millions of dollars behind certain designs, it doesn’t make them right. When so much money is at stake, following trends becomes a big consideration. It’s a detriment to fashion as an art form. It creates monsters. We made the monsters obvious [...] The satire is geared toward the shapes being advocated by designers at the time. It seemed everyone was in competition for shock value, which is also visible in the unfortunate evolution of the platform shoe, which continues to today. How mindless it is, to keep building and building; much like architects continue to compete for the world’s tallest building no matter the cost. Designers were following trends to an unfortunate place. Perhaps in conceiving it, I felt I was bringing a sobering comment to the conversation about how stupid it all was. “Shoulder Dysmorphia” operates under the concept of a fashion authority who declares what’s ‘in’ and ‘out’ of fashion, creating social anxiety. This tone reflects that of the feminist theorists of female fashion of the 1970s and 1980s who called for ‘functional’ fashion design. Negrin describes their argument as such: “They argued that women should adopt a more ‘natural’ form of dress which revealed the body for what it was rather than seeking to transform it by artificial means in conformity with some externally imposed ideal of beauty.”13 Though the 1970s and 1980s brought release from the constricting silhouettes of corset-driven fashion of the earliest part of the century, advancements in plastic surgery and the widespread popularity of dieting and exercise could be viewed as replacements for the earlier methods of female body shaping. As Negrin writes: “Feminists [...] drew attention to the new pressures brought to bear on women by the advent of body-shaping techniques such as plastic surgery, diet and exercise. While female dress became less restrictive, this did not indicate that it had become more liberated since there were 24 FASHION STUDIES JOURNAL 1.1
now more effective ways of moulding the body in accordance with the ideals of feminine beauty.”14 It can be argued that women who seek aesthetic surgery to enhance their physique to achieve fashionable bodies are directly related to the female amputees Marquard Smith discusses in “The Vulnerable Articulate,” these women participate in aesthetic surgery to fit with normative beauty standards.15 Although the social implications are comparably different, both sets of individuals seek bodily modification to align themselves with an established body ideal – something undeniably ruled by culture. The synthetic fashioning of the body has been identified as an answer to social anxiety surrounding an undesired body. Ubiquitous in our culture, synthetic refashioning is a means to ‘fix’ bodies which fall outside of the ideal. Once complete, these bodies are then permanently dressed in a desired vision. Smith writes, “Much like Gilman’s account of aesthetic surgery in which ‘techniques must constantly evolve so as to perfect the illusion that the boundary between the patient and the group [that they wish to join] never existed,’ developments in prosthetic technology as I have already indicated are in principle committed to the same evolutionary imperative: working seamlessly in such a way as to make themselves invisible.”16 It is this same invisibility that the fashion-conscious seek. The fashion-conscious and the amputees all desire to appear part of a group through fashioning their bodies by means of aesthetic surgery. Plastic surgery removes the anxiety of being an ‘outsider’ by permanently affixing fashion to the body. Those who undergo plastic surgery are no longer naked even when they are without clothing: they are always ‘dressed’ in culture.