Lorna Jane has a fit model problem

Boutique activewear brand Lorna Jane is currently enduring a severe tutting from the online media after it posted a job advertisement for a dual role at its HQ: as a receptionist and a fit model.



My initial response was to tweet: "Fit model is a legit job that needs specific body dimensions. But Lorna Jane shouldn't combine it with another job. Obviously anyone can do a receptionist job; but not everyone can be a fit model. Your measurements need to embody the brand's sizing."

Fit modelling isn't 'fitness modelling' – which is a genre of modelling in which the models look athletic and have very defined muscles and very little body fat. Rather, fit models work in the back end of the industry. Unlike regular models, who get booked by matching a designer, art director or stylist’s desired ‘look’, fit models stay employed by winning another kind of genetic lottery – possessing a body whose proportions match the vital statistics of a manufacturer’s target customer.

When I was writing Out of Shape, I did a fair bit of research into fit modelling that didn't make it into the final book. There really isn't very much discussion of this fascinating subset of the modelling industry – just as we prefer to concentrate on the glamorous world of fashion weeks and couture rather than the nuts-and-bolts business of garment production.

At many clothing manufacturers, employees step in as fit models when required, in addition to their regular jobs. And at some fashion labels – including, famously, Leona Edmiston – the designer uses himself or herself as the fit model. (I wish I could've got one local designer to go on record with his yarn that, having used himself as his fit model, his sizing began to get smaller when he lost weight – something he only realised when a longtime customer pointed it out.)

Kathleen Fasanella – who to me is the authoritative resource on the technical aspects of fashion – had a great two-part blog series about fit modelling. Natasha Wagner has fitted for jeans brands ranging from Gap and Old Navy to Levi's, 7 For All Mankind and Proenza Schouler, leading Vogue to dub her "the model whose bottom is shaping a nation". And here are some fun first-person accounts by Sable Yong, who at 5'2" works as a fit model for petites.

When I interviewed Clea Garrick of Australian fashion label Limedrop, she told me she tests her sample garments on several fit models who wear a size 8 differently – taller or shorter, and with varying body proportions – so she can get a sense for how each garment will look on different body shapes, not just sizes.

“We still do make garments that are fluid and flowing, so our sizing is not as strict on some pieces as they appear in measurements,” she added. “We aim to make fashion that looks great on real people, not just models.”

Lorna Jane, on the other hand, needs a fit model more than many fashion labels because all its products are form-fitting and stretchy. The way tight clothes compress the body can't properly be predicted from using industrial fit mannequins, which is why it's so important to use a live model who can report how the tightness feels.

When I looked at the the websites of specialist fit modelling agencies, I was struck by their galleries of pretty girls, photographed at full length and labelled with specs of height and body measurements. The effect is slightly unnerving – like a flipbook of mugshots or mail-order brides. They all hover around a standard Australian size 8-10, and all have a similar svelte, leggy look.

Yet it’s heartening and strangely touching to see how even these girls, whose job it is to be living dress forms, represent the shape variations of the human body, their proportions all slightly different. And this is important! A fit model isn't always a 'house model' – like Clea, some brands bring in several differently shaped women to test the tolerance of the size being fitted.

However, fit models are inextricable from the practice of targeted sizing. As Christina Cato commented at Fasanella's site Fashion-Incubator:

I’ve worked with fit models at a very well known company. In the time that I worked for them we went through 4 different fit models. We were also working on an identity crisis with understanding our customer. Once it was determined who she was the fit model was replaced with someone that would better fit that ideal. It is not a general ideal or an average. It is specific to the woman that buys this line of clothing. Through constant customer feedback the fit is refined and if needed the fit model is changed.

The clothes certainly don’t fit everyone (I couldn’t wear them), but the customers that can wear them are extremely loyal. The fit is the “signature” of the industry. I think it’s very clever to keep that a secret and to keep it unique. It ensures that the loyal customers remain loyal.

Lorna Jane, however, has the same image problem as its fellow 'fashion sportswear' label Lululemon. In claiming to champion health and fitness, yet targeting a particularly small, thin customer, Lorna Jane has been accused of excluding potential customers who also aspire to be healthy, sexy and stylish, but who fall outside its target size range.

So it seems extremely tone-deaf of Lorna Jane to advertise the fit model job – which legitimately has very specific requirements – alongside the receptionist job, which can, and indeed legally must, be offered to applicants of any age, gender, ability, and body shape and size. A Lorna Jane spokesperson told Crikey:

As a fit model is only required in a part time capacity, Lorna Jane felt it appropriate to combine this position with the part time receptionist role which is also currently vacant. … There are a number of positions within our business that combine roles to accommodate the needs and interests of our staff.

For me, this media outrage stems from the same "what about me?" attitudes that I see again and again in media discussions about clothing size. I really hoped that Out of Shape would help dispel them; but they keep being repeated in article after article. And as I noted in 2013 about Abercrombie and Fitch, people really struggle to get their heads around the legitimate marketing practice of targeted sizing in the fashion industry.

There is a widespread belief that consumers 'deserve' to be able to wear whatever brand they want as long as they have the money to buy it; and that if they don't fit into the brand's clothes, then this is the brand's conspiratorial moral judgment. We hear things like, "X brand doesn't care about real women", "X brand doesn't want to tarnish their brand with customers like me" and "X brand promotes unhealthy body image".

Conversely, when a brand decides to offer a broader size range, the media report this as an act of generosity and moral acceptance rather than what it really is: a decision to target a different market. And we'll hear things like "Y brand understands real women", "Y brand is welcoming and inclusive of customers like me" and "Y brand promotes healthy body image".

For me, the main problem with Lorna Jane's two-for-one job ad is that it has allowed the perceptions of exclusion and discrimination associated with its brand to extend to its broader hiring practices. Workplace law specialist Peter Vitale told SmartCompany that it's unlawful in some jurisdictions to discriminate against someone based on their personal appearance. Much depends on the way a job ad is phrased, and “the way [Lorna Jane] have structured the ad hasn’t done them any favours … Because it’s for a receptionist as well, the ad probably sailed a bit close to the wind".

Lorna Jane has made it easy for onlookers to infer – as some media reports have done – that the company only wants to hire employees with very small body sizes, in any role. But the company is perfectly entitled to seek a fit model whose proportions reflect those of its target customer.

Wearing the same thing every day

Check out this guy, always wearing the same grey T-shirt and charcoal hoodie. You don't need a facial recognition algorithm to know who he is.

It's Social Overlord Mark Zuckerberg, of course. (Captured by his nemesis, Google.) Recently Zuckerberg did a Q&A at Facebook headquarters and was asked why he always wears the same grey T-shirt. He answered: "I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how best to serve this community. […] I feel like I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous."

I decided to blog about this, but as the blog post got more detailed I thought, "Why don't I actually pitch this as a feature story?" So I did… and you can read the rest of it over at Junkee. I'm glad they have a 'Style' section over there, so I can pitch these kinds of stories.

This has been one of my more popular stories lately. I'm surprised by the pageviews and the number of comments, and that it's got the biggest reach of anything I've posted on my Facebook page in the last three months. That said, the comments seem to have taken issue with the way I situate 'wearing the same thing every day' within a culture of technologised neoliberalism. Jeff Sparrow's essay on Soylent has been very influential in my thinking about this.

But of course there is the broader truism that anyone who actually uses the term 'neoliberalism' tends to do so suggesting it is a socially corrosive, structural phenomenon. Whereas those who might actually practise and enable neoliberalism rarely acknowledge it as a guiding philosophy at all, preferring to couch it as a climate of ideologically empty 'individual choice'.

To me, it seems obvious that much of tech culture's thinking about the body is instrumental – obsessed with what the body can be used to achieve, rather than how it looks or feels – and also can't be disentangled from the historic disparagement of the 'nerd body' and the way it's dressed.

Popular culture has created this category of the 'nerd' or 'geek' as someone who lives 'in his head' (the nerd is a historically male category) and so consequently is either incompetent or uninterested in the social and aesthetic aspects of dress. When I as much as raised the issue of gender and the way that 'being interested in clothes' is feminised and hence devalued, commenters told me I was "reading too much into this". So I guess it's really about ethics in videogame journalism.

I also feel that some people who either identify as or get categorised as geeks might experience clothing primarily as a weapon of social distinction rather than as a source of joy or pleasure. At school, clothes are used to police in-crowds and are adopted as badges of honour by defiant subcultural outsiders. If you felt victimised by or wanted to opt out of all that bullshit, you might say, "I don't care about what I wear."

But as a researcher of clothes, I think very few people genuinely don't care about what they wear. I suspect that people who deliberately wear the same thing every day (rather than dress randomly from a limited pool of utilitarian clothes) actually have much more invested in the issue of clothing, and have a keener awareness of what their clothing says about them, than your stereotypical absent-minded professor whose mum or wife or workplace supplies his clothing.

So the semiotic question – what wearing the same thing every day might express about a person – is the issue I focus on in the Junkee feature.

What's my age again?

I was mildly annoyed to see the April 2014 issue of Australian Women's Weekly has a story about "the women who refuse to dress 'appropriately'". Just by glancing at it as I went through the supermarket checkout, I knew it would be a story about older women who wear sculptural, brightly coloured and patterned clothes with bold accessories.

And today I saw that vintage dealer Trish Hunter has blogged about the article.


Image: Trish Hunter

Trish was struck by the way 'appropriate' is put in scare quotes:

So who is the mysterious great and powerful OZ who dictates what is considered appropriate and inappropriate dressing? Who or what made the word ‘appropriately’ have to be placed in talking marks here?

I personally dress for no one but myself and I’m so happy that other people enjoy how I dress and tune into my blog to see my outfit posts. Sometimes Often I dress quite over the top, I style my hair, wear bold makeup and dress in a style that doesn’t follow main stream fashion, but does that also put me in the inappropriate dressing category to the ruler of appropriate dressing?

No. And here's why: Trish is young. Because our culture values women primarily for their youthful sex appeal, men learn to treat older women as if they are invisible, and women learn that as they age, the most tasteful and, yes, appropriate thing they can do is to fade gracefully into the background. We learn this in dribs and drabs, through culture, and through the media genre of orthovestia which teaches us which clothes are 'appropriate' to occasions and ages.

Here are a couple of examples of the little ways that culture teaches us what old women are 'meant' to be like. I have a lip tar in a peachy-coral colour that I thought looked quite fetching on me… until I noticed the shade was named 'Grandma'. Similarly, I love classic 20th-century perfumes, but I constantly notice people saying disparagingly that they 'smell like old ladies'.

However, the Australian Women's Weekly article is part of a broader cultural trend celebrating older women's style, led by Ari Seth Cohen's blog Advanced Style. Last year, Sue Bourne's Channel Four documentary Fabulous Fashionistas profiled six British women, average age 80, whose sartorial approach "is about more than following the latest trends; it's about an attitude to life itself."

It's easy to champion cool old ladies as feminists rebelling against sexist double standards by insisting on their individuality and visibility. However, writing in The Guardian about that documentary, Michele Hanson points out how patronisingly ageist our admiration is: "Telly has just picked out something they've done all their lives, and called it remarkable because they're old. Really it's just because they're them."

As I observe in Out of Shape, we allow certain older women to be celebrated for their zany, eccentric 'signature looks' – but only if their professional identities grant them the cultural power that older women are otherwise denied. From the photos Trish has posted on her blog, the "women who refuse to dress 'appropriately'" share a key trait: they are professional aesthetes and fashion insiders. They include former Vogue staffer Marion von Adlerstein, Marie Claire executive fashion editor Jane Roarty, fashion designer Jenny Kee and textile and homewares retailer Joan Bowers.

Internationally, 'advanced style' icons include English stylist Isabella Blow, American 'plus-age' models China Machado and Carmen dell'Orefice, American interior designer Iris Apfel and legendary Vogue Italia editor Anna Piaggi.

Linda Grant's book The Thoughtful Dresser (which is excellent, by the way) devotes a chapter to the invisibility of older women in public. She writes acidly that past the age of 50, careful dressing is vital for women, "if we want to have a presence in the world. If we don't want to be famished ghosts at the feast of life."

In Out of Shape I explain that fashion was once very dictatorial, but has splintered into a smorgasbord of market segments catering to different age groups, budgets and lifestyles. I argue that this is in response to "the baby boomers’ refusal to go gentle into that good nylon":

The boomers grew up during the 1960s ‘youthquake’, but they’ve followed fashion, and it has followed them, through their changing lifestyles – from 1970s hippie and folk apparel to 1980s power dressing. And they continue to adopt new ways of shopping; women aged over 35 account for 65 per cent of online apparel sales.

The word 'appropriate' is a hangover from the days of rigid dress codes, when there really were right and wrong things to wear in various social scenarios, and social penalties of ridicule and embarrassment for disobeying. But as Grant recognises, it's the very fact that fashion's rules are now more flexible that puts today's older women in fear of being socially penalised for the clothes they choose. They can no longer take refuge, as their mothers could, in etiquette, occasion and the artifice of glamour.

In her essay '"No-One Expects Me Anywhere": Invisible Women, Ageing and the Fashion Industry' (in Fashion Cultures, eds Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson, Routledge, 2000), Pamela Church Gibson points out the cruel irony of the current popularity of retro: that "these garments cannot be worn by those who wore them first time around." This is especially cruel, she writes, given that the boomers were "the first generation to grow up with and within fashion".

Indeed, younger women are fascinated by old-fashioned glamour precisely because we've grown up in a fashion world that valorises carefree, intuitive dressing, and looking 'fresh' and 'natural'. Trish mentions Snog, Marry, Avoid? – which is a 'makeunder' show obsessed with replacing its participants' chosen style with a codified notion of 'natural beauty'.

It makes me wonder about my current 1990s renaissance. How long will it be 'appropriate' for me to dress in the styles of my youth? When will I begin to notice disapproving glances and overhear stifled sniggers in public? Knowing that your clothes make you publicly visible in a vulnerable rather than powerful way, yet refusing to feel disempowered, is the act celebrated by the Australian Women's Weekly article.

Orthovestia does offer advice to older women: cultivating a wardrobe of safe, unobtrusive ‘classics’. The crisp white shirt; the little black dress; the string of pearls; the tailored blazer; the striped Breton T-shirt; the cashmere cardigan; the beige trench coat; the black leather loafers or ballet flats.

"Depicted on Bianca Jagger or Catherine Deneuve, these classics look sensational," Grant observes, "but they look good not because these women are in their fifties or sixties, but because they happen to be the kind of style that suits them. And because, being ravishingly beautiful to begin with, they can wear a sack (clinched at the waist with a chocolate suede belt, with heels and a gold necklace) and look as if they were doing the runway for Yves Saint Laurent."

Again, what makes an older woman's style admirable is a certain self-asssurance – the paradox of classics is that if you wear them with timidity, they don’t confer sophistication; they confer invisibility. Life's too short to be 'appropriate', says Grant. "There will be more than enough time for neutrals in the darkness of the grave."

Spring racing fashion

Today is Melbourne Cup Day. Yesterday I did an interview about Cup Day, fashion, gender and consumerism with Lourdes García Larqué for 3CR Community Radio – it was broadcast on today's Breakfast program (I'll post the link once I know what it is). Since then, I've been thinking some more about the issues we discussed.

I find it hard to get excited about spring racing fashion because I believe racing is a cruel pastime with troubling inbuilt class politics. For me it's like enjoying the Duchess of Cambridge's fashion choices when she represents a system of inherited privilege that locks up much of the UK's wealth in the hands of a family whose only purpose in life is political symbolism.

Marieke Hardy wrote an opinion piece for The Drum back in 2010 calling the Melbourne Cup "a truly revolting spectacle". Hardy's anti-cruelty sentiments are laudable. There's really no excuse to celebrate the use of animals for entertainment and the miserable treatment that goes with this. I mean, Black Beauty, written to 'humanise' horses so readers could empathise with their lives as chattels, was first published in 1877.

But I was startled by – and uncomfortable with – Hardy's repeated, contemptuous references to racegoers' dress and behaviour. They dress "like a complete twat with scant regard to the weather forecast", with "streaky fake tan or idiotic, impractical headwear". And these "freezing cold idiot women toppling over in muddy, undignified heaps, the natty prats in matching comedy waistcoats blearily waving cans of Bundy about", will find themselves "eventually teetering home covered in a fine spray of puke and semen".

Wow. Apart from the language, we can tell this is about setting up boundaries between Us and Them because the magic word 'bogans' also comes out!

Hardy makes an unpleasant slippage here between class and cruelty, implying that finding racing cruel requires the same cultural capital as 'dressing well'. This seems odd considering that racing is 'the sport of kings' and is just as popular with toffs in the Birdcage, Members and corporate marquees as with the stumbling general-admission masses in their dishevelled apparel.

We go to the races seeking something glamorous, special, out of the ordinary… but too often, as Hardy ably sketches, we're instead put back in our class boxes and told we're dressing and behaving 'wrongly'. Tomorrow we'll see the traditional 'aftermath' photographs of people sprawled on the racecourse amid abandoned rubbish; of people throwing up; of women walking barefoot, having removed their high heels, and women huddled in their male companions' jackets, having not brought their own.

These are the shaming photos. Men's clothing is frowned upon as incompetently chosen: their suits, ties, shoes, hats and sunglasses are deemed 'loud', 'ill-fitting' and 'inappropriate'. Women are basically slut-shamed for dresses that are too short, too low-cut or that flip up in gusts of wind, and for dressing for vanity rather than practicality.

Janice Breen Burns, the former Age fashion editor, warned in 2006 that racewear is very different to fashion: "It's not as sexy, for one thing. It's neater, more controlled. Things match, knees are covered. Cleavage is a no-no."

Even last year, she tutted retrospectively about the dress of youthful racegoers: "poppets in string-strapped, knicker-flasher frocklets…had flooded out of the sparkly nightclubs and year-12 formals and on to trackside lawns." Still, JBB did concede that Fashions on the Field has since evolved.

In 2011 the Sydney Morning Herald's Luke Malone described spring racing season as "Schoolies for grown-ups": "The end result of a day sipping sparkling wine and sinking beers in the often sweltering heat sees men walking around with their flies undone and women with high heels in hand as if it were 2am after a night out in Kings Cross."

Malone's article is interesting because, while it also presents racegoers as infantilised consumer dupes, Malone suggests a certain festive permissiveness. As his anonymous friend says: "A couple of years back at Melbourne Cup I saw a pair getting hot and heavy right by the track - complete with hands-under-clothes action. There were easily 30 people watching and laughing yet it didn't seem all that inappropriate at the time. Everyone is always in good spirits. You never normally see people get that drunk without a fistfight breaking out."



These are the kinds of images that we often see at Melbourne Cup time; of all the days in Melbourne's spring racing carnival, it's the most carnivalesque. Because the Cup is a public holiday and is said to belong to 'everyone' – it's "the race that stops a nation" – many people feel they can dress and behave in ways that ridicule and upend traditional hierarchies and morals… including those of gender and taste. You'll see people dressed in drag, as animals, in parodies of traditional racewear and in matching outfits.

I'd suggest that perhaps these marquee race meetings offer 'ordinary' people opportunities to be carnivalesque by temporarily dressing as our 'betters', borrowing the dress and habits of the 1%. It's not just about the clothes, but also about betting, eating fancy foods such as chicken sandwiches and smoked salmon, and drinking champagne.

There aren't many similar events like these, for which to plan and enjoy wearing elaborate clothes and to consume conspicuously – especially for people who've left university and its cycle of balls and 21sts. Even at weddings, people rarely wear hats any more, and the evangelical churches that are now popular with churchgoers (as 'traditional' churchgoing declines) encourage attendees to wear casual clothes rather than 'Sunday best'.

Looking through The Age's photo gallery of today's event (photos by Eddie Jim, Justin McManus, Wayne Taylor and Angela Wylie), I was struck by the way that racewear has developed its own logics, separate from the dictates that made it so shocking in 1965 when Jean Shrimpton wore a short dress with no hat, gloves or stockings.



Look at this doll! Doesn't she look young and gorgeous? There's something festive and joyous about the bright colours chosen by some younger racegoers.



This is Joanna Stanes on her way to the Cup. I like her bold lipstick compared to the subdued colours and textures of her hat. She looks both romantic and modern. I also like that she's wearing a hat rather than a fascinator.



This is a rather ladylike, vintage-inspired look (and a stunning photo by Justin McManus). The popularity of Mad Men and the general interest in mid-20th-century culture has driven a return to these styles. I've also noticed that brides in my social circle who favour a vintage aesthetic tend to prefer fascinator-style veils to traditional wedding veils.

The demureness and prescriptiveness of much midcentury fashion dovetails with our cultural associations of racewear with 'correctness' and 'classiness'. Usually I loathe the term 'classy' as one of those words that actually connotes its exact opposite, but here it's appropriate because people are often striving for a certain class fantasy of being wealthy and privileged.



I also noticed several different strands of women's racewear emerging. You can see these two sartorial approaches here: an edgier style in terms of colour and silhouette, compared to the classic racewear on the right. We can't see their faces, but I assume the woman on the left to be younger than the woman on the right.



I like that these two girls seem to be matching each other's outfits. Perhaps their hemlines are 'inappropriate' but they look so happy!



Deborah and John Quinn demonstrate a fun way to dress up when you're older. Deborah is a well-known millinery collector; she's in her element here. They have opted for traditional 'rules', but don't look fusty and conservative. I especially love the way that Deborah's sunglasses and gloves match John's buttonhole and waistcoat – which are the traditional yellow of Melbourne Cup Day.



By contrast, these are quite old-fashioned racegoers; their outfits are quite fussy and froufrou. I love the centre lady's pillbox hat; I wonder if it's her own vintage '60s number.



This is a good example of what many younger racegoers now consider appropriate: they're wearing flowers in their hair rather than hats; their skirts are very short (what Janice Breen Burns would call a 'frocklet'); and the fabrics are quite slinky and diaphanous in a way we associate with cocktail wear rather than daywear.



Like many celebrity racegoers and Fashions on the Field entrants who are professionally dressed by stylists, Lauren Phillips is wearing what we could call 'contemporary conservative': a sculptural but minimalist hat and a well-fitting, tailored dress that doesn't show too much skin.

Contemporary conservative (or 'contemporary corporate') is a style of racewear that doesn't really take risks: it's not exuberant like a lot of young people's racewear. You see it a lot in photos taken at the corporate marquees, and on models, invited guests and others who are at the races in a professional or promotional capacity.

Despite the boldness of its hats, it's not very whimsical or individual. When you see a number of different celebrities dressed this way, you notice the sameyness, even down to the position and angle of the hats.



For instance, here are model Jennifer Hawkins, sass&bide designers Heidi Middleton and Sarah-Jane Clarke and football WAG Rebecca Judd at the Melbourne Cup in 2011.



And here are Hawko and Juddy at last year's Oaks Day, flanking Kris Smith, who I believe is best known for having once dated Dannii Minogue.

To the museum!

I love museum shows of all sorts, but particularly those dedicated to fashion and clothing. A while ago the US-based Lizzie Bramlett, one of my favourite vintage bloggers, decided to compile an exhibition calendar.

Nicole Jenkins at Circa Vintage is very good at telling her readers about upcoming vintage-related events, but I had a quick look around online and couldn't find anywhere that listed all the exhibitions in one place. So I've created my own exhibition calendar for Australia. I actually set this up a while ago but forgot to actually tell anyone I'd done it. Duhh…

You can find it in the top menu and I'll update it whenever I come across a new exhibition. The shows are arranged by state, and within that by closing date, so you don't miss something before it finishes.

You'll notice, first of all, that Victoria is over-represented. That's because I live in Melbourne and it's easier to keep tabs on events in my home city. But I'd like to remedy that, so if you live elsewhere in Australia and hear of any forthcoming fashion, costume or clothing-related exhibitions, please email me.

My week in clothes

Apart from the stupendous reunion, this past week I wanted to blog some tidbits that are perhaps not deserving of their own entire blog posts.



On Tuesday night I went out for drinks with my colleagues at Junkee, and the taxi I shared home dropped me outside the Salco Group on Elgin Street. I couldn't get over the British Country-ness of this window display.

I've always thought Salco was some random corporate and uniform manufacturer, but it has a long history in that spot on Elgin Street, Carlton – it's been there since 1922. In 1942 it seems to have landed a wartime military uniform manufacturing contract, because it was advertising for machinists.

It seems to specialise in menswear (especially shirting). It has its own men's shirt brand 'Abelard', and also has the Australian production and distribution rights to American brands including Gant, Geoffrey Beene and Tommy Bahama, and UK brands Thomas Pink and Jeff Banks.

These are all quite preppy, traditional brands, so no wonder the window display looks like this. It's fascinating, though, to be reminded that brands trading on 'heritage' (for instance, citing London shirtmakers' district Jermyn Street, or ties to Ivy Style and WASPy resort wear, or Jeff Banks' Swinging London past and association with the Eurythmics) are not necessarily manufactured in 'authentic' ways.

Yet, ironically, Salco has its own kind of authenticity simply by operating for more than 90 years in the one location, even though it doesn't have any of the 'cultural' authenticity markers of the brands it manufactures.



Here I am on Friday in the Body Shop store in the Bourke Street Mall. I am wearing the other dress I bought from Hunter Gatherer in my 'two for $10' bargain. It's not the greatest; the skirt is a bit frumpily long and the print is a very '80s paint-swish abstract, but I like the colours, plus it has POCKETS, which was really helpful when I was standing around instore and wanted access to my phone. (It was also great wearing a dress with pockets to the MIFF opening night; I didn't have to worry about carrying a bag around all night.)

I was there as part of an event to mark the brand's 30th anniversary in Australia and its store redesign. There was a deal whereby if you bought $40 worth of Body Shop products, you got a free copy of my book, which I could tell you about and sign for you.

I'm coming to realise that I've written the sort of book that's hard to categorise – just look at all the various bookshop sections I saw it shelved during Home City Book Tour. But once I could tell people about it in person, they seemed quite interested and animated about the issues at stake. I gave away about 25 books, which hopefully went to people who mightn't otherwise have discovered my work.

Home City Book Tour

As advertised, a few days ago I went on a book tour without leaving my home city. I was chauffeured by Affirm Press's sales and marketing manager Keiran Rogers in the company Prius (Affirm Press is a socially and environmentally responsible publisher, so that's how they roll).

It was a wonderful winter's day to be out and about – crisp and sunny. At first I was embarrassed to admit to being the author of my book ("Uh, do you have Out of Shape by Mel Campbell?") but Keiran was very matter-of-fact about it, and the booksellers totally knew the drill.

They were a great bunch of people: friendly, knowledgeable, and genuinely passionate about reading and writing. I really encourage you to buy books in bricks-and-mortar stores if you can. The ones I visited were all lovely places: airy and well laid out.

I tweeted our progress around town, photographing my book in various shops, and I've made the tour into an interactive map, so you can follow where we went. Just click on the placemarks to see the photos and text, and if you find the pop-up boxes extend off the map, click and drag anywhere on the map to reposition it and pull the info into view.

View Home City Book Tour in a larger map

In other news, I wrote an op-ed about Cosmopolitan magazine's recent, ridiculous "Size Hero" body image campaign for Junkee, which was syndicated to The Guardian. Here's a taste; click through to read the rest.

It is comically naive to think we can counteract a lifetime’s worth of immersive, pervasive cultural messages about body size and shape just by bunging a few scantily clad celebs and plus-size models in magazines. But weird magical thinking aside, we should reject all these campaigns for the same reason: they teach us that our bodies are other people’s property, to be gazed at and judged. You shouldn’t need Cosmo’s permission — or anyone else’s — to feel good about yourself.

And, excitingly, I've been invited onto Channel Nine's breakfast TV show, Today, this coming Wednesday (10 July). I'll be on air at 8:20am, talking about 'change room anxiety' and other issues. So I'll be making a flying visit to Sydney next week and hopefully will be able to pop into some bookstores there to chat to booksellers and sign copies of the book.

Talkings, readings, signings

The Out of Shape publicity train is still chugging away on its journey to MOAR SAELZ. Here are some upcoming events I'm involved in:

Next Wednesday, 3 July, I'll be roaming around the bookstores of Melbourne with Affirm Press's sales and marketing manager, signing copies of my book. Starting in the city at 9:30am, here are the stores we hope to visit:

Hill of Content Bookshop, 86 Bourke St Melbourne
Embiggen Books, 197-203 Lt Lonsdale St Melbourne
Reader’s Feast, 162 Collins St Melbourne
Dymocks, 234 Collins St Melbourne
Thesaurus Books, 29 Church St Brighton
Avenue Bookstore, 127 Dundas Place Albert Park
Readings, 112 Acland St, St Kilda
Coventry Bookstore, 265 Coventry St South Melbourne
Dymocks, The Well Shopping Centre, 793 Burke Rd Camberwell
Readings, 701 Glenferrie Rd Hawthorn
Readings, 309 Lygon St Carlton

These aren't public appearances as such, but feel free to pop past and pick up a signed copy, or if you catch me, say hello! I will be wearing the bright yellow skirt I write about buying from Savers in the book. I will probably also have a coffee in one hand and an ice pack wrapped around the other.

Next Thursday, 4 July, I'll be appearing at ACMI's "Life Is A Cabaret" event, associated with the Hollywood Costume exhibition. Hosted by Kip from Joy FM’s Cabaret Room, it'll also include the director of the Melbourne Cabaret Festival (which kicks off today) speaking on the history of cabaret in Melbourne, a performance of Liza Minnelli songs, and Clementine Ford doing a dramatic reading. I'll be talking about the costumes from the film Cabaret, and Weimar fashion more generally. It starts at 6pm and it's free!



Sunday 7 July is Wizard of Oz Day at ACMI and I'll be giving a talk about the costume designer, Adrian, who was one of Hollywood's most legendary designers. I will try to avoid shouting "ADRIAAAAAAN!" in a Sylvester Stallone voice but I'm not sure if I will succeed. I'll give you some background on his Wizard of Oz costumes in particular, and how they create character and drive the narrative in the film.

On Wednesday 17 July, I'll be doing a reading and book signing as part of the City of Melbourne's Look Stop Shop cultural program, themed 'Hot Stuff'. The fashion boutiques of Curtin House will be open late, and I'll be appearing at Metropolis Bookshop, the excellent art, design and pop culture specialist booksellers on level 3. I'll be reading from the book, so if you missed my Dog's Tales or Wheeler Centre readings, please come along. And if you'd like your copy inscribed, I'll be signing copies too.



And on Thursday 18 July, I'll be repeating my Elizabeth Taylor talk at ACMI. This is richly illustrated with pics of Liz's film costumes (especially Cleopatra), her wedding dresses, her groovy outfits from what I refer to as "the Yachting Years" and, most fabulously, her jewels! It went down quite well the first time and I surprised myself by how much information about Liz's life and style I had accumulated while researching.

Who listens to the radio?

This past week I've been busily spruiking Out of Shape on radio. Last Monday I did Life Matters on ABC Radio National, which you can listen to here. On my computer, it worked best to choose the "download" option, which opened up a separate window where the audio played happily.

Thursday was another big press day. I began the day at Triple R chatting to the Breakfasters about the book. I was in there a fair bit over summer, doing "The Stupid Question" segment for The Enthusiast, so it was nice returning to familiar ground. Listen to the segment here.

Later that I chatted with Kelly Higgins-Devine for Statewide Afternoons on ABC Brisbane, and that interview is here.

Then after that I appeared on Rafael Epstein's Drive program on ABC Melbourne, as part of the regular "Culture Club" talkback segment, but I don't have any audio from that interview.

I've also chatted with Genevieve Jacobs for Mornings on ABC Canberra, Ian Henschke for Mornings on ABC Adelaide, and Kate O'Toole for Mornings on ABC Darwin, but I haven't yet found any audio from those spots online. 

I'm keeping track of all the reviews on the Out of Shape page rather than mention them all individually. So if you're interested, you can check 'em out there. If you use Goodreads, you can also link up with me there and follow what I'm reading.  

Finally, I'll be posting some of the fascinating stuff I couldn't fit into the book as blog posts over the coming weeks.

A book teaser… and some nice early reviews

So Out of Shape is about to hit stores! It has already hit some stores: you can get it right now at Readings, and thanks to the lovely people who've tweeted and Facebooked pictures of their spanking new copies!

To get a taste of what the book is like, Kill Your Darlings has an extract online now. If you followed or completed my What Dress Size Am I? online survey, this is the bit of the book in which I reveal the results. I even went back to the Bourke Street Mall to subject myself to more judgey glances from shop assistants! That is how committed to my research I am.

The official release date is 1 June, and I know for sure it'll soon be available at Booktopia, Constant Reader, Dymocks, Bookworld and Brunswick Street Bookstore. If your local bookshop doesn't stock Out of Shape, please ask them to order it in. I'm kind of hazy about how book distribution works, but one thing I have noticed is that bookstores gauge whether to stock a given book by how many people request it.

Ebooks are coming soon, from Kindle, Kobo, iBook and Bookish, plus others including OverDrive. The official ebook release date is 3 June, but it'll be gradually rolling out over the next few days.

There will also be a Melbourne launch on Thursday 20 June… details of that to come. And I feel so lucky and pleased that reviewers seem to have liked it so far. Here are some nice things that people have already said about the book:

"A lively and personal waltz through the history and culture of clothing size and fit … illuminating and enjoyable." – Portia Lindsay, Books+Publishing

"This is exactly the type of writing that I love – intellectually charged, feminist and smart." – Jessica Au, Readings

"Out of Shape is a smart, meticulous and well-researched examination of clothes and society. It is a book that will inspire readers to think about their own relationship with what they wear" – Kylie Mason, Newtown Review of Books

"Out of Shape has slapped me in the face. Fashion doesn't mean just talking about the way things look. What about how things feel? … Mel slices up the broad topic of 'fashion and fit' with anecdotes, research and insight." – Marissa Shirbin, Three Thousand

Abercrombie and fit

There's been a brouhaha this week over the size range offered by US preppy teenwear company Abercrombie & Fitch, and comments by its CEO Mike Jeffries. Here's how the issue has been interpreted in the media:

"Not available in XL: Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries accused of only wanting 'thin and beautiful people'" – The Independent (UK)
"Abercrombie & Fitch CEO's ugly quest for attractive 'cool kids'" – Los Angeles Times
"Abercrombie & Fitch only want your business if you're thin" – New York Post
"Abercrombie CEO slammed for refusing to sell women's plus sizes" – Edge Boston

This story is actually seven years old. It was back in January 2006 that Salon.com investigated the A&F company philosophy (including references to Friendster, LOL!). But the claims were revived in a recent Business Insider interview with retail pundit Robin Lewis.

Lewis reminds us that in the Salon interview, Jeffries had said:

we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don't market to anyone other than that. … Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.

Now some commentators – including Lewis – find this marketing strategy repugnant. At The Huffington Post, Andrea Neusner huffingtoned that as a parent of three "thin, attractive, all-American kids with great attitudes and lots of friends", she was so offended that she was donating their A&F clothes to charity and refusing to purchase more.

But A&F is perfectly within its rights as a retailer to define its 'target customer' however it wants. It's not in the business of pleasing everyone. It trades in a kind of sexed-up preppy aesthetic, in which shirtless, wholesome jocks and their girlfriends frolic in an eternally carefree, monied Ivy League youth. Kind of like what Facebook could've been if the Winklevii had had their way.







Lots of people seem to have the idea that clothing retailers are somehow conspiratorial in their sizing, deliberately gaming it to exclude those who don't fit the clothes, as it would be a 'bad advertisement' for the brand to let 'undesirable' people wear it. Kind of like jocks and mean girls bullying and ostracising nerds and fat kids.

That's just not how it works. Bad experiences with sizing and fit in shops are often the fault of poor customer service and unsympathetic retail design – in other words, the aspects of a clothing brand that have nothing to do with the actual clothes.

If Abercrombie & Fitch staff were trained to display a contemptuous, too-cool-for-school attitude and to belittle any shopper they judged to be 'not brand-correct', then that's an issue of customer service.

And if the store environment is alienating and intimidating, with shoppers made to feel like supplicants who have to prove themselves worthy to buy the clothes, then that's a store design and visual merchandising issue.

A given brand's sizing is actually based on the preferred size of the majority of customers. Any store's 'medium' size is always its bestseller; if a brand notices more 'smalls' or 'larges' being sold, that's a sign that its customer base is changing, and that the sizing needs to be tweaked.

While it may seem unfair to those who wear 'outlier' sizes, this is completely not a deliberate psych-out or an intimidatory or exclusionary tactic. And nor is it vanity sizing. It's an effort to streamline the costs of production so the brand is not wasting money making clothes that sit around on racks because they don't fit the average customer.

We often hear about how brands are pandering to the expanding market for plus-sizes by offering larger sizes, more cuts and mainstreaming plus-size models. For instance, Swedish fast-fashion brand H&M was recently praised for illustrating its swimwear using a plus-size model.


Plus-size model Jennie Runk models a pretty blah-looking H&M swimsuit

The media often present these actions as the brand's moral choices: choices that acknowledge the dignity and personhood of larger consumers, and that present the retailers as 'good guys'. But for the brand, sizing isn't a goodwill gesture; it's a marketing tactic. And a brand that clearly targets a particular consumer segment, then adjusts its sizing to fit these target shoppers, is making a strategic decision.

"Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny," Mike Jeffries said back in 2006. "But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either."

Out of Shape, into the world

Here's the cover art for my book, Out of Shape. Allison Colpoys did a lovely job, and I'm super pleased with Benjamin Law's quote. (More great design and quotes on the back cover, and inside!)

It'll be out in June, which is scarily not that far away. I'll also be speaking at a number of events over the next few months, so here are all the details:

ACMI's Hollywood Costume exhibition is opening on 24 April, fresh from its run at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Costume museums play a significant role in my book, as does clothing in film more generally. I was so excited by this show I was toying with the idea of travelling to London to see it, so you can imagine how thrilled I am that it's come to me instead.

There's an associated program of talks and events. I'll be speaking on a panel event called The Emperor's New Clothes on Sunday 5 May, along with costume designer Katie Graham (Wilfred, Small Time Gangster) and Dr Terrie Waddell, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cinema Studies at La Trobe University. It's about the role of costumes in developing a character.

I'll also be presenting a talk on Elizabeth Taylor on 21 May and 18 July, whose onscreen and offscreen clothes are so memorable. It's part of an ACMI package where you get to hear the talk and then go explore the exhibition. I've already been collecting images for my talk on Pinterest.

The Emerging Writers Festival runs from 23 May to 2 June. It's a favourite festival of mine because everyone is so friendly and it's genuinely focused on writing. I'm appearing at three events. I'm moderating a Writers' Conference panel on genre on Sunday 26 May, with Jane Harrison, Alex Hammond, Wayne Macauley and Alison Croggon. I'm also speaking at the Kill Your Darlings 'Late Night Live' panel about TV on Tuesday 28 May, and at the Express Media/Signal intensive workshop for young writers on 1 June, alongside Bethanie Blanchard, Amy Gray and Samuel Cooney.

On Monday 3 June I'll be reading from my book at Dog's Tales, a monthly storytelling night run by Angela Meyer at the Dog's Bar in St Kilda. Sharing the bill with me will be the very funny Lee Zachariah, who's also one of my film-reviewer buddies.

And hopefully, having got used to the idea of reading my work aloud, I'll be appearing at The Wheeler Centre's Debut Mondays on 17 June. Debut Mondays are held at booze o'clock (6:15pm) in the Moat bar in the basement of the Wheeler Centre.

The inspirational gaze

I just read an interesting post at The Peach about 'thinspo' and 'fitspo'. These are genres of images that are circulated through image-centric blogs and social networks including Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest. But the line between these and 'pro-ana' (pro-anorexia) imagery is very blurred. Basically I see the terms 'thinspo' and 'fitspo' as interchangeable.

The idea of the images is to inspire women to become thin ('thinspiration') or fit ('fitspiration'). Some have superimposed aphorisms, like motivational posters, about the value of self-discipline and the deferral of pleasure.

Here are a few pics I found via a 'fitspo' search on Pinterest:











The point Holly Curtis is making at The Peach is that historically, women's magazines have controlled the production of aspirational imagery of women's bodies, but now women are photographing themselves. And they're accessing and circulating these images in much greater volumes than before, and in ways are much more pervasive.

It's no longer the responsibility of magazine gatekeepers to promote 'positive body image', Curtis argues – it's now up to us (the producer/consumers) to develop our own visual literacy so we can separate the 'healthy' from the 'non-healthy' images.

Some feminist fitness fans are seeking to do just that. Virginia Sole-Smith teases out the relationship of fitspo to its eating disorder-fostering antecedent, thinspo. Charlotte Anderson points out that "compulsive over exercise can be just as deadly as other eating disorders and yet it [is] so socially sanctioned that it’s often promoted as inspiring." At Fit and Feminist, Caitlin explains that she's inspired by images of women in action, rather than women posing passively for the viewer's gaze.

The first thing I'll say about thinspo and fitspo images is that they are an obvious example of what I call 'orthovestia'. They dramatise the idea that we're only entitled to appear in public if we continuously 'work on' our bodies through diet, exercise and judiciously chosen clothing.

These images divide people into 'winners' and 'losers'. Winners are those who train hard, deny their appetites, and are rewarded by being the objects – sometimes the headless objects – of the thinspo and fitspo gaze. Losers are those who 'give up', 'never try' or 'make excuses' and are relegated to longingly gazing at images they don't have the self-discipline to resemble.



What's striking about a lot of fitspo is the pitiless sameness of the bodies: they're very lean and slender, with flat, toned stomachs, protruding hipbones and large gaps between the thighs, yet still with plump breasts. Some images are closer to what we'd understand as bodybuilding or 'body-sculpting' images: the women have defined abdominal muscles, bulging shoulders, arms and thighs.

Traditionally, 'positive body image' campaigns have argued we should promote imagery of a diversity of body shapes and sizes. People who ascribe to the body image doctrine might argue that the antidote to thinspo and fitspo is circulating similar semi-clad images of other body types – pudgier ones; stockier ones; ones with bigger hips, or broader shoulders.

However, I take a more radical view. I believe that a gaze-based culture is inherently tyrannical, turning its citizens into objects to be surveilled and judged on their outer appearances. We erase the subtleties of being embodied when we place so much value on how a body looks. And we lose empathy for other people when we're taught to obsessively focus our energies on 'improving' our own bodies.

It is truly alarming that some women can only feel 'inspired' by gazing at pictures of other people's bodies. Any circulation of images of bodies is damaging; instead we need to cultivate ways of being in and talking about our bodies that aren't dependent on displaying them for other people's approval.

Fatness vs obesity

Today I have an op-ed at the Wheeler Centre in response to an essay by Karen Hitchcock in The Monthly. Hitchcock is a doctor treating extremely fat people whose ill health makes them candidates for bariatric surgery.

Hitchcock’s arguments about the adverse effects of being very fat and the fatal allure of ‘bad’ foods are alarming but persuasive, as are her clinical experiences with the strain that a large amount of weight places on the body. It’s certainly troubling that we are medicalising what is really a social issue.

But it’s hard to have a constructive public discussion about obesity when scientific research and medical authority are used as moral justification to shame and blame fat people.

In my book Out of Shape, I identify a rhetorical mode in public debate that I’ve dubbed ‘scienciness’. Just as ‘truthiness’ is something that feels intuitively true without requiring any evidence, sciency writing uses the language of science to normalise the judgments we make about other people’s bodies.

Hitchcock’s essay was frustrating for me because she understands the way culture works on us, yet in her position of authority as a doctor she also regurgitates its worst messages. She lists the tools of her trade – ‘our ears, our voices, our hands, our pills and our scalpels’. But she leaves out the most important – her eyes.

Read the rest at the Wheeler Centre site.

Interview: Kate Millett of Bombshell Vintage

Kate Millett runs Bombshell Vintage, a Melbourne store specialising in plus-size vintage clothing. I discovered it when Fashion Hayley blogged about the launch of Bombshell's first shopfront in Clifton Hill.

A year later, Bombshell Vintage now operates from the Lost and Found Market in Collingwood. And Kate is celebrating its first birthday on Saturday 9 March at the LuWow, 162 Johnston Street Fitzroy from 7:30pm. There'll be delicious tiki cocktails, curvaceous go-go dancers, and a catwalk show featuring Bombshell's wares as well as clothes from local designer Fox Parse and fellow plus-size vintage sellers, Hey Fatty.


Kate models her favourite festive vintage outfit. Image: Bombshell Vintage

Mel Campbell: How did you get into the vintage retail business?

Kate Millett: I was a vintage aficionado for a long time before I ever thought of starting a business. I always wanted someone else to do it so I could just take advantage of their effort! I was the one telling vintage store owners to sort their clothes by size so I wouldn’t have to waste my time pawing through clothes that never went higher than a size 12…

And then I went through six months of being unemployed and I thought to myself, "Well, I’ve got the time on my hands. Just start doing it. Keep it small and so if it fails, you won’t have lost much." And then it just grew from there!

And what's your approach to vintage now – do you see yourself as a collector, or a savvy shopper and trader, or an advocate for plus-size fashion… or something else?

I see myself as something of a collector, a bit of a hunter, and definitely an advocate for plus size fashion! I love finding new designers to show people that it is possible to be larger and dress beautifully! I love hunting for new bargains. I will spend the extra hours going through multiple op shops to find those little hidden treasures.

What do your clients or shoppers tell you they value most about a shop like Bombshell Vintage?

All the clothes I stock are interesting, either because of the colour, embellishment, texture or the shape. I help people find clothes that reflect their personality and rediscover the joy in fashion – the fun in playing dress-up every day! My customers use my store to find one-off special pieces they can then integrate with the rest of their wardrobe to make it a little quirky, a little bit more interesting.

I guess the main thing about my store is that it gives them the freedom to explore fashion without judgement, a place where they know they can find clothes that are gorgeous just for them!

I've always been fascinated by how much plus-size vintage is still out there, and how easy or difficult it is to find. (In its early stages, my book had the working title 'What Fat Chicks Used To Wear'.) Where do you get your stock?

It’s not the easiest thing of all time. You have to be willing to scrimmage through warehouses of clothes to find awesome stuff that’s also plus size. Now that we can search via the internet, that search is getting a little easier, although that does mean you can’t personally inspect the stock for things like poorly stitched seams, stains or tell if it’s a reproduction rather than the real deal. You have to build relationships and trust between yourself and suppliers to ensure you get the best stock possible. These days most of my stock is from a few second-hand warehouses, with a few special items bought over the internet.

I found most of [my suppliers] by exploring every op shop/second-hand store in my area, thanks to this website. The others I found by driving past them every day on my way to work and then finally deciding to check them out. Second-hand stores can look pretty dirty from the outside!

Does plus-size vintage have much of a presence here in Australia compared to straight-size vintage? I understand it's quite a thriving vintage segment overseas – I've heard fabulous tales of giant plus-size vintage warehouses in Brooklyn…

In Australia, plus size vintage pretty much doesn’t exist by itself. One or two places do stock it alongside straight sizes, but even then it’s only a few pieces. As far as I know, there’s only myself and Hey Fatty who are specialising in plus size vintage full time. There are a few Facebook groups popping up to help plus size women clothes swap, et cetera, and a few people have started doing market stalls, but it’s still a rarity.

I’m travelling to the US and Canada later this year… I really hope those tales are accurate!


Fancy wares at Bombshell Vintage's stall at Lost and Found Market. (May I draw your attention to that covetably Stam-like handbag on the wall?) Image: Bombshell Vintage

What kinds of items do you find a lot of when you're sourcing stock? Do you find certain labels or brands are well represented in plus-size vintage?

Thankfully, most types of clothes are available in plus size vintage if you look hard enough. The only thing that’s really missing are pants that aren’t awful!

In terms of labels, there are a few that keep popping up and are indicators of good quality clothes – Lane Bryant and Diane Freis come to mind. Diane Freis’ dresses are almost more artwork than clothing… I love her clashing prints and amazing pleats!

What proportion of your stock would be home-made?

Quite a bit of it. Especially when you’re talking about clothes from before the '60s. We also get a lot of stock that has been altered again and again. Something that may have started out as a store bought frock ends up looking like something homemade because practically every seam has been changed!

What are the idiosyncrasies of vintage sizing that shoppers might not be familiar with from contemporary garment labels? Do you see much of the old half-sizes and OSW, EOS and XOS sizes, or European numbered sizes?

We don’t get a lot of the European numbered sizing. The OSW, EOS, etc only really shows up in a few styles of clothing – it’s not very common. The half sizing is everywhere! I tend to ignore vintage sizes… They seem to change from brand to brand!

It's kind of a truism of vintage shopping that older sizes are much smaller than their contemporary equivalents. Personally I disagree that this is 'vanity sizing' at work – I see it as more a 'sizing evolution' as the population has got older, taller and heavier – but what do you think, based on your experience?

Vintage sizing is very different from modern sizes… I think the change comes from evolution, like you said, but also maybe from trying to combine two or three different methods of sizing.

I think it's about the sizing systems changing. Companies were starting up who didn't want to use the old systems of sizing - the half sizes, the XW method - and needed something to use. I think the sizes have also grown as the population has. We are now taller and broader than we used to be. It's a different way of looking at sizing. I don't think it's a vanity thing, I think it's a natural growth out of the old systems. The next step is for them to all be standardised...


More colourful merch at Bombshell Vintage's stall in Lost and Found Market. Image: Bombshell Vintage

Interview: Stephanie Trigg on medieval wardrobe malfunctions

Stephanie Trigg is a Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. This was my department when I was a postgrad, and as I walked through the corridors of the John Medley building I could sometimes peek into Stephanie's office and see her at work.

These days I sort of do the same thing in a digital fashion by following her blog, Humanities Researcher. I got really excited when I realised that her work tracing medievalist themes to the present day, and particularly her latest book Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter, resonates with the ideas I'm exploring in my own writing.

I'm delighted that Stephanie so graciously answered my decidedly non-expert questions, and I'll be including parts of this interview in my book.

The Order of the Garter is England's highest chivalric honour – an institution whose pageantry persists today. Intriguingly, it has an origin myth both as populist and as persistent as any superhero's. Here's how Stephanie describes it:

King Edward III was dancing at a ball with a girl, possibly Joan, Countess of Salisbury, possibly his mistress, when her garter falls off so her stocking crumples to the ground. All the courtiers laugh — "Ho ho ho! What an embarrassing thing!" — but the king very chivalrously bends down, picks up that garter, ties it around his own knee and says (in French, of course), "Honi soit qui mal y pense" — "Shamed be he who thinks evil of this." And he says: "I will found a chivalric order in honour of this event that will be so great, all you who now laugh will want to join it!"

Check out this very hammy painting of the scene: Ceremony of the Garter, by Albert Chevallier Tayler, 1901. I love the way Joan's silhouette is much more typical of a corseted Edwardian lady.

Mel Campbell: I was struck by the vulgar 'origin story' of the Order of the Garter basically being a wardrobe malfunction. Today we shame celebrities (and ordinary people) whose clothing goes awry in public – do you see this as a continuation of older attitudes, or as a different, modern phenomenon?

Stephanie Trigg: I think this is a continuation: it’s the collapse of a carefully-controlled public presentation of self, and so this is always intriguing. These ‘malfunctions’ usually remind us of the body beneath the clothing, so they are reminders of our physical mortality, and the sheer animality of our bodies we share beneath the differences of age, beauty, class, et cetera…

It's true we shame celebrities in this way, but we also take pleasure in circulating and re-circulating those images. In that respect it's like the laughter of the crowds in the story of The Emperor's New Clothes. The Emperor is duped into thinking he is wearing magnificent garments but in fact is walking naked, or in his underwear. A small child points this out and everyone laughs. Nevertheless, the Emperor keeps walking, holding his head up high, as the sheer formality of the ritual procession keeps him going, and must be maintained.

I'm so pleased you mention this, because I'm using The Emperor's New Clothes in my book! To me it seems like the origin story of the lady dropping the garter and the king picking it up is gendered, with the female as shameful and the male as the restorer of honour. Have you found in your research that shame is something more often ascribed to women?

It depends very much on the context. In courtly and chivalric literature, the knight who retreats from battle or attacks a woman is publicly shamed. He can be stripped of his knighthood and lose his courtly reputation. And the story of the Garter ostensibly makes a distinction between those men who can appreciate the king's gallantry and those who cannot, who are shamed (according to the Garter motto – honi soit qui mal y pense) if they see anything untoward in the king's behaviour.

But yes, a woman’s body is seen as more shameful than a man’s, in medieval culture. In humoral terms, it’s seen as moist and cold, as compared to the hot and dry male body, so it’s closer to the earth, more physical than spiritual. And in general terms, women are associated more with sexuality, which in Christian culture is often seen as inherently shameful. There is a very vague hint in a nineteenth-century commentary on the Garter story that the offending dropped garter wasn't so much a garter as underwear stained with menstrual blood, so that's an indication that the story was being read then as about women's shameful bodies.

I've been influenced by William Ian Miller's writing on shame and honour in medieval Icelandic epics. He argues that the Icelanders had no concept of internally motivated self-esteem; their sense of honour was entirely bestowed by the community, and so taking away your honour ('shaming' you) was the ultimate punishment. Do you reckon that in England and France, honour and shame were external states like this, or were they internal, deeply felt emotions?

This is a really fascinating question. Conventionally, yes, in heroic and chivalric culture, collective or communal reputation is pre-eminent; and I think shame is usually experienced in a social sense: one is shamed by, or in relation to others. But there is also a deep interest, especially in the later middle ages, on the individual’s relationship with God, and shame sometimes features here. By the later middle ages, I think we are starting to see indications of a more internally experienced sense of shame. Margery Kempe, for example, a fifteenth-century woman who experienced many visions of Christ, opens her narrative saying she had a sin she was too ashamed to confess. We never find out what that is.

What do you think is the difference between shame, humiliation and embarrassment?

I guess embarrassment is the most ephemeral, and the least serious of the three. Humiliation need not have an ethical component. You can be humiliated by defeat in a sporting contest or in battle, or in debate, or by a partner's infidelity, for example. This can feel devastating, but it's just as likely to lead to anger, or determination to do better next time. Shame, on other hand, brings us down very low, because it really implies social judgment not just on particular actions, but on our very personhood, in relation to our infringement of social norms.

Have you done much research into medieval clothing – and medieval underwear – more generally? And if so, what have been your impressions?

Yes, a little. The medieval period, especially the fourteenth century in England, was a time of great anxiety about social instability and economic growth. Clothes became a less reliable indicator of social status, and so sumptuary laws were passed attempting to restrict the wearing of various colours, fabrics and types of fur to particular classes. Clothing was often the subject of satirical commentary or stern critique: Chaucer's Parson in the Canterbury Tales, for example, complains about contemporary fashion for short tunics, and tight-fitting pants.

I don't think underwear was regulated by the sumptuary laws or subject to this kind of critique in this way because it's not normally visible. There would have been great degrees in the quality and fineness of the fabric used. The fourteenth century marks a big shift in clothing, generally, as they started to tailor clothes to the shape of the body, not just holding things in with belts and pins. Not very much underwear survives, and we have to guess a little bit from pictures.

Have you heard much about the so-called 'medieval bra'? Has this discovery caused much discussion among your colleagues?

Yes there was a bit of a flurry on Facebook! We really don’t have much surviving evidence of medieval underwear, so this is an astonishing find: I think it’s the first medieval bra to be found, and it’s remarkably similar in design to modern bras. I think there is also something quite moving about a garment that has been so obviously worn, that bears the traces of intimate touch with a medieval body. It's really quite uncanny to see something that is both historically alien and yet also so ordinary, so familiar to us.

I'm writing about 'retro' cultures, which many people seem to identify with the 20th century, but it could equally be about cherishing older aesthetics and values too. How do you see medievalism used in today's fashions and pop culture, as an aesthetic or as a set of values or ideals?

This can take a number of forms, from the long embroidered dresses of hippie and Indian culture, to some aspects of gothic fashion. Sometimes you see high-end fashion return to a kind of fantastic medievalism: fine metallic meshes that are reminiscent of chain mail, or metallic breastplates and bras that evoke armour plates.



Lena Headey as the villainous queen regent Cersei Lannister in the TV series Game of Thrones. She's wearing an armoured breastplate during a battle scene.



And here's Lucy Liu at this week's Emmy Awards, wearing a Versace gown influenced by armour and chain mail.

Often the medievalism of fashion is mediated by pre-Raphaelite nostalgia for long dresses, rich fabrics, on models with long wavy tresses and big dark eyes like the models of William Morris and Holman Hunt in the nineteenth century.



Medievalist film plays an important role here: think of Helen Mirren's metalllic costumes in John Boorman’s Excalibur; Milla Jovovich as Joan of Arc in The Messenger; or the popularity of pre-Raphaelite paintings, e.g. John Waterhouse’s Ophelia. This is a model of femininity that tends to show women as rather passive, if not doomed to tragic deaths like the Lady of Shalott. The costumes for the heroine in Brian Helgeland’s Knight’s Tale, on the other hand, are a fantastic example of the way something can be both vaguely medieval and also very stylish and avant-garde.



Shannyn Sossamon as Jocelyn in A Knight's Tale.

On the subjective address in non-fiction writing

I've got just over a week to hand in a full draft to my editor, and I've really been struggling with the issue of writerly voice. I've done so much research, in so many broad fields, and it frustrates me that rather than this fascinating stuff about the histories and cultures of size and fit, my editor wants more of my own experiences and anecdotes.

There's so much gold I'm having to summarise or cut out, but luckily I plan to showcase that stuff here on the blog.

I've also written a little essay for the Wheeler Centre about how I fret that adopting a subjective voice simply plays into the prejudices that people already have about the topic of clothes. Here's an extract:

My book needs to embrace subjectivity and embodiment, because it’s about clothing size and fit. I want to celebrate the sensuous pleasures of a garment that hangs, clings and moves in all the right ways, making us feel powerful, relaxed or sexually alluring. I also want to explore the excoriating shame we endure when our clothing doesn’t fit. Those soul-crushing change-room experiences. The public disgust and ridicule that greets wardrobe malfunctions.

But from the beginning of my project, I’ve struggled with the perception that what I’m doing isn’t ‘proper’ journalism. My book is no hard-hitting exposé, no barbecue-stopper that will land me on Q&A. (Well, okay, perhaps my absolute loathing of Q&A might have ruled that one out.)

It’s, like, about fashion, LOL!

‘Fashion has often been relegated to being a woman’s domain, something historically not deemed worthy of critical thought,’ says Serah-Marie McMahon, founding editor of Worn Fashion Journal. Fashion historian Valerie Steele, director of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, adds that most people think of ‘fashion’ as a remote, superficial fairyland of runway shows and red carpet gowns: ‘They don’t identify it with what they are wearing.’

Read the rest at the Wheeler Centre website…