Beauty, Fashion and shape

From History of 20th Centuary Fashion: by Elisabeth Ewing Revised by Alice Mackrell

I love the difference in these images, from the 1st speaks about how "the fashionable edwardian lady did not want to follow nature" and how shape was thought to be beauty, for women over the last hundread years, we have been apples, pears, S-shape, hour glass, bell and so on. It seems that men never get this treatment of being shaped and molded to imitate everyday objects... seems really strange

Fashion history shows the most desirable body image of a fashion era is most often achieved by distorting the figure by enlargement or reduction, or by flattening or moving parts into new positions.

Fashion is a shape, a changing shape. That shape is mainly formed and controlled by some device which affects part of the body's natural outline. What is considered beautiful in the eyes of one race may be thought horrific in another. Beauty then is in the eye of the beholder, and for centuries beauty has been shape.

Until about a hundred years ago a small dainty foot was considered essential to make a Chinese woman eligible for marriage. Small feet are a racial characteristic of Chinese women. The desire to make the foot smaller in the name of beauty was strong enough for the Chinese to mutilate female feet for nearly 1000 years

A massive change to womens dress came about during the first world war when they had to dress for practicallity... this gave way to more manly dress and possibly hardened women or made men realise that women were not quite so dainty as they first thought.

It seems ironic that in the victorian era women were damaging there bodies by means of clothing and now our fashion images just seem to be an emaciated form, with this image supposed to represent the current day venus (as titled with the collection)...she just looks ill to me. It seems so ironic when compared with the original Venus.