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1639 – The Three Graces; Pieter Pauwel Rubens
1887 – Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Bathers
1920 – Thin, short haired flapper.
1950 – Marylin Monroe (Size 14)
Update: MAM885 says
I’ve read in a couple very reliable sources (women’s fitness magazines) that Monroe’s “size 14″ is comparable to a size 8 today, due to vanity sizing and such.
1960 – Twiggy Lawson (Aka the beginning of the end.) This was the first time in history that an under weight woman became the standard for the ideal body image.
1970′s – Karen Carpenter (Died in 1983 from heart failure as a complication of Anorexia Nervosa)
1988 – Cosmopolitan
2002 – Harper’s Bazaar
Modern day Fashion Model
Quick point of reference for that last one:
1944 – Nazi Holocaust Victim
Further reading:
Underweight Models Banned From Madrid’s Fashion Week
This is What an Eating Disorder Looks Like
Bulimia Nervosa Illustrated Perfectly on Film
Sources:
Holocaust photo – Olam
Dissastifaction with our bodies/eating disorders – Lillith Gallery
Every body type has it’s ideal era. Not all thin women have eating disorders, and not all heavier set women have major appetites. Sometimes it comes down to metabolism. Some women look at a slice of cake and gain 5 pounds, while another could eat an entire cake and not gain a single pound. Just be proud of your own body type regardless of media’s “ideal”…
well this has offically pissed me off no one should hate on this person he/she made a valid page and all the haters should hate them selfs
I don’t think this article is about comparing body types for one reason or another. It’s not a new thing for women to feel pressured to fit into the preffered body type. http://www1.fccj.cc.fl.us/cgroves/2211docs/test1/5%20woman%20venus%20of%20willendorf.jpg
This is the *oldest* human made thing we’ve found, this is a beautiful image. This was the so called “ideal” for the time.
It is a shame now days that we do equate “losing weight” with “getting healthy” because we’ve taken the Greko-Roman and Renassiance idea that “beauty equals goodness” (which is the simplest terms, it was actually very detailed and included a lot of athleticism and spending every day improving yourself, and was, reflected majorly in the arts) well we’ve taken this idea and lost the “goodness” part. The Venus of Willendorf (link above) and Ruben’s women were bigger because times were harder and if you were chunkier you were richer, because you didn’t have to work so hard and you had enough to eat. Thats the same reason being pale was in, if you were pale you were rich, (and rich is sexy) if you were tan you were poor and had to go work out in the fields all day. Now, because of all of the processed foods, healthy foods are more expensive and the lower grade less healthy food is cheaper. Being thin now means you have time to exersize, spare time to lay in the sun and get tan and enough money to eat healthy foods that are good for your matabolism.
The “ideal” form is truly not the same ideal form for everyone, people will always have different tastes but the major trends are reflected in the art. So, in hundreds of years when people study us like we study the Renassiance they will see our Blair fashion magazines and the very underweight models more than they see the average, healthy, happy person.
…Did there used to be text with this article? Like a bunch if paragraph texts? Because if not, I REALLY don’t get why everyone’s acting like this article is SOOOO TERRIBLE.
People, the author isn’t hating or “comparing” any of these body types… He/she is simply showing what the body types of different periods looked like. If it was some kind of hate-comparison, there’d be words describing which differences the author liked or disliked.
I understand the dislike of the holocaust thing, but other than that, I do not think this author has done anything wrong. Viewing the ideals of the female body for different time periods is interesting. The author saw that, and decided to show the different types in a post. Why is that so terrible??
You guys are digging too deeply into this. Just sayin.
My first couple of girlfriends were very thin. After that the average weight of the women I hung out with got steadily heavier. Now my wife is a very healthy weight, but she is a bit ocd about it and I keep telling her not to worry about the numbers. But just keep an eye on the BMI and be happy with the weight she has settled into…
Frankly, I find this whole thing a bit irritating. It’s not fair to say that one body is more beautiful than another, and that INCLUDES women like Marilyn Monroe. We cannot control the shape of our hips or the size of our breasts and it doesn’t matter what the media says, women have always been comparing themselves to one another and what you are doing here is absolutely no exception. It is downright degrading.
Some of us are rail thin and naturally don’t hold weight, some of us are more prone to gaining it, and some women love to be in shape. If you don’t find beauty within yourself regardless of what other people say, you will never get past things like eating disorders or false self-images. So stop blaming it all on the ‘media’ because there always has been and always will be unachievable standards of beauty that other people set for you. Every woman out there is beautiful, and I’m not talking in the bullshit ‘on the inside’ way that leaves people feeling just as ugly as they did before, but on the OUTSIDE. Know that you are beautiful, accept it, embrace it, love it and stop caring about outside influences. Confidence is the sexiest thing you could ever wear.
Oh by the way, sorry to burst your bubble but a size 14 in Marilyn’s time is like a size 4-6 now. Like I said, stop looking at beauty ideals and start looking at yourself. You are the beauty ideal.
Actually, Marilyn’s size “14″ was more like today’s size 8-10. Sorry to burst your bubble, by the way.
I agree with Brad, no matter what you see in the media, people are wired to find healthy people beautiful. People who are at an unhealthy weight (at either end of the spectrum) won’t be attractive to most other people. But of course there are fads. Just as certain clothes, cars and home decor have fads, so does the idea of the ideal human form. Weight, breast size, skin colour, hair colour etc all have moments of increased popularity for better or for worse.
I do not like that “Getting healthy” and “losing weight” are often used interchangeably, because they are not the same thing. For some people losing weight could improve their health but there are plenty of average weight people who would actually be less healthy if they lost weight. Losing weight isn’t necessarily a guarantee for good health even if you are overweight. Many weight loss methods are unsafe and harmful.
I’m in school for design and we learn a lot about advertising. The people who make advertisements are supposed be sensitive to these things and try to create ads that are ethical as well as effective but sometimes you just have to do what the client company wants. Companies like Dove have monopolized on the general sentiment of this article and made it part of their brand to include “average looking” women in their marketing. But it’s still about money and sales in the end. If the CEO at DOVE didn’t believe that it would help them sell soap, he/she wouldn’t have let them run the campaign.
The so called ‘ideal’ figure is different to men than it is for women… I as a man and many other men will always naturally gravitate towards women with curves.
It is WOMEN who constantly glorify these stick thin women,not men. Who can blame them though, constantly seeing stick thins in the media wears away at women who seem to be naturally pretty insecure with themselves “Do I look fat in this”?
Try putting a woman that looks like Twiggy on Sports Illustrated and see how many sales ..or lack thereof… you get. Put it in a fashion magazine and women are all over it and trying to be it.. what gives?
When a woman like Beyonce and Kim Kardashian easily turn heads, people want to know why? Start posting messages like CURVES ARE IN… no curves aren’t “IN” they were never out. You can’t brainwash nature. Men don’t feel inclined to reproduce with skeletons.
Um, don’t compare fashion models to pictures of Holocaust victims. Inappropriate, insensitive, immature and offensive, kthx.
if you look at the model on the Bazaar magazine and the model on right below her, the only real difference is the top model is standing confidently and she’s oiled up. that’s sick. It’s freakish how they can make someone who’s actually much too skinny to be attractive, look like someone desirable.
People like to put out that the Monroe was a size 14 or something. That is not at all correct. She wasn’t even an 8 like this story claims.
Her dress maker says she was between 35-22-35 and 37-23-36. Going from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_standard_clothing_size and removing the bust size (because those dress sizes assume an average bust) Moore would be a size 2 or 4 at most.
Her BMI was 19.3 which puts her at the low end of normal. She was 5′ 5.5″ and 118 pounds. That’s a slim women by any messure.
I dont think anyone could be 5’6″ and 95lbs without clearly having a disorder. I’m 5’5″ and 112lbs and I’m really thin naturally. People think I have an eating disorder at that weight. :S If I was 95lbs I think I’d be dead….
marylin was a beautiful example of a woman. not stick thin but not fat. every time I see a super thin model I think of her size and how absolutely gorgeous she was. even if she wasn’t a size zero.
Beauties like Paulina Poriskova (Cosmo cover) and Giselle Bundchen (Harper’s cover) are healthy, for their height and frame. These are not women with collarbones you could use in the deli for slicing salami. THOSE women are scary, and it would take a pronouncement from the Mayo Clinic to convince me that they’re healthy. I don’t believe that obesity is beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but the POW look is just as scary to me.
Marilyn Monroe had a fabulous body, and as another small woman with an hourglass figure that shape is actually something I have some hope of achieving.
There is a beautiful size for all shapes, and I’m betting that “healthy” is really the key. Somehow we need to instill in the young people today the idea that there is not a one-size-fits-all for beauty (or sex appeal, for that matter).
I agree with some of the things you are saying, but to say that obesity isn’t beautiful isn’t nice. Who’s to say what true beauty is? In some cultures larger women are considered more gorgeous than the smaller sized women. Beauty isn’t something that you can see on someone, its something that is reflected out by their personality. So, to say that all obese people are not beautiful would be wrong, because you are judging their appearance and not their personality. I believe that anyone, whether they are overweight, underweight, or in between, can be beautiful, as long as they are happy no matter what size they are.
This article is sad. Female anorexia is a serious problem but to compare models today with victims of the holocaust is discussing. I would hope that the person posting this would get a grip with reality and realize most women/models eat more healthy than 99% of America. Seriously, what would you prefer to see a healthy women or a 200 pound cow?
and I’m very sorry, but this brazilian Model looks quit healthy to me.
come on, thats bit easy to put Twigy next to a holocost victim…
I’m 5’6″, 95 pounds, very very healthy.
Just throwing that out there.
@Ayrlyn- That’s because women hear men say they like curves (an hourglass) and interpret it to mean they like fat women. It’s just the kind of rhetoric that overweight woman use to try and make themselves feel more attractive than they are.
As far as a cosmetic standpoint goes, there is a simple logic behind the idealized standard of thinness. For most of our existence on the earth it was hard to get food. First, we had to catch or grow it individually, which made it scarce, and later the vast majority fell into a poor, working class which kept them in poverty where they couldn’t afford much. Larger women were a sign of someone being upper class. With the creation of the middle class about 50 years ago that began to change as more people had access to luxuries like an abundance of cheap food. This meant that the larger shape was no longer idealized, because everyone started to look that way. The coveted shape is generally the one that is rare and hard to obtain. It’s not rocket science.
As far as health is concerned, the fat apologists talk endlessly about how unhealthy it is to be thin. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The bottom line is that people who are underweight live longer and are healthier than people who eat average diets. It basically keeps your body in sustained survival mode which makes you more immune to diseases and keeps your body degenerating at a much slower rate, meaning a much longer life. So as long as you are not malnourished, and eating a balanced but small diet, it is very healthy to be underweight. Here is a recent study, but there are many.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/science/10aging.html
Now that is just compared to someone of average weight. An overweight person not only misses out on those benefits but has an even shorter lifespan because of strain on the organs, higher blood pressure, and pressure on the bones and joints.
So as much as the apologists would love for the world to think that it is both attractive and healthy to be unable to keep a healthy weight, it is just simply not.
I really appreciated these comments, and this subject is a hard one to chose a side for (if there are sides, really). Self esteem is what we need here, instead of placing blames wherever we can, family, school, corporations…
And that last comment ruined this discussion for me. How often do you have interesting debates over these issues with out someone complaining about not being a “haawtie”. If you want to be popular, how ’bout some work on the personality, learn a skill. Work on your grammar.
That is all…