who promote unhealthy looks should be blamed, but so should journalists, editors & models.
This argument also seems to assume that gay male designers want the models to look like the object of their desire (ie. Men). But plenty of designers, male and female, can admire a model' look or wish to emulate it rather than want the model to look more like the kind of person they're attracted to. And if gay male designers, according to this theory, want to design for young men, why would they work in womenswear?

I must have missed the regular threads about gay male designers on MN.

I have no interest in fashion. I probably couldn’t name a male designer let alone a gay one. I shop at Next. But looking at models - half of whom barely look human they’re so emaciated - I think it’s very clear it’s a toxic industry that is very pro ana. And we can’t just blame the women - the men, even the gay ones, need to take the blame too.

This argument also seems to treat female fashion consumers/journalists/editors etc as if they're bewitched by nefarious gay designers, rather than making choices based on what looks they like.

Clearly some women do like the flatter-chested, slim, more androgynous look : flappers did, 60s women emulating Twiggy did etc. This didn't seem to lead to eating disorders or extreme unhealthiness. So what changed in the 90s to make it unhealthy? More media pressure? I want to look into this.

Certainly the fashion industry can & does exert unhealthy pressure & influence, but I don't think that the slim/flat-chested/androgynous look is simply something some women were brainwashed into liking.

Also extremely ageist, another problem we can thank men for, the fashion industry continues to be virtually paedophilic in its obsession with youth, trying to buy well made flattering non frumpy clothes for older women is virtually impossible on the high street.

Well recently they‘ve even skipped the middle (wo)men and just got trans women to model to get the slim androgynous look.

Thought I thought one reason was it was easier for the designer to have the clothes smaller and that was why models had to be emaciated to fit them.

Not threads but I've seen this comment quite a lot on various threads. Here's one, for instance, where several posters say it :

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5111453-to-think-a-lot-of-men-arent-that-bothered-about-women-being-ultra-slim?page=1

I like fashion but I don't really bother about what's current, I prefer older stuff. A lot of places a shop at seem to have fairly normal size models, or at least not anorexic looking, but I agree that the industry is probably still pretty unhealthy.

But I just don't think history shows gay men in particular pushing a slim androgynous look. Was this happening in the 50s with the Dior New Look? Or the 80s with the curvy supermodel era?

Gay men have been very prominent in the fashion industry for ages. But fashion hasn't always promoted unhealthily skinny or even androgynous women..as I said, the heroin chic era was fairly recent. So something must have been going on to trigger it apart from gay men.

I'm strongly gender critical but have trans models been used though a lot? I thought occasionally they were used to seem woke but generally not.

That may be one reason : smaller clothes easier, but this is fairly recent. What changed?

I work for a fashion brand but not in the creative side.

As far as I can tell, they basically want the model to be a coat hanger. Really they just want them there to hang the clothes on. Thus going for a slightly wider shoulder, then minimal lumps and bumps on the way down, heaven forbid anything should get in the way of lines/fall. Its all about the clothes, they treat the clothes like a piece of art to be displayed rather than choosing clothes to make the model look good.

Yes, the industry is really ageist.
Otoh while high fashion is unfairly dominated by (usually gay) men, most designers overall are women. And women are the .majority of journalists & editors etc. So why can't they try to change this? It's not only a male problem although sexist male designers clearly are an important part of the problem.

Interesting and disturbing!
Do you feel this is a male/gay male-created issue? Are female designers the same usually- from what you can see?

I suppose though, while the coat hanger approach sounds unhealthy, a model will generally be chosen to show the clothes rather than vice versa : unless they're a supermodel or other well-known person..

I wonder if this also downstream from the so-called Prada Effect.

During the supermodel era, figures like Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford etc were celebrities in their own right, and some designers wanted more control.
The aesthetic of Prada’s runway increasingly featured very slim, often Eastern European models with neutral expressions and understated personalities. These models functioned less as stars and more as “blank canvases” for the clothes. And it seems this continues to this day.

Of course Miuccia Prada isn't a gay man : I'm unconvinced gay designers are an important factor. I think misogyny is though.

I'm certainly don't think that we should just blame the women in the industry, or that gay designers should not be criticised.

What I do think is that I don't think the manifest issues with clothes are due to many designers being gay. And I also think the narrative that women only buy those kinds of clothes because they've been bewitched by gay male designers, and otherwise wouldn't buy them, is unrealistic. Female editors, journalists as well as designers etc have all been involved in promoting unhealthy looks, and there's been a focus on skinniness at other times before, not necessarily promoted by male designers.

I'm not familiar with this 'narrative' and it sounds like some social media driven bollocks to me, but what I do know is that the camera adds pounds like you wouldn't believe. I saw a film recently that someone I know is in (in a bit part). This woman is the teeniest, most petite person you can imagine but on film she looked like she'd eaten all the pies and then some. Sometimes the obvious answer (i.e. that models are stick thin because the alternative is for them to look dumpy, which doesn't make you want to buy the clothes) is the correct one.

Interesting point re camera adding pounds: why is that?

I think this argument is used less now but I've still seen it in various places including quite a few threads here.

These 2 articles from 2010s Guardian show both sides of the argument.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/07/vogue-not-for-children

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/13/patrick-strudwick-feminism-gay-fashion-designers

There were plenty of young women with eating disorders in the 1960s. My mother shared psychiatric wards with them. I suspect eating disorders go back way before that.

I'm sorry about your mother. 💐 Definitely eating disorders were around pre-1990s. There was a spike in the 1990s which coincided with the heroin chic era, but there was apparently a spike in the 60s (coinciding with the Twiggy era) and it dates back at least to the 1870s, probably before.
Speculation but some think medieval nuns & saints who focused on fasting may have been anorexic in some cases.

These 2 articles give some information about the history.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&rct=j&url=www.lookingglassbc.com/a-cultural-history-of-eating-disorders/%23:~:text%3DFast%2520forward%2520to%2520the%2520new,topics%2520in%2520a%2520given%2520year.&ved=2ahUKEwj52K3ckpiTAxXiZ0EAHVnXEigQmL8OegQIBhAC&opi=89978449&cd&psig=AOvVaw0pPhYGoe0KAM0W5qfQAO0-&ust=1773328803220000

I came her to say this. I know it’s not loads or even the majority (yet) but there are definitely a significant number of TiMs now working as models. Not only does this skew the design/fit of clothes, it holds skinny male bodies as female beauty standards.

Interesting, I agree that's worrying. Do you know of any names?

Alex Consani, Hunter Schafer, Valentina Sampaio, Leyna Bloom, Munroe Bergdorf, Isis King, Kai Schreiber……

Phew, I had heard of some of these but had no idea they were so prominent.

I suppose a small mercy is that most of these are very well-known FOR being trans. So hopefully at least some people who see them will be aware they are not biological women.

Personally I think trans women models will never be a major thing, companies surely know most women don't want this. It is worrying though..

What’s worrying is the determination to force us to accept that TWAW, instead of acknowledging that TiMs are men/boys, so no, I don’t think most companies know that women don’t want this. Sure, the ones I’ve named are known as TiMs, but they are the famous ones. Unless we push back against the re-emerging beauty standard of rail thin and ‘boyish’ we could end up with a much more significant proportion of models being trans, because the clothes don’t fit most biological women.

I think it's more that they want the clothes to look good, way more than they care about whether the women look good or not. Clothes just hang better on the thin frame - no lumps and bumps to spoil it. Easier to get a good picture from every angle. Maybe this wasn't true when women wore corsets and their dresses were pretty tight around the corseted frame. But as soon as the less structured fashions came in (1960s) - loose clothes, clothes without defined waists, clothes you can actually move in - the coat-hanger look showed them off to better advantage.