The Black Dahlia is a peeling little basement club in northern Soho. I’m sure
that when the French fashion magazine Jalouse chose to have a party here
during fashion week, they thought it was cool, edgy, a little antifashion.
People stood outside smoking, noticing the mean stink of urine-soaked
streets, then this girl turned up. She had long, dark, artfully tangled bed
hair, a Betty Page-style Agent Provocateur leopard-print playsuit, opaque
black tights on long, shapely legs extended by a pair of YSL Tributes. She
stood outside, shooting off a big friendly gob, in a most lively and
entertaining way, about her new single status. Ah, that’d be Daisy Lowe,
then, freshly split from Mark Ronson, full of energy and — oh, my —
jaw-droppingly sexy.
Females gawped with the same drooling admiration, so compellingly scrumptious
was this woman. She strode inside to play a rock’n’roll DJ set for the
friendlier fashion crowd, the sort who dance and talk to each other in the
loo about shoes. It was here I heard someone say that Lowe “looks so great
because she’s not model thin”.
At last, slowly and from within, it seems fashion is falling back in love with
the things that make women truly beautiful: confidence, sex appeal, health.
They’re lauding the ample, sexy behind of Joan, Mad Men’s smoking-hot
secretary, and beginning to reject the boniness of eastern European
skinny-minnies. Could it be that, finally, we can put those two incendiary
little words, “size” and “zero”, behind us, and that Lowe and her softly cut
ilk are the poster girls for a new aesthetic of womanliness and personality
that lies ahead? While catwalk girls will always be thin, there has been a
bit more bounce lately in the bottoms and flesh on the bones that walk in
London, Paris, New York and Milan.
It’s been in the air for a while. The real titans, the ones who kept their
lips buttoned when the size-zero debate raged, have also begun to speak out.
Kate Moss was overheard saying how sexy Lowe and the shapely girls sporting
hundred-quid frillies looked at the recent AP perfume launch. The
super-stylist Katie Grand has talked of being tired of “the tedious
stereotypes of what it is to be a wonderful 21st-century woman”. Even mean
old Karl Lagerfeld, the wicked fairy godfather of the cruel world of
fashion, sent some girls away from a recent show, a first, saying: “They
looked as if they had grown up in a Third World country with no food to eat.”
Significantly, the original LA poster girls of scrawn, the ones who gave
skinny a well-dressed media glow that extended beyond the little pond of
true high fashion — Nicole Richie, Mischa Barton, Paris Hilton, Lindsay
Lohan — have all either put on weight or been disgraced. The LA fashion
journalist Merle Ginsberg says that crazy town still loves to gawp at the
ultra-slim, but for the rest of the world those girls have lost their
amusing sheen after a riot of inelegant behaviour and ugly rumours.
Even the mainstream media’s fascination with celebrity cellulite is now
regarded as vile or, worse, boring. Everyone clapped when they saw Helen
Mirren in a bikini. Gok Wan’s new Channel 4 show, Miss Naked Beauty, aims to
move middle-aged women in their undies into the arena of classic beauty by
trying to find “a woman who embodies the confidence, sex appeal, spirit,
brains and true natural beauty of a modern-day Eve”. She will need,
apparently, “brains and balls”. What she does not need is a torso like a
xylophone.
Mix up the newish girls (Lowe, the fervid-looking Lara Stone or the generously
sexy Sasha Pivovarova, who, despite putting a very unmodelly quantity of
pounds on recently, still got to open Prada last season) with the reclaimed
supers (who, while still natural-born skinnies, have the presence and fleshy
strength of a mature woman) and we have a refreshing alternative to the
status quo of recent years.
In the autumn issue of the avant-garde, high-fashion glossy 10, Mario
Sorrenti, the anomalous master of the “fashion nude”, has shot a burlesque
dancer called Dirty Martini. The editor, Sophia Neophitou, says: “Her body
shape is so different to what we are used to seeing.” Neophitou is a woman
who spends her life tucked away in the fantastical and bizarre aesthetic
bubble of fashion, where women don’t come with extra flesh to spare.
Yet, she adds, “as a woman, I have to say, I was excited”. The issue
also carries a piece by the New York magazine fashion writer Amy Larocca,
who has noticed a new vogue for women who are “lush and sparkly, with nary a
jutting collarbone in sight” and for “the natural shapes a woman’s
body takes when it’s not being deprived of things like food and water and
air and natural light”. Though, as a rule, Larocca points out in her
article, “when fashion people say curves, they are still referring to
something acres below anything approaching average”.
Designers such as Antonio Berardi and Roland Mouret have spoken about problems
finding girls who adequately fill their womanly clothes. “We have to spend
days altering things, Berardi says. “We add padding and pieces that work
inside the clothes to exaggerate their bodies into a more female form. Some
girls can walk in a way to make themselves look womanly; with others, we
have to use every trick in the book.
“You go back five years, before we had all these young girls with pale skin
from eastern Europe who all look the same, these weird androids with no
character. . . I want to go back to when you had girls like Karolina K and
Eva Herzigova, proud women with personalities. My family is Italian — I am
inspired by a womanly aesthetic.”
Mouret, the master of the sexy female silhouette, describes pulling out the
padding and sculpting waists for catwalk shows in recent years. “The girls
are young, and their bodies are not yet curvy enough. But I see advertising
going back to that powerful 1980s mentality, when girls like Linda
[Evangelista] were the ideal.”
Baroness Kingsmill, who headed the British Fashion Council’s inquiry
into models’ health in the wake of the size-zero furore, told me: “I think
that it will take some time for perceptions to change. It’s a bit like
smoking, in that only after some years of a sustained public campaign did it
come to be regarded as unacceptable.”
Yet at the stuffy old Hermès show, Gaultier mixed Naomi Campbell and Stephanie
Seymour in with his cast of younger models. Viewers commented on the fact
that a small quantity of — gasp! — “back fat” was on display, but also
on how forcefully they took to the catwalk. Sarah Leon, head of talent at
Select, recently, and with much glee, booked the decidedly normal and
fabulous CSS front woman, Lovefoxxx, for the Luella campaign.
“Much of the fashion industry is tired, constricted, suffocating,” Leon
observes. “It’s time to break away from these gaunt, miserable girls. There
are many people who are unimaginative and afraid to go out on a limb. It
just upsets me so much that beautiful, perfect girls like Daisy worry that
they aren’t thin enough when prestigious magazines won’t book someone like
her because she doesn’t fit the typical thing.”
Yet, “in 15 years in this business, I’ve never heard the words ‘too skinny’ as
much as I have in the past two seasons”, says Anthony Gordon, head of
scouting at Premier Model Management. Anita Bitton, a New York-based casting
director, is also a fan of the stronger-minded girls, because that’s what
her clients are after. She has been working with a lot of older models,
familiar names such as Missy Rayder, Erin Wasson and Emma Balfour. “I love
the older girls and the supermodels,” she says. “I love that they’re still
working.”
She also likes working with sceney girls such as Alexa Chung, Alice Dellal,
Pixie Geldof and Lowe: “They’re not perfect, not in that
eastern-European-beauty, hyper-thin way, but they’re not afraid to say ‘I’m
thirsty’, ‘I’m tired’ or ‘Please don’t use a certain product on my skin’.
They’re not struggling with food disorders. I love working with girls who
have opinions. For campaigns, people want more at the moment. They want
multilayered, a girl with a voice. They want a degree of approachability and
reality that touches a nerve in the consumer.”
Leon agrees: “Advertising clients don’t want two-dimensional girls, they want
that something extra that a Daisy, a Kate or a Karen Elson can bring to
their PR campaign. They want commanding women.”
And commanding women, as a rule, have a hunger not only for life, but also for
breakfast.
