Who is this woman and why does she matter?

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was having a nice quiet Sunday, browsing around on the interwebs, listening to a fascinating programme on Radio Four about how the Celtic Tiger got caught by the tail, eating cold sausages, and thinking gentle thoughts about autumn, when I stumbled upon the name Rachel Zoe in Miss Whistle's blog. I felt rather like one of those old crusty judges from the 1960s: 'Who ARE these "Beatles"?' (Answer, always: 'A popular beat combo, m'lud.') Luckily, the enduringly considerate Miss Whistle, who is much more well-informed but just as baffled as I, had put a link to a New York Times article about the lady.

As I read it, I had a vague sense of memory. I had read about this person before. I remember thinking that her story was so dull and marginal that it never encroached beyond the edges of my consciousness. There is only room for so much in one brain. The great, drunk, talented John Barrymore would never learn his lines when he went to Hollywood to make films after a long careeer on Broadway; hapless underlings would have to contort themselves with idiot boards. David Niven once asked him why he did not just memorise the damn things, and Barrymore said something like - 'My mind is filled with beauty, the Queen Mab speech, Hamlet's soliloquies, why would I want to fill it with this garbage?'. My mind is not quite as crammed with beauty as Barrymore's was, but it has enough beauty in it for me to give up reading Tatler. I admit to occasional unseemly interest in the odd famous person (for some reason, I am riveted by the opera that is Brangelina) but a story about a stylist has me turning the page.

When I first read about Rachel Zoe she was just blasting into the public square, for a very sad reason. She got thin famous people, and made them thinner, and then told them what to wear. From my lofty perch on the moral high ground, I thought this a poor thing. There is a fabulous running sketch in the current series of The Mitchell and Webb Show, one of the funniest comedy programmes on the BBC (go to the iplayer and listen for yourself) where they have a panel of old ladies asking people to explain what their job is for. This week the old dears got in a futures trader. 'How does it help, dear?' they asked. 'Wouldn't you rather open a little shop?' I felt rather the same about Rachel Zoe. How does it help, exactly? But now she is not just a liminal figure familiar only to those in the know, she has a television show and the kids love her.

Reading the piece in the New York Times, my mouth actually fell open like that of a cartoon character. I felt even more antiquated and out of touch than those old Beatles judges. The money quote: '“It’s such a racket,” said one head of publicity at a major studio, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of angering any actresses who work with Zoe or other top stylists. “During awards season, when you are nominated or presenting an award, then it makes sense to have a stylist. But now, B and C list stars are demanding stylists for everything. The level of insanity is very high. But the bottom line is, if you don’t give them what they want, the actresses say they won’t do any press, that they won’t appear at the premiere. Sometimes I feel like saying, How difficult is it to just go out and buy a dress?”'.

When a publicist at a movie studio, where reality is a faintly elastic concept, says 'the level of insanity is very high', you know that madness has run off the scale. I have been thinking of September 11th over the last few days, as have so many people. I did not write about it here, because it is almost impossible to give it words without sounding portentous or sentimental or filled with platitude. Before that, I was thinking about the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. I was thinking a lot about the Poles. No one can think about the big things all the time, not even me. Even I, with my irredeemably poncy sense of being a femme serieuse, have to wonder occasionally whether all the stories about Jennifer Anniston are true. But when a woman who makes nothing, says nothing of interest, writes nothing, produces nothing, gets paid $6000 dollars a day for dressing very thin people, I start to think that something might have gone a little awry.

In which one stomach does not change the world

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I feel I should roll myself up into a crazed ball of words over the Lizzie Miller affair. Everyone else has, after all. It’s a subject on which I feel strongly. I am not famous for being short of an opinion. I am a mouthy feminist. And yet, and yet, I am tempted to say...nothing.

It won’t happen of course. The last time I said nothing was sometime in 1979 and that was because I had bronchitis. But for some reason, I am tempted to say: so what? Here is what happened, for those of you who have been too busy following the murky Al Megrahi business or the increasingly strange debate over American healthcare reform: a very small picture of a pretty model with a slightly protruding stomach appeared in the back pages of Glamour magazine. The readers of Glamour wrote to the editor saying they were very happy to see a photograph of a real woman. The newspapers picked up on it, and decided that it was the end of fashion as we knew it. The model herself, a beautiful 20 year old called Lizzie Miller, added a footnote about the hall of smoke and mirrors that is the magazine business, reopening the airbrushing debate that has been chugging along for some months. In an added twist, it turned out that Miller was too large to model so-called plus size clothes, despite only being a size twelve herself. The headline writers had a nice time: ‘flabulous’, screamed one. The columnists piled all over each other (one tried to be controversial by stating that if women did not have perfection to aim at, what else were they going to do with their time?). The message boards lit up with every variety of comment. And the world said: excusez-moi?

This is my subject. I loathe and abhor the bizarre dictates of the fashion and beauty industries. I get very sad when I see successful women growing thinner and thinner before my very eyes. I feel a tinge of melancholy whenever I think of how hungry Victoria Beckham must have been for the last five years. I refuse to go on diets, because I am too greedy, because I love food, because I will not be told what size I should be. I should be out there shouting with the best of them. But for some reason, I find the whole thing an absurd storm in a silly teacup. India Knight, who is exceptionally good at sailing through hype and hyperbole with a true compass, made much the sanest and most adult point in the acres of type generated on the subject when she said that fashion is theatre, and it should not be confused with anything else. It seems to me that the fevered debate about Lizzie Miller and her little stomach has rather missed the point. One photograph is not going to change an entire zeitgeist. The very same newspaper which ran a banner headline celebrating ‘The Wobbly Bits that Shook the World’ had a long feature only three days later headlined ‘Why I’ll suffer any pain to be beautiful,’ describing the writer’s long, painful odyssey through Botox and Restylane. All the columnists who are celebrating the appearance of a real woman work for newspapers and magazines that constantly push the latest diet, the newest cosmetic miracle, the hottest anti-ageing concoction, the makeover that will save your very soul. In those same pages, unrealistic, airbrushed models wander freely like rare creatures moving across the savannah. Perhaps it is the phoniness and hypocrisy to all this outcry that makes me want to say: move along, nothing to see here.

Lizzie Miller, for all her galvanising honesty, is not going to change anything. Many of the very same writers who were lauding her little stomach last week will be going out to dinner this week and refusing the bread (Yeast! Gluten! Too bloating for words, darling!). Designers are not suddenly going to send size fourteen girls down the catwalk. The diet industry is not going to pack up and go home. The magazines will not put away the airbrush. Real women are not going to be set free by a small photograph on page 194 of one glossy; they will not be liberated by a scatter of over-excited headlines. True liberation comes from stepping away from the spectacle. I love nothing more than a heated debate, and yet I think this latest one is not particularly helpful, because it is too hysterical and too shallow. It does not, in the end, mean much.

I think we all have to do the heavy lifting ourselves. I think we have to work out where true beauty lies, and understand that it means something quite different to everyone. For real freedom, women have to go to the profundities, far away from vociferous commentary and one-dimensional aesthetic imperatives. It is a question of priorities. To love and be loved, to contribute some small thing to the sum total of human happiness, to fulfil your potential: these are the things that matter. Real beauty comes in many forms: the ability to laugh at yourself, the talent for listening, the trick of making really good chicken soup. Random acts of kindness are more lovely than a flat belly. It’s not a snappy headline, but it is true.