What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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8 What's up! December 4-10, 2022 Feature Eyes Of The Beholder Fashion Week considers standards of beauty APRIL WALLACE NWA Democrat-Gazette C hances are, when you think of models on the catwalk, a certain image springs to mind of lines of tall, slender women strutting down and back. Perhaps many of them are even blonde, white women that easily come to mind. While that's not an image representative of the entire community, it is a common, stereotypical body type associated with fashion from years of images on television, magazines and other media. Northwest Arkansas' Fall Fashion Week challenged that very image with its choice of topics and with representation of all body types, skin colors and genders on its stage. The one-day event of panel discussions and runway shows took place at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art on Nov. 12. Speakers that day addressed the changing landscape of clothing choice for genders, diverse cultures' influence on American fashion, body positivity and neutrality, standards of conventional beauty and how to change them, sustainability in fashion and much more throughout the afternoon, ahead of the runway shows. PINK OR BLUE If you've ever wondered why little boys are traditionally dressed in blue and little girls wear pink, you're not alone. Aubrey Costello, a local queer fashion designer and costumer, and Lisa Corrigan, Ph.D., professor of communication and director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Arkansas, kicked off NWA Fall Fashion Week events with this very topic — first by acknowledging the existence of gender regimes. Gender regimes are the many ways in which gender affects the way we live, work and interact with others. Corrigan described gender regimes as having structural levels, meaning that there are cultural expectations around gender; as well as institutional levels, causing people to behave in certain gender normative ways in families, church settings or workplaces. Of course, the ways the two levels intersect are very personal, she said. "There are different expectations at different historical moments about how bodies are supposed to be costumed in different spaces," Corrigan said. In the modern era, gender became a hot topic at about the 1950s, right after World War II. That's not coincidental, Corrigan said. The result of the war was something scholars refer to as "agency panic." "There was a huge push to define something that was gender normal," she said. "All the psychological literature, business literature, political lit of the post-war period is about what it is to become normal — what are normal behaviors, what are normal bodies, how do we dress to purport ourselves?" Children's clothing in particular is a way of mapping anxiety of particular cultures in certain times, Corrigan said. Agency panic was a way of dealing with the trauma of the war and its consequences, and its result was to produce conformity. Before this moment, children wore the same thing as infants. Boys and girls alike wore white dresses until a certain age. Costello added that the uniformity of dressing all children in white dresses to a certain age was purely an economical thing, making it cheaper and easier to dress kids. Once children got to the typical Speakers at NWAFW addressed the changing landscape of clothing choice for genders, diverse cultures' influence on american fashion, body positivity and neutrality, standards of conventional beauty and how to change them, sustainability in fashion and much more. (courtesy photo)