On Trend or Cake CJ Fletcher
Setting New Year’s resolutions and hitting the reset button always ends with promises of exercising, cutting back on treats, starting new diets, and reinventing your look. However, this year, I think it’s time those resolutions had a refresh. If the year 2020 hasn’t taught you that there are more important things than your appearance and how you appeal to society’s newest body trend, then this is your wakeup call. Understanding how society makes us feel about our own bodies, allows us to avoid giving power to social anxieties and ego, and give more energy to appreciating our health and spending time with loved ones. This New Year let’s make sure hitting the refresh button and setting new goals includes educating ourselves about how our society treats female body types as a trend. To do this, let’s examine the changing representations of women’s bodies in art.
Body Trends Throughout History:
Between 1400 and 1700, during the Renaissance period, women were often depicted with large breasts, cellulite, round stomachs, and wide hips. This is evident in 6
the art piece The Three Graces by Peter Paul Ruben, which exposes three naked women with curvy plump figures, surrounded by nature. Moving on to the Victorian era between 1800 and 1900, Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s portrait of Queen Victoria displays a prominent body trend of the period. This painting presents a female with large breasts, a plump frame, and cinched waist, wearing a laced-up corset in line with fashion trends of the time. Then, a more drastic change occurs in the roaring 20s, where the latest fashion included flapper dresses that were tight against the figure. This is featured in Russel Patterson’s work, Where there’s smoke there’s fire, which displays a woman with a boyish, petite figure, flat chest and flat stomach. These trends have continued to develop through to the modern day. The new trend is having a flat stomach, big bum and breasts, tanned skin, a thigh gap, and hairless body from the neck down. This, of course, does not preclude shaping your eyebrows, having perfect skin and conforming to the ‘no-makeup’ makeup look.
PROSH is Pelican with less syllables/brain cells
