The Shape of Things To Come


5 minute read

“Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-break on.” So said author Maxwell Maltz. I think of it as walking into a steep headwind every day. All you can do is turn up the collar of your coat, keep your head down and concentrate on getting from A to B. But that’s an exhausting existence and not sustainable long-term, so finding a way to sidestep the hurricane is essential for each and every one of us if we’re to thrive. In an interview with The Guardian last year, the author of How Confidence Works, Professor Ian Robertson, explained quite simply that, “Confidence is a precious mental resource that we all need…The words we say to ourselves will help harness our anxieties by focusing our attention on achievable goals.” 

But often what we tell ourselves about ourselves is simply the parrot speak of others and how they have defined us. Most of us remember being told at one time or another, either at school age or beyond, that we weren’t sporty enough, or creative enough, or academic enough, or pretty enough. We each have a tendency to box other people off, to categorise them, to compartmentalise them, and often we are equally ready to stay within those boxes, because it takes courage and fortitude to step outside of them and state plainly “I am not only this”. Then once you state it, you have to prove it, which can be even more terrifying.

It’s our natural tendency as humans, according to an article in medium.com, to box off individuals. “But it’s putting people into boxes that reduces them to labels, that limits our abilities to see them as much more than a label, that limits our ability to learn and grow as individuals ourselves.” And while I wouldn’t usually direct you to the fashion industry for inspiring examples of how this cycle can be broken, a poignant moment at Valentino’s Paris Couture show in January is worth mentioning because, like it or not, what happens during fashion week drip-feeds down to impact each of us, from the clothes to the cast of models. 

Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli’s models were described by several commentators as emotional and bleary-eyed as they walked in the intimate show at the heritage brand’s Parisian salon. Piccioli pointed to one particular model and explained to a Vogue reporter: “She was told she would never walk couture.”

Whatever small gains have been made for women of differing ages and body types in ready-to-wear, the rarefied environment of couture has held on tightly to the youthful skinny model aesthetic of old. Until now.

Piccioli defied tradition and expectation by casting a diverse range of models, most notably those of average dress size rather than a single tokenistic plus-size model – for once reflecting the majority of women in society rather than just the minority of very thin or very voluptuous types – as well as models from 20-odd through to 50-odd. He rightly explained: “In runway shows, sometimes there are 50 skinny models and one bigger-sized. I feel like you don’t really relate to that. You don’t believe that. You just tick the box.” Of his decision to include mature models, he said, “The body modifies with age. They’re still as beautiful but the shape is different. I wanted to capture the beauty of how the body modifies.”

For someone as influential as Piccioli to describe ageing bodies as beautiful; for him to want to dress them as exquisitely, and expensively, as he always has younger bodies; and for him to convince his powerful financial backers that the considerable additional cost would be worth it (instead of having a single house model for fittings, Piccioli used 10 of different shapes and sizes) is a dramatic step forward. Interestingly, the fact that he has three children in their teens and twenties, he says, influenced his decision to try and reshape the essence and our perception of couture. He doesn’t want his kids growing up seeing only one exclusive representation of beauty, as many of us did. 

He’s also giving women permission to age as we’re meant to. I’m not suggesting that we need his permission, but there’s no doubt that when individuals like Piccioli, who influence not just fashion but contemporary culture, wave their magic wands and declare ageing to be beautiful and something that should be embraced not fought against, it’s the beginning of a shift in mindset that ripples out and slowly washes away old prejudices.

With this one show, he’s taken curvy and mature women out of their ‘not couture-worthy’ box and made every other woman feel like she deserves to be dressed and treated as well as her younger, thinner peers.

He’s changed the words these women say to themselves, from ‘I will never walk couture’ to ‘I am couture’. 

In an article a couple of years ago, Euronews.com explained that Haute Couture was about “making what seems impossible, possible”. Of course, this was in reference to the character of the clothes, but this season, Piccioil has made it more about the character of the house of Valentino, and he’s challenging others to do the same. I always feel proud that it is two Irish designers, Richard Malone and Simone Rocha, who have been among the strongest supporters of diverse runways over the years, and in particular of age diversity, featuring women twice – sometimes three times – the age of most catwalk models. A few years ago, I interviewed Co Wexford native Malone and he told me that his private clients had stopped buying from luxury fashion houses because they couldn’t imagine themselves wearing the clothes that were only shown on size 0 models. “The houses grade up the fits,” he explained, “but then they don’t sit correctly on other women.” Perhaps institutions like Valentino are beginning to feel the impact on their bottom line of excluding women with gorgeous curvy, fleshy bodies who now refuse to be shoehorned into styles constructed for narrower, angular silhouettes?

Maintaining the body of our 20-something selves is not natural – it requires draining amounts of mental, physical and sometimes surgical effort. It’s a fool’s errand that most of us, myself included, have been sucked into with sometimes tragic results, as seen in the case of former supermodel Linda Evangelista, who has described herself as “brutally disfigured” by a cosmetic procedure intended to remove body fat from her abdomen, flanks, back and bra area, inner thighs and chin. I’ve seen images of the 56-year-old post-surgery and she is in no way deformed. She simply looks fuller in face and figure. She still has that famously beautiful nose, those exquisite rose-shaped lips, enthralling eyes, and skin I’d swap my right arm for. She’ll always be a beauty by most people’s standards, and I would love to see her in a runway show, now more than ever.

Evangelista may feel like she’s in the eye of that self-esteem storm right now, fighting a relentless headwind, but maybe the Valentino show might give her the confidence to love her body just as it is, as it’s given many other women that freedom this month.

Marie Kelly, February 2022

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