Fashion Models as Ideal Embodiments of Normative Identity

Abstract

This paper examines fashion models as gender myths and cultural icons through a cultural history of modelling. It reveals the construction of models’ personas by the successive addition of meaningful signs: physique, manner, attitude, nationality, class, race, salary, chamaleonism, slenderness, and so on. The author argues that models’ glamour expresses economic and social power and promotes the values of consumerism, while exporting cultural ideals through visual neo-colonialism. On the basis of empirical material on models’ experiences gathered from interviews, second oral sources and autobiographical material, the author approaches models’ bodies, identities and public personas as artefacts performed through the reiteration of collectively defined gender standards and practices. This approach overcomes the contrast cast in fashion discourse between visibility/invisibility, private/public, real/unreal while disclosing the hegemonic beauty standards as fiction.