On the body of women and agender-ness

Photographer: Nita Strudwick Photography Model: me. Lifestyle shot

(Still writing Part II of my post on age and marketing. It will not be too long, I promise!)

As I was catching up with my reading on a lazy Sunday afternoon I came across a great issue of the Italian weekly L'Espresso, dated 7th January 2016, to which I subscribed a while ago as I wanted to keep up to date with what is happening in Italy and feel the pulse of the current political discourse. Somehow, I never managed to read it until yesterday. Let's not dwell on my tardiness!
This was an issue dedicated to women and their bodies, with the title On women's bodies, a reference to the violence usually unleashed on women's bodies - the articles inside discuss a few such instances - and with a great cover, shot by photographer Maki Galimberti. 

The picture  shows the same model, first wearing a burqa and then wearing nothing, posing  like Botticelli's Venus. The girl is young and beautiful, as befits an image of Venus, and appears to be extremely fragile. The article which this powerful image illustrates discusses the veil and puts forward the views of Bruno Nassim Aboudrar, professor of aesthetics at the Sorbonne, Paris and author of the book Comment le voile est devenu mussulman (How the veil became muslim).
It is indeed a very interesting book, worth reading. But I am not posting to discuss the book.

Another article, part of this issue, caught my attention, one written by Maria Luisa Frisa, fashion curator and professor of fashion theory at the University of Venice.  Frisa is the incredibly stylish lady featured in  Advanced Style by Ari Seth Cohen on his tour of Italy in 2014.
 Frisa regularly writes about fashion, so she is quite well known to anyone who has an interest in fashion as a cultural phenomenon.

The article in question is entitled Che violenza, la moda (Fashion, how violent) and discusses the whole issue of body image, citing the views of a number of couturiers on what to them is the ideal female body to dress (this resonates with me, when I was doing my research in Jakarta every time I met a designer I would ask him/her who they designed for, who were their muses).
I would love to translate the  article in its entirety but it would make a very long blog post, therefore I will summarise it, quoting from it, those of you interested in reading the original can view it here.
Frisa begins by suggesting that the (female) body in  fashion is a body redefined by clothes: the clothes alter the body and realign it with a changing imaginary that every time proposes a different body typology. She gives some apt examples. For Gianfranco Ferré, his ideal woman is tall, lean, well proportioned, agile, sleek and dynamic, with dark hair and full lips. Charles James thought that the female body was intrinsically wrongly shaped, to be improved by his designs, whereas Walter Albini's pronouncements sound a little chilling in their details: "Slim but with a solid bone structure. With straight, broad shoulders, a longish bust, narrow hips, small breasts. A small head, medium length hair, almost short. Not beautiful but definitely irresistible".
These are views put forward by men, male ideals  regularly projected on female bodies, redesigned through clothes to match each variant of the ideal.
Fashion remains male dominated, despite the presence of women, some of whom of the calibre of Coco Chanel, for whom "a woman should dress like her maid - with simplicity". Never mind here the class distinction (Chanel's clients were upper and middle class women, for whom a maid was part of their lifestyle): the message is clear, Coco Chanel advocates something quite different from what her male colleagues (still) do.
Frisa notes that it was precisely to counter the impossibly narrow waist proposed by Dior following the second world war that she, Coco, returned to designing clothes, feeling somewhat outraged by Dior's "anachronism".
Citing Germaine Greer, Frisa goes on to comment that the female body bears the marks of the superstructures that culturally inscribe it. The history of fashion and its changes, she goes on,  is a narrative of bodies re-designed by fashion itself, and is given in the sequence of silhouettes through which the manuals of history of fashion illustrate its changes.
Frisa notes that there are subtle differences between styling and designing in their respective  construction of the  body. The professional development and cultural cooperation between styling and design has changed over the  decades, prompting a readjustment in the way fashion looks at the bodies it clothes. And more recently, the search for a silhouette that can follow with ease the contours of both the male and the female body is being touted as the culmination of the utopian dreams of 'the modern body'  of the last century. The (male) designers and the creative directors of recent generations are moving into this area of indistinct agender-ness, where men and women are irrecognizably mixed.

'He, She, Me': an exclusive track by Devonté Hynes and Neneh Cherry, commissioned by Selfridges for 'Agender' pop up department.

Suddenly, says Frisa, the female stereotype imposed by the media, that of 'sex and silicone', is passé. Antiquated. Except that once again it is a male dominated design that defines the contours of the female body.
I have found this article very enlightening. I had not thought at all of the background to agenderness and how fundamentally male centred it is, as a concept. Thanks Maria Luisa!
I would love to hear some of your views.