monsterbeard:

newyorker:

Oscar Fashion: Angelina Jolie Wins

The Oscar for best-dressed at the Oscars, however, goes to Angelina Jolie, in a daring, strapless Versace gown of black velvet, with a bustle and an asymmetrical bodice that resembled tulip-petals, slit to show off her legs to die for. That is more like it: something to die for! She resembled Sargent’s Madame X.

And in the to-die-for department, special mention goes to Rooney Mara, who lost to Meryl Streep, but showed the competition what Oscar fashion should be. Her white slip of a dress, by Givenchy, evoked vintage Chanel (Chanel-Chanel, not Lagerfeld-Chanel, one of the bias cut slips of the nineteen-thirties). Mara seems to understand that style requires exaggeration, and everything about her is exaggerated: her emaciated figure; her shellacked hair; its inky artificial blackness, the punkish bangs; the thick brows over the alarming blue eyes; and the aching fragility—all of it a contrast to her freshness.

- Judith Thurman on the best-dressed and last night’s trends (red hair and sequins): http://nyr.kr/y8Tf5a

This makes me extremely uncomfortable.  First of all that Angelina Jolie would be considered best dressed for showing her leg?  But also because despite the fact that all of Hollywood is dangerously and disgustingly thin, respectable media (like the New Yorker) fail to discuss or even address it. (cc: Cheat Sheet, Washington Post style, and all the others et al)

This despite the fact that when Angelina Jolie was on stage last night everyone could tell her body is so lacking for nourishment that her arms look like twigs with knotted lumps at the joints and her face looks only a few years away from Angelica Huston’s character in Witches.

I mean, just LOOK at her right arm in the above picture.  If you remove that arm from the movie star, it looks like it belongs to a heroin addict or, per Tumblr’s new self-harm guidelines, LIKE SOMEONE WHO IS STARVING THEMSELVES.  So yes, if it’s ok, can we please remove all of the tumblrs posting pictures of Angelina Jolie and how gorgeous she looked?  Because that is self-harm and unhealthy and NO ONE STANDS LIKE THAT, ANGIE!  STOP STANDING LIKE THAT WHERE IS YOUR SOULLLLLL?

I’ve spent a few hours lately out trying on dresses in a booming industry that seems to exist to remind you that, first, the most valuable asset you have and the entire key to marital happiness is your looks. And, second, that the looks you have are actually embarrassingly inadequate.

At a vintage shop, I overheard a sales woman encouraging tell a patron “you can’t eat or drink anything in that but it’ll be worth it!”  At a bridal store, they told me my hips are rather “voluptuous” so I’ll definitely need to load up on spanx and definitely consider ways to fake a tinier waist. As we hoisted and wrangled me in to a series of white monstrosities that were as unflattering as they were overpriced, my vision of myself bled muddier and angrier. Clouded and distorted until we left with me defeated, shrunken, broken down into silence and the edge of tears. Visually tracking the highway shoulders and garbage and the pigeon flocks the whole drive home, staring and not seeing and distracted by the very least important aspects of the season ahead.  How had I never noticed what a thick, disappointing waist I have? Do my arms always look so doughy and large? Did my girth expand only as an illusion under all that unforgiving white or have I turned my back on this fight too long? Have I lost my vigilance and grown too big?  If this is fashion, this tom-boy wants no part in it.

This is hard to write about. I don’t want to teach my nieces or the women I love that any of this matters one bit. I don’t want to be a woman whose sense of worth is shaken by a mirror or the bitchy opinion of a horror who works on commission and can justify undoing our delicate body peace for the sake of an upsale.

I don’t own a scale. I don’t weigh myself not just because I don’t want to know but because I can’t know. If I know once, I will know hourly and I will not go back to that.

These days, I embrace food. I am known for my love of candy. Brunch is a weekly ritual in our household. I speak out in favor of women who eat, talk about my appetite and most often clean my plate. I wear a two piece and I choose not to let the curve of my belly take away the joy of an ocean. I choose to be ok with my body and the fact that I get hungry and I eat — because it means the world to me to send this message out to every other woman I encounter: This is ok.

Probably, I fake the ease too well.

Because the heart of the matter is that this self confidence, this contentedness with a healthy partnership with food and exercise and a spirit of grace — this willingness to be softer in places in exchange for not being possessed by starving or purging or denying or excerising not for the joy of it but out of the consuming fear of NOT doing it.  All of this? Is terrifyingly delicate.

A saleswoman’s “constructive” criticism of my shape. A few minutes staring at Angelina’s shrunken arms. It doesn’t take much to skew my body image 180 degrees until I am standing in front of the mirror in underwear, breaking this armistice. Renewing the war - disgusted by that belly. Pinching those thighs and wondering when they got so close — why wasn’t I keeping watch? Until I want to double my work outs and halve my meals. Until I begin to lose myself again. Until I forget the beauty in this body, which only a few weeks ago I was so happy to Look and See.

It takes so little.

At this point in my life, thank God, I can just manage to stop it. But it takes all my will and commitment and the support of a man who is smart and evolved and has an incredibly realistic, healthy idea of beauty. It takes me deciding today and the next day and every day that runs out ahead of us that these scraggly starlet limbs aren’t beauty to me. Not being able to breathe on the day I marry C isn’t beauty. Eating is beauty. Being strong and able and relaxed and content and joyful in the bounty of food and drink is beauty.

I am going to stay on track. That is a damn promise. I won’t risk the peace of this life for a flatter this or a tighter that or ten pounds less of anything. Because it’s an illusion - it’s all just a siren drawing us to the next moving goal. I’m done with all of that.

What kills me, however, is how normal, how acceptable it is to tempt each other with this bullshit. What shoulder to the plow hard work it is to keep our heads on and our bodies nourished and our hearts quiet.

For ourselves, for each other, for the girls who inherit the world from us, for the women who are caught in this mire right now and need to hear some blessed truth in this cacophony of marketing lies, we’ve got to be able to do better than this. To act better, to think smarter, to love ourselves and each other better. We’ve got to.