Disorder or delight? Towards a new account of the fashion model body

Abstract

The body of the fashion model is not always an object of admiration. Extensive criticism has been directed at the sordid and sometimes grotesquely unhealthy and inappropriate bodily appearance of the fashion model body. The disorderliness of the model body is particularly conspicuous in research literature that interrogates the fashion model in terms of illness and possible treatment. Such accounts can work out of assumptions about the model body as intrinsically disorderly, even dangerous, imbued with the capacity to ‘infect’ a healthy population. This paper analyses these research accounts, taking as its particular point of interest the ways in which the model body is constituted as a ‘naturally’ disorderly entity in need of medical intervention. The paper pre-empts fresh analyses of the ‘influence’ of the fashion model body as disciplined, precise analyses that are possible once the discursive opposition between desire and discipline is undone.