Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

I am working on a particularly labor intensive project and my quest for knowledge led me to the California Afro-American Museum on the campus of USC. The museum featured numerous exhibits celebrating the creativity and the accomplishments of members of the African American community and the Diaspora but I was drawn, particularly, to the exhibit titled, “Curvature,” it celebrated the works of artists Michael Kilgore and Anthony Kemp. Curvature drew me into an artistic celebration of the beauty that encompasses the figure of every woman of African decent. Each artist credited their mothers, along with other female members of their family, as the catalyst to their love for the voluptuous female figure. I could not help but swish my hips a little more as I sashayed through the exhibit, admiring each interpretation of the female form.

Unfortunately, when I got home and turned on the television I was met with a different message. As we all know this is the season for fashion week. Members of the celebrity and fashion elite will attend shows in various fashion capitols to view designers’ artistic interpretations of everyday clothing. Fashion design is indeed an art form but it seems to me to be riddled in seclusion. Every year we cry foul at the pencil thin models that grace the runway, having only nourished themselves on cotton balls soaked in orange juice, and every year we go back for more. While I am not surprised at the bevy of women of European descent that flock to each major city to breath in the air of their favorite designer, I cannot seem to understand why so many women of African decent entertain themselves with works that do not celebrate their bodies.

I recently watched an episode of the Real Housewives of Atlanta (a guilty pleasure that I indulge in from time to time) and in this episode model Cynthia Bailey was invited by a friend and former colleague to walk in his Fashion Week show. Ms. Bailey has been out of the world of runway modeling for some time, but she still maintains her straight off the runway beauty. Ms. Bailey has been blessed with hips that women are paying, and in some cases, dying for but when she arrived to New York runway ready she was met with a question of how she gained so much weight. Now, maybe I wasn’t looking from the right angle, maybe I needed to tilt my television to see it better but I did not see any issue in this former runway model’s figure. But apparently they both did because this designer pointed it out and Ms. Bailey let it bother her to the point where her walk lacked its normal oomph of confidence.

I cannot seem to understand why we continuously plead for acceptance into a world that does not celebrate who we truly are. I have hips, I have breasts, I am supposed to, I am a woman. While there are women who naturally have a slim build, eating juice soaked cotton, (or nothing at all) does not constitute a naturally slim figure. I would like to be able to walk into a store and purchase a pair of jeans without having to go up 3 sizes because they are all styled, “super skinny.” I would like to turn on a fashion week display and see women with more diverse body types on the runway. Why should I buy your clothing if you are obviously not making it for me? Why is it that these clothes are modeled by the super skinny but when I go to purchase something every medium and large in stock is gone? Is there a disconnect that only I am seeing or are we blatantly ignoring the fact that women’s natural bodies are still being deemed unattractive in the year 2015?