My 15-year-old daughter recently drew my attention to a startling story from the Oscars that I had missed. It was about the trauma that Hollywood actor Jennifer Garner had subjected herself to, to get into a curve-hugging Versace gown designed for her.
The 43-year-old star said the curves that the dress highlighted weren't hers but an outcome of a metal corset she had been squeezed into. The two men who had helped her into it had moved her ribs and shifted her liver to one side to make her fit into it, she said. It was practically a metal body suit she was caged in. Bang in the middle of the ceremony, she had a rib spasm. Later, when she wanted to go to the bathroom, Garner realised she had been locked into that thing.
I watched in horror as she narrated this nightmare on the Jimmy Fallon show, laughing all the while. She made it sound comical. But, the fact that she put herself through this is rather frightening.
When I found out that she was not the only one enduring pain for the sake of the prefect look and that numerous others, like Jennifer Lopez, Kylie Jenner and Sofia Vergara, had suffered cuts and bruises, I tried to dismiss it as one of the many discomforts one is expected to endure in the pursuit of stardom. It turns out I am wrong.
Ordinary women, and even teenagers, are making the same mistakes with the same stereotypes and prejudices of the Victorian times that women fought so hard to break.
Corsets, a symbol of that regressive, repressive time, are back in fashion. They are available online and at the corner lingerie store. A corset squeezes the ribs and the innards of a person to give her the hourglass figure. No wonder those women in the Victorian ages kept fainting or pulling out smelling salts.
The more I read about it, the more alarming it got. A "corset diet" shrinks the waist. Women begin with wearing the corset for a few hours every day and then work it up to sometimes 12 hours a day. Trapped as they are in this oppressive contraption, they tend to eat far less than they ordinarily would and in effect starve themselves to fitness, if you can call it that.
The beauty industry has other shortcuts to offer. Tummy and thigh tuckers, for example. So what if they are harmful, and offensive. They bruise and dehydrate, but some women will argue that they're well worth it.
It does not end here. Other kinds of bizarre arm and thigh tightening mechanisms are also gaining traction. What makes these even more popular is that these are do-it-yourself tricks. In this what a woman does is that she pulls the unwanted fat hanging loose on her arms and thighs and she tapes it up to her skin. That is how mad it is.
My jaw hasn't dropped this low in a long, long time. Why would women do this to themselves? As if threading and waxing aren't painful enough.I can only think of one answer to that question. Over the years, we have systematically stereotyped beauty into such strait-jacketed parameters that most women are today living under constant pressure to look 'perfect'. Some of the notions of beauty today are almost Victorian in their rigidity and need to be challenged.
Last week, one Pretty Woman did just that when she walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival barefoot. Dressed in a black Armani Prive gown and wearing her wide smile, Julia Roberts' resorted to this blatant act of fashion rebellion a year after the festival's organisers had reportedly turned away a group of women for not wearing high heels.
“I looked all right,” she said. Simple.
veenu.sandhu@bsmail.in
