Beauty: Female aesthetics

Sunsets and mountains are beautiful. Flowers and classical architecture are beautiful. People are beautiful.

Well, some people, right? The Elle MacPhersons and Cindy Crawfords (showing my age, I know) are supposedly the epitome of feminine proportion. I don’t read People or magazines like it, but I still look for their “Most beautiful people” issue every year just to marvel at the narrow-minded idea of human aesthetics put forward in the publication.

I never personally thought models were attractive. When my high school friends ogled over the celebrities in magazines or on posters, I lingered on the faces and physique of “common” peers in the hallways. Girls like Patty, Amber and Rebekah bore an authentic femininity which is almost completely lost on girls the fashion industry likes to push down the runway.

Musical interlude: “I’m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt . . . “

Barbara de Vries, a former model, ponders the industry this Fasion Week. She asks why the industry is so infatuated with these bird-like bony bodies — this “adolescent-boy look” — to fill their chic portfolios when their customers look like the feminine beings they are? Why don’t the female designers in the industry stand up for their own sex? And why do we as a culture capitulate to this false representation, why do we defy the natural beauty of all women? De Vries memoir Stupid Model will be on shelves soon.

Ugly Betty, the recent ABC television adaptation of the Spanish-language original, properly mocks the idiotic vanity apparent in the fashion industry. Will viewers actually get the message?