The Fashion Industry & Eating Disorders

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

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suited to the task of wearing that clothing. The possibly pernicious effects of a cultural ideal and of the normative powers of the culture have been noted by various observers. Forms that the encounter between image and actuality take may have attributes that are idiosyncratic to a given culture, but the encounters themselves persist, and their content is rich with a psychological and sociological complexity that can be traced to features of the fashion industry. Barthes has given special attention to the mythology of Fashion as exhibited in the fashion magazines, wherein pictures of models extravagantly clothed suggest another self (or more exactly an "other self") as a potentiality of the consumers' existence. Such is the Woman ordinarily signified by the rhetoric of Fashion; imperatively feminine, absolutely young, endowed with a strong identity and yet with a contradictory personality, she is named Daisy or Barbara; she is often seen with the Countess de Mun and Miss Phips; an executive secretary, her work does not keep her from being present at every festive occasion throughout the year or the day; she leaves the city every weekend and travels constantly, to Capri, to the Canary Islands, to Tahiti, and each time she travels
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Approximate Word count = 7696
Approximate Pages = 31 (250 words per page)

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