Fashion seems to be inextricably
linked with body image. Without a clear sense of what kind of figure you have,
how can you make sure you’re looking good in your clothes? But have you noticed
how reluctant we are to look at ourselves in the mirror?
Stacy London & Clinton Kelly in TLC's What Not to Wear
I watched an eye-opening episode
from Season 4 of What Not to Wear the
other day about a woman named Dara. This courageous
woman had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and was currently working as a psychiatrist.
This woman had so much moxie that she actually challenged Clinton to a push-up
competition, and counted out 90 reps in front of the camera! Yet she was
terrified to reveal her figure with form-fitting clothes. This size 4 woman had
a great body but she was ashamed of her figure, and was hiding it away with
clothing that made her look much larger than she really was. At the end of her
experience with Clinton and Kelly she burst into tears, because the experience
of wearing clothing that actually fit made her realize that she was a beautiful
woman after all.
Everyone complains that we are
obsessed with ourselves in this culture, but I think we are obsessed in the
wrong way. It’s the tiny blemishes we seem to focus on when we look in the
mirror rather than seeing ourselves as a whole. The Body Project is a fascinating book that studies the way that
American women’s self-esteem has dissolved over the past 100 years. Studying girls' diaries 100 years ago, the girls reflected just as much on their character
(morality, goodness, relationships) as their bodies. But teenage girls in the
1990s seemed to agonize over dieting, breast size, acne
and so on to the exclusion of the deeper character issues that young women cared
about 100 years ago. Reflections on moral choices and relationships had taken a backseat to deliberations on whether or not to consider breast implants. The irony is that all this interest in physical beauty isn’t
making us feel any more beautiful. Many of the teenager’s
diaries in The Body Project were
self-critical.
I personally experienced this phenomenon
when I was teaching writing to Community College students. My writing unit on
“Body Image” became a major focus of my course because eating disorders and low self-esteem abounded in my adult
students, from Russian, Chinese, Japanese, to Latin American and U.S.-born individuals. And don’t think it was just the
women—the men wrote about their eating disorders and insecurities too.
The irony was that these students, mostly ranging from 18 to 25 were gorgeous.
They were for the most part, young, thin, fashionable young people with fresh skin and great hair. As an antidote to the widespread
self-depreciation they communicated in their writing, I had all of them compose
a one-page poem about the part of their body that they liked the most, inspired by Wendy Ewald's book, The Best Part of Me. Feet, lips, chests, whatever my students felt moved to praise went into their poems. A lot
of them associated the favorite part of their body with a skill, like piano hands
or soccer legs. The students wrote these wonderful poems, and I pasted them all
over the walls of the classroom. As they walked around, reading each other’s
writing, a new feeling of hope and empowerment surged through the room.
(You can find children's poems inspired by Wendy Ewold's book here: http://www.myteacherpages.com/webpages/MrsThonus/student.cfm?subpage=183068)
In written exercises
like this, where they interacted with media images and their own writing, my students discovered the power of the written word to shape their perceptions of themselves. I believe that if we wish, we could use our knitting knowledge
in the same way. It is a powerful act to make your own clothing, and I believe
that we can wield our knowledge of our bodies and our knitting techniques in an
empowering way—to make clothing that celebrates our figures and creates a
positive vision for us to see when we look in the mirror. All that’s holding us
back is our own Body Project Diaries, that we’ve
been writing so long in our own minds, we don’t stop to take a critical look at
ourselves to see if the words are even real.
