NORTH AMERICAN BEAUTY IDEALS THROUGH THE 1900'S Below is an article by Maria Hart that contained information I thought was worth sharing. (supporting images added) 1910's Meet the “it girl” of the era: the Gibson Girl. Illustrator Charles Gibson was to the early 1900s what trend-setting fashion photographers are today. His dream girl, broadcast on the pages of LIFE magazine, Collier’s, and Harper’s, quickly became the Beyoncé of her era. Women raced to copy the signature look: A showstopping feminine body like a looping figure-8, thanks to a super-cinched corset. (Don’t try this at home!) Linda M. Scott writes in Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism, "The Gibson Girl was not dainty… she was dark, regal in bearing, [and] quite tall.” But Gibson’s model and O.G.G. (original Gibson Girl) Camille Clifford was critical of the ideal. She sang in her vaudeville show, "Wear a blank expression/and a monumental curl/And walk with a bend in your back/Then they will call you a Gibson Girl.” 1920's Say bye-bye to monumental curves, statuesque height, fussy updos, and all that jazz—and hello to the flapper. Unlike the frozen beauty of the decade before, the flapper is constantly in motion. The exaggerated curves of Gibson are gone and replaced with small bust and hips. In fashion, the waistline moves several inches below the navel, making narrow hips a necessity. But don’t be fooled, the flapper doesn’t lack sex appeal; the focus has simply shifted downward to the legs, where a shorter knee-length hemline could expose the flash of a garter while doing a “shimmy.” Margaret Gorman, crowned as the first Miss America in 1921, was the era’s ideal. Her 5-foot-1, 108-pound frame was a full 180 from the Gibson era. 1930's Following the stock market crash, spirits dip back down and so do hemlines. Dresses are now draped on the bias. Translation? A less boxy, more fitted silhouette. The natural waist (around the belly button) comes back and there’s a hint of shoulder too. And the flat-chested look so popular in the 1920s gives way to a small bustline, likely a direct result of the new bra-cup sizing invented in this era. The media embraces a slightly more curvaceous body, making this era a stepping-stone from the streamlined, petite look of the 1920s toward the curvier 1940s. Photoplay, the People magazine of its day, declares actress Dolores del Rio to have the “best figure in Hollywood.” The article applauds her “warmly curved” and “roundly turned” figure. 1940's Atten-SHUN! There’s no farewell to arms… but there is a farewell to the softer look of the 30s. Thanks to World War II, military shoulders(broad, boxy, and aggressive) become the look du jour. Angularity is the order of the day. Bras take on a pointed look too, with names like "bullet" and "torpedo." All that translates into the look of the moment: a long-limbed, taller, and squarer silhouette. Don’t be fooled by Rosie the Riveter, the ideal body type still doesn’t include flexing biceps. But it does become taller, and more commanding, possibly echoing women’s expanding role in the workforce while men are on the battlefield. 1950's Welcome to the era of the hourglass. In the 1950s, the ideal body type reaches Jessica Rabbit proportions. After the angularity of the war era, a soft voluptuousness was prized above all else. Ads of the time even advised “skinny” women to take weight-gain supplements like Wate-On to fill out their curves. Playboy magazine and Barbie were both created in this decade, echoing a tiny-waisted, large-chested ideal. Fashions also showcased this body type with the rounded shapes of sweetheart necklines and circle skirts. 1960's The swinging 60s brings the pendulum back in the other direction. Thin is in. And Jessica-Rabbit proportions are out. The look is now fresh-faced, girlish, and androgynously trim. Models like Twiggyand Jean Shrimpton (aka “The Shrimp”) represented a new ideal: doll-faced, super slender, and petite. The clothing supports this look: shrunken shift dresses remove the cinched waistline, and fashion demands of a smaller bust and slim hips. (Sound familiar? It’s the same dramatic swing we saw from Gibson girl to flapper.) More and more women are going girdle-free and embracing a less constricting wardrobe. The trade-off? Now that slim, flat-stomached look must be achieved through diet. Right on cue: Enter Weight Watchers, founded in 1963. 1970's Disco! Jumpsuits! Bellbottoms! This decade was a raging party. But the party girl of the day was still pressured to maintain a slim-hipped, flat-stomached body in order to rock these fashions at the discotheque. Synthetic fabrics like polyester and spandex are embraced, but they’re also far more revealing and less forgiving compared to fabrics of the past. The overall look remains lean, especially in the torso, but curves start to come back. Like the 1930s, this decade is a step away from the petite look of the 1960s. And following the black pride and “black is beautiful” movements of the 1960s, Beverly Johnson becomes the first black woman to grace the cover of Vogue, while Darnella Thomas stars in a groundbreaking “Charlie” fragrance ad. 1980's Amazonian supermodels reign supreme. These tall, leggy women come to represent the new feminine ideal. Women like Elle MacPherson, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista lead the stampede off the runway and into the heart of pop culture, dominating the media and music videos of this decade. The 1980s also ushers in an era of fitness, thanks to a pioneeringJane Fonda. Aerobics and jogging take off, and for the first time, muscles are acceptable and desirable on women. It’s both empowering and discouraging—one more beauty standard to add to a lengthening list. 1990's Honey, we shrunk the supermodel. Kate Moss ushers in the era of the waif. Naysayers also dub it “heroin chic” for the gaunt look associated with Seattle’s grunge music scene. At 5’7” Moss is undeniably petite for a model and thin, even by industry standards. It’s a firmly unathletic look and a reaction to the Amazonian, uber-fit woman of the 80s. Slouchy jeans, oversized fraying sweaters, and even unisex fragrances (CK One, we’re calling you out) all support the petite and androgynous waif look. Hollywood also embraces the look. A-list 90s actress Winona Ryder is so petite, costar Ben Stiller exclaims, "She's like a little figurine for the coffee table!" 2000's (bonus) Supermodel Giselle Bundchen brings sexy back, according to Vogue. She’s credited with ending the era of “heroin chic.” Gone is the pale, gaunt, glass-eyed look of the 90s. Now we enter an era of visible abs and airbrushed tans. Bundchen is crowned “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” by Rolling Stone magazine and dominates the runway, print ads, Victoria Secret’s lingerie show, and the red carpet on Leonardo DiCaprio’s arm. Hollywood actresses follow her lead hiring a small army of personal trainers and layering on a couple coats of spray tan during awards season. 2010's (bonus bonus) Two words: booty bonanza. That’s this decade’s contribution to the shifting landscape of women’s body image. Twenty years after Sir Mix-a-Lot sang “you can do side-bends or sit-ups, but please don’t lose that butt,” it seems the media is finally carrying the banner. (Now that The New York Times is reporting it, we can officially call it: “Bootylicious” bodies have gone mainstream.) Nicki Minaj and J.Lo release their tributes to the almighty buttock:Anaconda and Booty, respectively. In Anaconda, Minaj holds a workout session while backup dancers wearing shorts that read "Bunz" do squats to the beat. Subtlety has left the building. But is it empowering? Or exhausting? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - We are fickle. We are fleeting.
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BEAUTY IN NATURE: part one I believe that nature is one of our greatest examples of beauty. Many would use nature to define beauty. Nature is vast, alive, fierce, gentle, powerful, fragile, detailed, and chaotic. All in one. All together. Nature is science. Nature is art. There are a million things to say and discuss and question about beauty in nature. There is so much that is beyond me, and so much that fascinates me. But for today, this is where I'll leave it. The article below is one of my favorites. It says many things much better than I know how, or have the capability, to. (However, I'm not in 100% agreement with everything it states. It's just some good food for thought.) Beauty in Nature April 23, 2014 By Michael Popejoy, Fellow in the Department of Philosophy (underlining added) “I declare this world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists.” The beauty of nature can have a profound effect upon our senses, those gateways from the outer world to the inner, whether it results in disbelief in its very existence as Emerson notes, or feelings such as awe, wonder, or amazement. But what is it about nature and the entities that make it up that cause us, oftentimes unwillingly, to feel or declare that they are beautiful? One answer that Emerson offers is that “the simple perception of natural forms is a delight.” When we think of beauty in nature, we might most immediately think of things that dazzle the senses – the prominence of a mountain, the expanse of the sea, the unfolding of the life of a flower. Often it is merely the perception of these things itself which gives us pleasure, and this emotional or affective response on our part seems to be crucial to our experience of beauty. So in a way there is a correlate here to the intrinsic value of nature; Emerson says: the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves. Most often, it seems to me, we find these things to be beautiful not because of something else they might bring us – a piece of furniture, say, or a ‘delicacy’ to be consumed – but because of the way that the forms of these things immediately strike us upon observation. In fact, one might even think that this experience of beauty is one of the bases for valuing nature – nature is valuable because it is beautiful. Emerson seems to think that beauty in the natural world is not limited to certain parts of nature to the exclusion of others. He writes that every landscape lies under “the necessity of being beautiful”, and that “beauty breaks in everywhere.” As we slowly creep out of a long winter in the Northeast, I think Emerson would find the lamentations about what we have ‘endured’ to be misguided: The inhabitants of the cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year….To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.The close observer of nature sees a river in constant flux, even when the river’s water is frozen and everything appears to be static and unchanging for a time. Nature can reveal its beauty in all places and at all times to the eye that knows how to look for it. We can hear Emerson wrangle with himself on this very point in the words of this journal entry: At night I went out into the dark and saw a glimmering star and heard a frog, and Nature seemed to say, Well do not these suffice? Here is a new scene, a new experience. Ponder it, Emerson, and not like the foolish world, hanker after thunders and multitudes and vast landscapes, the sea or Niagara. So if we’re sympathetic to the idea that nature, or aspects of it, are beautiful, we might ask ourselves why we experience nature in this way. Emerson says that nature is beautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive. In nature we observe growth and development in living things, contrasted with the static or deteriorating state of the vast majority of that which is man-made. More generally, he writes: “We ascribe beauty to that which…has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things”. He cites natural structures as lacking superfluities, an observation that in general has been confirmed by the advancement of biology. Furthermore, he says that whether talking about a human artifact or a natural organism, any increase of ability to achieve its end or goal is an increase in beauty. So in Emerson we might find the resources for seeing evolution and the drive to survive as a beautiful rather than an ugly process, governed by laws that tend to increase reproductive fitness and that we can understand through observation and inquiry. And lastly, Emerson points to the relation between what we take to be an individual and the rest of nature as a quality of the beautiful. This consists in the “power to suggest relation to the whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful individuality.” In nature one doesn’t come across individuals that are robustly independent from their environment; rather things are intimately interconnected with their surroundings in ways that we don’t fully understand. Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. All of these qualities of beauty seem to go beyond the mere impression of sensible forms that we started with, and what they require is what also served as the basis of truth and goodness in nature. In addition to the immediate experience of beauty based in perception, Emerson suggests that the beauty of the world may also be viewed as an object of the intellect. He writes that “the question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things.” In other words, we can also experience the world as beautiful because of its rational structure and our ability to grasp that structure through thought. Think for instance of the geometric structure of a crystal, or snowflake, or nautilus shell. Or consider the complexity of the fact that the reintroduction of the wolf in Yellowstone National Park changed the course of the rivers due to a chain reaction of cause and effect through the food web, a process called a trophic cascade. This reinforces Emerson’s emphasis on the interconnection between all members of the natural world; as observers of nature we are confronted with one giant, complex process that isn’t of our own making, but that we can also understand, and get a mental grasp on, even if only partially, and be awe-struck in that process of understanding. There is thus an emotional or affective component in the beauty of the intellect just as there is in the immediate beauty of perception. If we destroy the natural world, we take away the things that we can marvel at and experience awe towards in these two ways. And this experience of the beautiful through the intellect may reinforce our attributing value to nature here as well, but a deeper kind of value, the intrinsic value I talked about in the last essay. Here it is not only that nature is valuable because it is beautiful, but nature is beautiful because it possesses intrinsic value, grounded in its intelligible structure. Thus we see a close parallel between goodness and beauty in nature. We can find an objective basis for goodness and beauty in nature, namely its intelligible structure, but also see that nature is valuable and beautiful for us, with the particular apparatus that nature has given us for navigating our way through the world. So that which is the basis of truth in nature and provides it with intrinsic value is also that which makes it beautiful. Emerson himself ties these three aspects of nature into one package himself: He should know that the landscape has beauty for his eye, because it expresses a thought which is to him good: and this, because of the same power which sees through his eyes, is seen in that spectacle. This is the unified philosophy of nature that I set out to explicate in the first essay – nature is the source of truth, goodness, and beauty, because of its intelligible structure, and because of its production of organisms that can recognize that structure, us. And this view of nature includes an inherent call to protect that which is true, good, and beautiful. These are the things that we as human beings are searching for, are striving after, and yet they’re right in front of us if only we would listen with our ear to the earth. Although I’ve been advocating an approach to nature based on its intelligibility, we are far from tying down the giant that is nature with our minds. Emerson writes that “the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.” Although we shall continue to try to uncover nature’s secrets, let us also continue to take pleasure in our immediate encounter with her. Let us continue to be awe-struck, like the child on the seashore, or clambering up a tree. Let us hold onto that experience, and fight for the environment that makes it possible, both for the child in each of us, and for those that come after us. - See more at: http://green.harvard.edu/news/beauty-nature#sthash.XPs3GW9x.dpuf THOUGHTS/IDEAS Nature is beautiful not just because of it's visual appeal. Nature is beautiful because of what it does; because of what it is. Nature is beautiful because it is alive, because it is helpful, because it is powerful, because it is miraculous. Nature is beautiful because it was designed with care. Nature is beautiful because it is united, each part working seamlessly with the rest. I believe in God, and I believe that nature is beautiful because it is surrendered to Him. Soft clay that allows itself to be molded by the artists hands. How beautiful could we be if we were the same? If we were surrendered to the designer of the whole system? Maybe we could play our parts better if we stopped trying to rewrite the script. BEAUTY? : The alive, the designed, the united, the useful, the natural. BEAUTY IN NATURE: part two JAGUARS AND MONA LISA’S I have confessions to make. To myself and to everybody else. I have for the majority of my life wished that I was someone else. I’ve wanted to be prettier, stronger, smarter, happier. I have wished myself away. But I see now that this is wrong. And not only wrong, but a terrible thing. A sad thing. I learned this at the Zoo. Because of a Jaguar. I was watching it walk, watching it move, admiring it’s perfect spots. I was drinking it in, amazed by it. It just seemed so ideal. So complete. So wonderful. It was powerful and sleek. It was graceful and elegant. Perfect in it’s design. As I watched I wondered, “What if the Jaguar wished that it was different?” What if it wanted to be a Chimpanzee, and swing from the tops of the trees? What if it wished it’s spots away? A surprising sadness came over me. The loss of such an incredible creature felt weighty. What if it tried to rub off it’s fur and stand upright? What if it tried to make it’s paws look like hands and began to a diet of fruits and nuts and seeds and such? It wouldn’t make the Jaguar any more like a Chimp. It would just make it a really messed up and malnourished Jaguar. The Jaguars DNA has required it to eat meat and have incredible spots. In the same way, no amount of work, dieting, or wishful thinking will ever turn me into, say, Gigi Hadid. I could treat my body like it was hers. I could do all her workouts and eat her diet and all that. But the result will not be another Gigi Hadid. The result will be a really messed up and malnourished Elisa McCready. I believe that when we wish ourselves away, we are scribbling on the Mona Lisa. We are looking into the face of Leonardo Da Vinci and saying, “I could have done it better.” Nothing I think or say about the Mona Lisa will ever change what it is. Valued. Loved. Cherished. Beautiful. I could waltz into The Louvre and scream about how ugly I think she is, but it will not change her value. It is fixed. It is secure. The Jaguar could form all it’s own ideas about what it thinks it should be. But then it would miss all the beauty that it is. |