A day or two ago I casually opened my J. Crew catalogue addressed to the Student at Dartmouth College, expecting a peek at the new spring fashions. To my horror, instead of being modeled by women, the neat tissue crepe suits and silk outfits were draped over hangers. Surely this could not be.
I flipped a few pages until I arrived at pictures of women in wool crepe pieces, silk charmeuse skirts and playful cotton dresses. Shocked, I realized that the models bore a striking resemblance to the hangers pictured on the previous pages.
I turned back to the beginning of the catalogue, searching for the men's section. It was just as I had suspected: the only articles of men's clothing on hangers were five suit jackets which, due to the padding of their shoulders, could only fall as if they had been on real men with real shoulders. The rest of the clothes were folded onto white backgrounds or modeled on active men. There were men fishing, men building a house, men leaning suavely and confidently in business suits. Oh, and there was one woman. Resting from what seems to have been intense physical labor (presumably work on the house), she was holding work-gloves and naturally, was dressed in a men's waffle-knit shirt, jeans and work-boots.
The women in the back of the catalogue were lying on beaches, smiling off into the distance, ankles sickled, shoelaces untied, flowery skirts blowing in the wind. The quintessential young girl smiling coyly at the camera.
The last few pages were devoted to a couple comprised of a dark-eyed man and his skinny girl/woman frolicking playfully on the beach. I think this man may be the Tarzan figure who was pictured earlier in the catalogue swinging from a rope. In this final image, J. Crew offered what it apparently considers the embodiment of a balanced relationship: The confident and competent man of the first half of the catalogue meets the wispy passive flower-girl of the second half.
I returned to the pages of hangers. The longer I looked at the catalogue, the more angry I became at the hanger-shaped, flat-chested, little-girl image that J. Crew created and sold. The clothes hung on these women as if their bodies were hangers! Women, I emphatically stated to my roommate, were never meant to be shaped like wire closet devices.
I nearly ended the discussion at that. However, while I was walking around campus today, I noticed something very disturbing. Hangers. There were hangers in my classes, hangers walking across the Green and hangers checking BlitzMail at Collis Center.
I had thought I understood the true nature of the problem of eating disorders that exists at Dartmouth. But the severity of the problem is now painfully obvious. It is not okay to have the body of a child when you are 20 years old. It is not okay to starve yourself. It is not okay to force your body to begin to devour your heart for lack of better nutrition. And none of this is necessary to achieve a balanced and fulfilling relationship like that which is ostensibly portrayed in the catalogue's final pages. The image presented by J. Crew is neither healthy nor beautiful.
Somehow, we all look through J. Crew catalogues addressed to the Student at Dartmouth College and, by our silence, convince each other that hangers are acceptable and even desirable. Many women seem to think that hanger status is a precursor to a satisfying relationship, or, for that matter, any relationship at all.
But until we learn to love and embrace our own true self-image we will never achieve a satisfying relationship with ourselves, let alone one with another person. Until we are happy with our own bodies and learn to fight against the passive and helpless images that portray us, J. Crew will always win. And until men and women on this campus and everywhere break the silence by lending support to each other and to a dialogue concerning healthy images, hangers will always exist.
The truth is, hangers are not beautiful. But a woman's body is.
