"The Enigma of Beauty" by Alexandra Shulman

Here's the final paragraph, which rather un-self-consciously enacts some of the contradictions surrounding beauty culture and beauty consumptions that we're working with in this article as well as in the class as a whole:

To some people's eyes, one will be beautiful perhaps, the others perhaps not. But whatever the case, they have been anointed with whatever collective process it is (magazine covers, advertising campaigns, tabloid comment) that deems them, out of so many lovely girls, to be the faces of the moment. It's all in the eye of the beholder.

One issue for me is, how can someone say with a straight face that "It's all in the eye of the beholder" while still calling attention to "magazine covers" and multi-million dollar "advertising campaigns" meant to train our eyes to recognize "true beauty" (a phrase that Shulman uses several times, which apparently has a great deal to do with being white and slender)?

The fashion writing I have encountered is an interesting, sort of hermetically sealed place, a site of deep, DEEEEEEP earnestness (certainty of power?) masquerading as detachment and breeziness, where people can indulge their fantasies while honing their tendency toward criticism, which is too often turned back toward themselves. It's nearly as impossible and frustrating to critique as Lee Edelman's No Future (in the sense that a critique of its logics seems to be at least somewhat contingent on an acceptance of them), since engaging with it own its terms means that we have to accept as non-preposterous the conflicting premises that 1) "it's all in the eye of the beholder," 2) there is no outside to the system (I'm thinking of the scene with the cerulean sweater in The Devil Wears Prada), and 3) "true beauty" is something that be spoken of earnestly and unironically.

And if we refuse the terms outright, we become [insert theorist from first week of class here].

I know I shouldn't post when my brain starts to hurt. I'm just a little intellectually paralyzed.

Also, the photo of a young Charlotte Rampling in the link totally looks like Helen Hunt. Have you seen Under the Sand with Charlotte Rampling? It's a great movie.

(BTW, I know that the tension between the two poles I just described are a big part of what our class is trying to negotiate, I just had a frustrated moment when I read the article)

(I know I use too many parentheses)