John Robson: Fashion’s Obsession With Novelty Means It’s Bound Veer Into the Absurd

Commentary

Apparently, bodies are being worn skeletally thin these days or something. I’m inclined to “or something,” having roamed the streets and supermarkets. But a Washington Post reporter based in Seoul tells us, “In its annual report of yearly procedures for 2023, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons dubbed the new popular look the ‘ballet body.’” Which I suspect is a bit of a faux pas de deux.

Usually when given an opportunity to sauté onto some trendy bandwagon, I respond, “I fear you have mistaken me for someone else.” Including one that arrived in my inbox while typing this paragraph, saying “How to dress like an Italian,” as if (a) there were such a thing, (b) I would succeed if I tried, and (c) I might try. “Buy a nice suit” is more my speed. But there is a lot of it about.

For instance, food trends for 2024 apparently included black garlic, ponzu, spam, and amba. Unless they didn’t. (I had some black garlic, but only because I forgot it at the back of the shelf.) And for 2025, powered by AI (again, not my cup of bubble tea or whatever the in-crowd is now sipping), “2025’s Most Disruptive Food & Beverage Trends” include “Black lime,” “Transparent carbon labelling,” and “Hyper-personalized Nutrition” including “Hormone regulation” for “the post GLP-1 era.”

Or, arguably, microwaved pasta and fish fillets with capers in store-bought mayo. Just saying. I actually doubt a search party could find most such supposed trends even shortly afterward. Including this alleged surge toward “ballet bodies.” The Post says, “Fueled by the rise of the blockbuster GLP-1 drugs, including Ozempic and Wegovy, thinness appears to be making a comeback in the trend cycle.” So is it the post-GLP-1 era or not? Or the “What’s GLP?” era?

The piece started, “The idealized look in the 1980s was muscular and toned (with leg warmers).” Now, if you have leg warmers hidden somewhere and seek to be chic, best hide them better. But surely there’s something to be said for “muscular and toned” as a description, not of a once-cool person but a fit, attractive one at any time. Not because it’s 2024, will be 2025, or was 1985, but because it’s good to be healthy and bad to be ill. Especially so ill that you might be mistaken for a fashion model.

Here, as so often, I invoke G.K. Chesterton, not some TikTok “influencer.” Even before fashion became deliberately ugly, he rebelled against its obsession with novelty premised on denial of truth, including aesthetic. He denounced modern civilization “because it cannot create a custom. It can only create a fashion. Now a fashion is simply something that has failed to be a custom. It is changed as a fashion because it is a failure as a custom. The rich, who are the most restless of mankind, do one thing after another, and prove in the very process that they cannot create anything that is good enough to last. Their succession of fashions is in itself a succession of failures.”

Unlike statues or buildings that continue to inspire down through the ages, “fashion, in the feverish sense that exists to-day, is … a merely destructive thing; indeed, an entirely negative thing. It is as if a man were perpetually carving a statue and smashing it as soon as he carved it.”

Given most modern fashion, one can understand the impulse. And it was bad enough when “fashion” was just clothes, cocktails, or the latest ugly modern art. Now, it’s our bodies, and it involves not just old-tyme unhealthy eating but surgical intervention.

The Post piece, which to be fair was a bit wary, said: “Trends in body shapes – like in clothing and hair – inevitably change. And when trends hit the mainstream, the wealthy and chic seek to do something new.” Then it quoted someone with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons saying that “people don’t want to look like their mom or their grandma.” Why the heck not? Have you seen photos of them from back in the day? And unless someone’s invented new limbs, etc., if it was good enough for Cleopatra and Marc Antony, it should be good enough for us.

Thus, I can’t help thinking that “toned and muscular” remains the ideal, alas not always realized quite as we had fantasized in ourselves or others. Just as I insist, it would have been in 1815, 31 BC, and while shuffling about the tundra baffled that people would one day tear their dyed hair out over it having warmed up, and call a mammoth robe tacky. Unless they’re in fashion this year.

P.S. The Italian thing started, “As I slipped into my Montafia Plaid Hunter Green Suit.” As usual, they had mistaken me for someone else. Possibly one capable of executing a jeté with the aid of a plastic surgeon.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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