Can Corsets Help You Reach Peak Physical Performance? AOC Says Buy 2

Can Corsets Help You Reach Peak Physical Performance? AOC Says Buy 2

Why Does One Woman's Waist Trainer Make Another Woman Upset?

Waist training advocate Kim Kardashian is a big driver of this trend. But celebrities like Nicki Minaj and Kylie Jenner are also fans. Laverne Cox has made a place in her life for waist training. Lizzo is out front with her new shapewear collection, and I promise you that when Ana de Armas hits Netflix playing Marilyn Monroe in 'Blonde' this fall, waist training corset sales will soar.

Read More

Lara Stone Covers Vogue Poland March 2022, Lensed by EIC Ina Lekiewicz

Lara Stone Covers Vogue Poland March 2022, Lensed by EIC Ina Lekiewicz AOC Fashion

Top model Lara Stone is back in the pages of Vogue Poland, posing in a large fashion story ‘The Return Of An Icon’. Simply stated, that’s great news because Lara Stone is sorely missed in fashion world.

Always a woman shattering glass, Lara was among the first models to deal with being “too fat” to model in a patriarchal-values fashion world that prefers flat-chested women. The Dutch model was very comfortable expressing her sensuality at a time when fashion was ready to dial down the volume. We are moving out of that long, dark winter.

Ashlee Barrett-Bourmier styles Lara in images lensed by Ina Lekiewicz, who is also Vogue Poland’s EIC./ Hair by Tomi Roppongi; makeup by Mel Arter

Lara married property developer David Grievson in July 2021. Lara Stone also covers the Vogue Czech March 2022 issue, lensed by Sonia Szostak and she appeared in Balmain’s SS 2022 campaign. Without a doubt, the 38-year-old sensual goddess is back!

Rianne Van Rompaey Honors the 1990s in M le Magazine du Monde | AOC Is Standing Guard

Rianne Van Rompaey Honors the 1990s in M le Magazine du Monde | AOC Is Standing Guard

Top model Rianne Van Rompaey covers the November 27, 2021 M le Magazine du Monde in a fashion story that honors the ‘90s. M’s IG describes the 1990s as a “decade of demanding style, of which the Japanese designers were the masters. A clean style, a little cerebral, overflowing with energy. For uncompromising elegance.”

The 1990s Were a Setback on Many Fashion Fronts

Some have pointed out that this decade of demanding style demanded size 0 bodies in fashion magazines. The size 4-6 supermodels were increasingly no longer the body types favored by fashion editors and the fashion business leaders who sought to disempower the supers.

Many of us are digging our feet deeply into the pavement, determined to NOT have any 90s redo in a literal sense.

AOC believes that an entire rollback to size 0 white women models tripping over each other for prime time exposure will not happen in the age of social media. Then again, AOC didn’t believe the January 6 insurrection at the US capitol was possible. And we never believed that Donald Trump would become president.

Read More

Anna Murphy's Critical Insights in 'Body Beautiful' for Harper's Bazaar UK

Republish via AOC at FeedBurner CC 3.0 License Attribution Required: Daily Fashion Design Culture News

Anna Murphy's Critical Insights in 'Body Beautiful' for Harper's Bazaar UK AOC Fashion

Models Molly Constable and Seynabou [Zeyna] Cissé cover Harper’s Bazaar UK’s August 2021 ‘The Body Issue’. Shibon Kennedy styles the duo in ‘Body Beautiful’, a visual and written-word reflection on curves lensed by Pamela Hanson [IG] with words by Anna Murphy.

Murphy is fashion director of The Times and The Sunday Times [UK] since 2015. Previously she launched ‘Stella’ at The Sunday Telegraph, also London-based. She is unusually honest in sharing her thoughts about curves and female ‘flesh’ generally-speaking.

All women have paid a high price over body management by religious zealots, but women of color have paid the highest price. In every dialogue of this nature, we must take the experiences of white women and double-triple them for women of color.

Murphy only has a one-pager in Harper’s UK, but hopefully she intends to use her platform to amplify her message going forward on this topic.

Anna Murphy considers the origin of the so-called ‘thin ideal’ that has been in ascendancy over the last century.

In her book ‘Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body’, Susan Bordo argues that it’s about 'the tantalising ideal of a well-managed self in which all is kept in order'. That this has had a greater hold over women than men is because "throughout dominant Western religious and philosophical traditions, the capacity for self-management is decisively coded as male. By contrast, all those bodily spontaneities – hunger, sexuality, the emotions – seen as needful of containment and control have been culturally constructed... as female." Golly.

And so, to follow Bordo’s argument, modern women – or at least those in "late modern Western societies" – have used their bodies to demonstrate to others that they can do, be, live as men do; that they can subjugate their "domestic, reproductive destiny".

I told you the essay is provocative!! ~ Anne