Defining Beauty...and Normal

Annamaria on Monday

 The ancients started it.  They sought to define beauty.  Famously, these two:

Polykleitos

This sculptor from the fifth century BC was one of the pantheon of such artists. None of his works, sad to say, survives. What we know of him comes down to us in Roman copies in marble of his works, which were originally cast in bronze. (I guess this should be a lesson to us. If an artist wants his works to survive, he should not make them from something that could be remade into weapons of war.)

These days, Polykleitos is most famous as the author of a Kanon, a written work  that defined the perfect male body on a mathematical basis.  He was, therefore, one of the sculptors instrumental in defining classical beauty. Sadly, we have no original of his writings either, only references to it and quotes from others - such as Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, and Cicero.

Polykleitos concentrated on nudes of athletes, especially in the controposto pose - in the act of shifting weight from one leg to the other.  The position of Michelangelo's David leaps immediately to mind.  It would be hard to disagree with his criteria.  Even the copies of his work (one shown above) are beautiful.

Vitruvius 

The definition of human physical beauty as a matter of proportion and symmetry was taken up around four hundred years later by this Roman architect and engineer.  He wrote "the navel is naturally placed in the center of the human body, and, if any man lying with his face upward, and his hands and feet extended from his navel, as the center, a circle be described, it will touch his fingers and toes. It is not alone by a circle that the human body is thus circumscribed, as may be seen by placing it within a square. For measuring from the feet to the crown of the head, and then, across the arms, fully extended, we find the latter measure equal to the former; so that lines at right angles to each other, enclosing the figure, will form a square."

Thank goodness we don't have to try to imagine this for ourselves.  Leonardo gave us this drawing of Vitruvian Man:

In the ensuing two thousand years or so, the human race hasn't had much to add to  these ancient men's definition of what constitutes human beauty. We've had far less noble pressing questions to answer.  Fast forward to the 1930s, in the good old USA, where the clothing industry was looking for a way to standardize sizes to fit "the average man" or "the average woman."  Until that time, off-the-rack clothing pretty much didn't exist. But then the Sears Roebuck catalog (the Amazon of its day) wanted to sell clothing to people in standard sizes.  Of course, they were not looking for a definition of beauty, just a definition of normal.  To do this, they needed data. For men, there was plenty available. The United States military collected measurements of all the men in the service. So, coming up with standard sizes for men turned out to be a whole lot easier than standard sizes for women.

These are "normal" people!

Interestingly, enough, at the same time, a group of eugenicists set out to draw a distinction between "normal" and "abnormal."  Retailers were looking to standardize sizes to fit their customers. The eugenicists, on the other hand, were looking to "perfect" human beings by eliminating from the populace anyone who didn't fit their standards. These bad guys had been collecting data on what was and what was not "normal." They did a lot of measuring and crated their own database and description of normality when it came to size and shape of human females.  The clothing manufacturers glammed onto the statistics - the military for the men; the eugenicists' for the women.

When I first learned about this, it piqued my interested because of my personal experience of the difference between men's clothing and women's clothing when it comes to the fit.  You see, I always went along with David and helped him pick out his clothes. Typically, if we were looking for a new suit for him for instance, we would go to one of the nice department stores, and in the men's department, there would be racks of suits sorted by size.  In most stores on the floor where the men's suits (ahem) hung out, someone would ask if he preferred British style or Italian style. David preferred Italian. We found the racks with his size, and let's say he was looking for a blue suit. We would choose two or three for him to try on. When he came out of the dressing room wearing one of the choices, there would invariably be a tailor on hand, with a tape measure around his neck, and a pin cushion on his wrist, waiting to see what needed to be done to fit the suit to David.

If I, on the other hand, needed a blue suit, I would have to travel from floor to floor and look among the offerings from this designer and that designer to find a blue suit.  When I found one that sort of fit, that I wanted to buy, I would ask the sales clerk for the tailor, because-invariably – the jacket sleeves were too long, as were the trousers or the skirt. The sales clerk would sigh deeply, and say "A tailor?"  Another sigh.  "I'll call for one; it will probably be at least 20 minutes."

The moral of the story, of course, is that if the suit does not fit the man, there is something wrong with the suit. But if the suit does not fit, the woman, there is something wrong with the woman. This is why I became enthralled with this new information, which I just acquired in the past few weeks about how sizes were standardized in the 1930s.

Okay.  Let's get back to the eugenicists' role in standardizing "the normal woman."   Their data was collected all over the country, and all kinds of women volunteered to be measured. But being racist at heart, the eugenicists included only measurements of white women in their database. They automatically excised data from blacks, Italians, and Jews.

For this and other reasons, the effort to scientifically standardize women's clothing sizes to be offered to all women was a failure.  The clothing manufacturers eventually gave up trying to make universal sizing work.  They took an expedient.  They chose to use a particular woman as their model, usually a slender one. She  would be their basis for the sizing of, say jeans.  The smallest size fits her perfectly.  The larger sizes are increased proportionately from her dimensions.  this is still the way women's apparel production works.

And now, my female readers, you know why - unless your proportions mimic hers, you will gnash your teeth and stifle curses every time you try to find a pair of jeans that fit you.