Feral supermodels, hyperlinking, and the value of archives

Yesterday I was reminded of how hyperlinking might happen in all kinds of places. I was at the Montague Bookmill, grading papers while jd and mhpd played alongside the river. If you’ve ever been to the Bookmill, you know that the bathroom walls (now there are two bathrooms, upgraded, but they haven’t fully lost their randomness) are covered with letters and newspaper clippings. The bathrooms always remind me of the independent journalist Mae Brussell, who used mountains of news clippings and cross-filings to develop theories and keep tabs on all kinds of government activities. She was down with the “internet” before there was an internet!

Anyway, on my way out, I just happened to catch sight of a Natalie Angier article from 1993–”Fashion’s Waif Look Makes Strong Women Weep” (If you don’t get TimesSelect, you can click here to read it). It shot me back to college, to when waifs–and their attendant “poverty chic” and “heroin chic“–were new and news.

Angier, a New York Times science writer, sets it up like this:

After a long spell of the lusty, towering glamour queens, of the women with physiques hammered out at the health club and often perfected at the surgeon’s office, of the Cindy Crawfords and the Claudia Schiffers, the fashion industry has pulled another of its tectonic shifts and declared this the year of the gamine. Now it is time to celebrate the saucy little street urchins, the winsome starvelings. The mature, big-haired and big-breasted look is out, and the short, waiflike and wafer-like look is in….

Huh. It’s a good point. It didn’t seem so at the time, but looking back to the eighties, Crawford and her ilk look positively BBW next to the constantly youngering and smallerifying models who would come to define the next fifteen years. I mean, Dakota Fanning for Marc Jacobs? Cute or Creepy indeed! (thanks tweenscene and eccw.) Faced with the newest trend, Angier asked some good questions back in 1993:

Fashion is supposed to be part fantasy, of course, and its every attempt at novelty probably should not be taken to heart. But the latest paradigm switch in body type is so extreme that it cannot help but raise the question: What does the gamine girl mean for real women? What does she say about the culture’s judgment of women, of how comfortable it feels with the power they have seized? Are women once again being portrayed as skinny and childlike because the larger and more sophisticated images became too threatening?

Some good questions, no? Intrigued by this article, I went back through her NYT archive. I love her stuff! In fact, I might do a whole post on how she has already written with authority on everything I have ever thought of thinking about. (She was well into her career while I was still working to disavow Kriss-Kross!)

Back on track: What I found most interesting about the article was my own response to how Angier’s questions still stand fourteen years later. Historicization is always a relevant concern for cultural studies: what are the questions we should be asking? And how are those questions addressed, suppressed, or expanded over time?

In that vein, it is interesting to map other pop culture shifts, which really over time index historical shifts, alongside this one that Angier has named. In the article, for instance, we are reminded that the waif-look was supposed to be seen as anti-establishment, as

in keeping with [the day's] more liberal tone, a rejection of conspicuous wealth and an embracing of the organic, the gritty, the ethnic — poverty chic, as many call it.

In observing the many ways celebrity-watching has become a mainstream obsession– and how uber-thinness, if anything, signifies wealth and whiteness– how might we talk about the ways in which the waif look quickly moved from being countercultural to being an absolute signification of capital, in every sense, but particularly as social capital?