“New York Fashion Week is celebrating gender nonconformity– because it’s 2017, and anyone should be able to wear anything,” says Strut, Mic’s fashion publication. Because gender nonconformity in 2017 generally refers to the political lobby of men who think they are women, the uber-selective New York Fashion Week will feature men strutting down a runway in female lingerie.
Anyone, they say. Anyone! To the reader assuming ‘anyone’ includes female models with eccentric features, a body mass index above 17 or height below five-foot-eight (five-foot-seven if you’re lucky), guess again.
Because of the fashion industry’s competitive nature, NYFW is notorious for nixing models of any shape or size not fit to their physical standards. And the lengths that female models often go to meet those standards are terrifying. A 16-year-old model was recently seen eating cotton balls in order to survive without gaining weight at NYFW. Other models were seen taking drugstore staples, which expand in your stomach to make you think you’re full. Even water consumption is treated as a threat to weight gain.
These practices are not uncommon at all in the fashion industry. After all, “you’re nothing but a pretty hanger,” says former NYFW model Sannie Pedersen. Just one extra millimeter of fat, a facial scar or an imperfect nose can get you nixed at castings. You have to be tall; but girl, that doesn’t mean you can get out of fitting your tall feet into those tiny size 5 heels.
But for the male-posing-as-female model, these rules don’t seem to apply.
The “ungendered” fashion models at NYFW will get to keep their excess body hair, custom-fit shoes, and loose corsets that don’t crush their broad torsos as the more narrow female corset would. They get to strut the female catwalk at a fashion event where women from all over the world the world practically kill themselves for; yet, they don’t have to meet half the female standards for modeling.
“Essentially, the idea is that a lot of the traditional notions that we associate with a particular gender – male or female – are now being offered for the opposite gender,” NPR fashion critic Robin Givhan says. “So for men, that often means that the clothes have a frillier feel to them. You know, there’s more color, perhaps, there’s florals, things that are normally associated with womenswear.”
See some of the designers this year’s ‘ungendered’ models will be wearing on the runway:
If a female model looked at all like any of the men in the slideshow above, she wouldn’t even be given the time of day. But so begins the leftist takedown of any industry. It starts when members of a political interest group, in this case the trans lobby, are given special treatment over qualified members, skewing the talent curve and increasing internal rivalry.
But hey, at least NYFW can flip the bird at claims they are too selective, right?
