Two years ago I began mentoring BUILD Beauty, a new college club for female stu- dents on my campus. BUILD stands for
Believe in yourself, Undo negative thinking, Inspire others, Live fully, and Dream. Damaging
images of women in the media motivated the
undergraduate founder to create a sisterhood to
help young women find other ways of valuing
and evaluating themselves.
Her impetus didn’t surprise me. Strong feelings about this topic had already arisen in an assignment in my Fiction Writing class: a dramatic monologue form of the short-short story that
I call the rant. The objective is to unleash a narrator to freely associate on any topic. The results
are often hilarious, sometimes heart-rending.
That semester, for several women, the rants were
both. Their female narrators ranted about the ev-er-changing fit of jeans, the capriciousness of
clothing trends, and the conspiracy of labels to
inflate sizing to seduce even large women into
seeing themselves as an elusive size six. Rants
also explored the expectations of guys and dating. Most of all, students ranted about celebrities, beauty, and fashion magazines. Nothing,
these young women concluded through their
rant personae, would more quickly bring on a fit
of hopelessness characterized by donning sweat-pants, lying on the couch and devouring a pint
of ice cream than reading several beauty magazines in a row.
Fashion designer Betsey Johnson is widely
quoted as having said, “Girls don’t dress for
boys; they dress for themselves and each other.
If girls dressed for boys, they’d walk around
naked.” Yet, hilariously and painfully evident in
my students’ rants was their view that fashion
was the greatest contributor to unrealistic beauty
expectations in both genders generally, and to
women’s self-loathing in particular. Theirs is not
the first generation to feel so. In her 1972 Esquire
essay, “A Few Words about Breasts,” humor
writer and eventual filmmaker Nora Ephron laments the rigid 1950’s “intolerance of [flat-chested] androgyny,” a physical category she
ambivalently claimed as her own. Ephron remembers a salient moment as a budding teen:
“‘I want to buy a bra,’ I said to my mother one
night. ‘What for?’ she said.” Ephron’s love affairs as a grown woman revolved around her A
cup: “There were men who minded and let me
know that they minded. There were men who
did not mind. In any case, I always minded.”
Miscast in the era of actress Jane Russell’s va-va-voom curves, Ephron’s lifelong nagging fear
of being flat-chested contrasts with the current
era in which litheness is the reigning taste and
tabula rasa of fashion.
No matter how one is shaped, fashion seems
to say, the trend favors what one is not. Consid-
ering the markets supported by fashion and
beauty industries, this is not surprising. Watch-
ing even one episode of Project Runway, the real-
ity series about aspiring fashion designers, re-
veals unequivocally that the fashion industry is
purveyed not by visionaries in service to
customers, but by (predominantly male) design-
ers for whom women are merely animate deliv-
ery systems for the creativity of the label. In-
deed, designer Karl Lagerfeld once proclaimed,
“The woman is the most perfect doll that I have
dressed with delight and admiration.” Never
is this attitude so clear as in the episodes of
Project Runway that challenge aspiring designers
to create clothing for “real” (read: variously
sized and shaped) women.
The BUILD club founder noted that fashion
often makes women hate the way they look,
while beauty and fitness magazines and the rest
of contemporary culture make women feel
guilty for falling prey to low self-image. In Fiction Writing class she had ranted about it, and
in the club she hoped to address this. I agreed
that recognizing negative images for the harm
they cause was a positive step, but getting young
women to dislike media together didn’t sound
like much of a club to me. There would need to
be something more. In the conversations that
followed, the concept of BUILD was born.
Image
Problematic right away was how to create
something positive without simply substituting
one set of images for another. If the raft of Internet stories and self-help books are any indication, believing in oneself is easiest when visualizing what one wants to be. Immediately, the
students went looking for role models in the
media. But does seeing oneself as Catherine, the
Duchess of Cambridge or country music superstar Taylor Swift inspire a college student to become a better version of herself? Social psychologists Penelope Lockwood and Ziva Kunda suggest not in their 1999 study, “Increasing the Salience of One’s Best Selves Can Undermine
Inspiration by Outstanding Role Models,” in the
