NOTICED:THINSPIRATION
Karl Lagerfeld, as rake thin as a MacBook Air
I have glimpsed the future, and boy does it look like it’s just back from a spa vacation–one where they put you on a strict regime of colonics and an 800 calorie vegan diet. Back in the days of the Duchess of Windsor, it was said that you could never be too rich or too thin. But now, it seems being so severely rake-like that you have the side profile of a manila envelope is “money” itself.
Yes, extreme thin is in, and not just for the re-imagined Karl Lagerfeld, whose drastically reduced circumstances I had the opportunity to observe from a nearby table not eating in a New York city restaurant. Or Posh Becks, whose skeletal, bobblehead silhouette so captures the new starved chic that, if you believe the tabloids, the pop twig’s “dieting secrets” are Hollywood’s Da Vinci Code. It’s so scary thin out there, celebrity acolytes of stylist Rachel Zoe such as Nicole Richie must be surviving, three weeks postpartum, like Gandhi on a hunger strike, on air and lemon juice. Teenaged boys in Western countries, typically a rather hungry group, are now starting to show signs of eating disorders. And it’s no wonder: thanks to the razor-thin profiles made fashionable by menswear designers from Hedi Slimane to Thom Browne, even their clothes are shrinking.
Peer-pressured by fashion’s anorexia, our new must-have products too have hit the gym. Never particularly chubby to start with, the iPod reduces with each new version (the latest Nano, presumably, named to reflect either our desired dress size or fighting weight). Digital cameras are now as pocket-sized as wallets, while the angles on the new cell phones are so Razr-sharp, they could do double-duty as disposable shavers. The Tata Nano, India’s version of the Smart car, which is an even skinnier Minnie than the BMW Mini, is the new dream ride. Face it folks, we are so into thin that the only real reason to shell out for a new tv now is that your old one is looking, well, kind of fat. Certainly the design crew at Apple are thinking outside the fulsome sphere of their namesake: “thinnovation”, the catchy tagline for the new so-slim-it’s-virtually-invisible MacBook Air, could coin a whole emerging design movement.
Already at home, the new couch in front of your slimmed-down television is the biggest loser. Stripped away by design are its cosy plump arms, chubby seats and fattening piping. As glassware sheds its potbelly, and flatware its love handles, the newest porcelain is so fine-boned it resembles paper (all the better, come to think of it, for not eating off of). All out war has been declared on clutter—essentially on any junk in our trunk. Which is not to suggest this new thinness is merely minimal. Ornament abounds, typically on flat-tummied surfaces such as carpets and wallpapers, but so tightly applied it looks sprayed on, like a tattoo on the tiny arm of Amy Winehouse.
And damasks aren’t the only ones on a diet. Following the examples of Mrs Starbucks’ public breast reduction and the digital liposuction of Columbia Pictures’ toga-clad Torch Lady, the latest high-tech “performance” fabrics, together with tissue cashmeres and tissue cotton tees, just keep getting thinner. Obesity may be so drastically on the rise in Western, developed countries that it’s fast approaching a global, epidemic health-care crisis, but interestingly enough, in the world of style, the signature curvy blobbiness of designers such as Karim Rashid and Michael Graves is looking increasingly less like the future and more like the past.
Back in the Jetsons era, the manner in which we once envisioned this new century may have looked to our 1960s tastes as scarily minimal, but in the glow of retrospect it was still happy, hopeful, brightly coloured, round and sumptuous. In contrast, this new, leaner, meaner future—the actual one we are living in– is tense, ropy and disciplined, with a somewhat cruel, tight-lipped smile. If this future has a mantra, it would have to be “no”.
Surrounded as we are by historic levels of excess and confusion, we seem to be making our way by eagerly embracing a look that precisely expresses the mean ascendancy of denial. But then again, perhaps what is really running desperately thin out there besides our public patience, is a kind of largesse, or generosity of spirit we once imagined the future might bring.