The purpose of this research is to examine connections between the policies, strategies, and practices of the fashion industry and the phenomenon of eating disorders. The plan of the research will be to set forth the background and context in which such connections can be credibly made and then to discuss the extent to which compelling evidence exists that there is fashion-industry culpability in the reach and severity of eating disorders, where such disorders can be interpreted as a response of fashion-industry customers to social and cultural norms that the industry either shapes or leads.
The influence of the fashion industry on medical pathology that arises from eating pathology cannot be understood without an appreciation of the ability of cultural norms to influence a whole range of human behavior within that culture. Equally relevant, such influence is not solely a contemporary phenomenon but a historical fact. Western wardrobe fashion in particular has cut across multiple cultural styles and eras since the twelfth century, and it has demonstrated extraordinary resiliency and adaptability against clothing associated with individual ethnic, national, or tribal cultures. Western dress in its most general form has changed in ways that non-Western dress or the dress of Western subcultures has not. Undoubtedly Western dress can be interpreted as a social construction, and the role of elite classes has long been acknowledged. Shakespeare has Henry V explain to his fiancee, a princess of France, that monarchy "cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's fashion: we are the makers of manners, Kate; and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults" (Henry V, V.ii).
The history of fashion--and of the industry encasing it--is a history of change and adaptation. The origin of clothing is instrumental, with dress conceptualized and employed by human beings in terms of protection, as for example of t...