In this week’s Saturday magazine I’ve written about raising a daughter against the backdrop of punishing beauty standards, diet culture and our relentless obsession with image.
Having been a fashion writer for two decades, I’ve watched, with unease and frustration, how the whims of the industry I work in have ebbed and flowed. I’ve wondered how to explain society’s vigorous thirst for youth and thinness to my daughter.
We want to tell our children that looks don’t matter, but in a world where that is demonstrably not true, how do we navigate this?
In her book Sexism and Sensibility, psychologist Jo-Ann Finkelstein describes the disadvantage young women face when beauty obsession takes hold, weakening their ability to concentrate at school as well as swallowing up their time. While boys are facing increasing scrutiny on their own looks, it is still girls who are most affected. I heard stories about them getting up hours before school to perform elaborate skincare and makeup routines before they felt confident enough to step outside.
And while TikToks of six-year-olds doing three-step skincare routines still feel a world away from where my daughter is at (she’s bath-avoidant), the pervading marketing view is that gen Alpha is prime beauty buck waiting to happen. Brands are aggressively targeting their future customers on social media, ensuring that packaging is tantalisingly cute.
Not long after I filed this story, two things happened. First, I sat on the bus next to three teenage girls. They can’t have been older than 13, sat in a row with matching acrylic nails, all staring into smartphones. I watched as one of them paused to take a selfie before zooming in to manipulate the picture through a filter. They compared their outfits, debated changing hair colours, and laughed at themselves in the way that young women have for time immemorial. The phones were a fourth dimension in their gang, an ever-present conduit to a world where looks reign supreme.
Later, at my mother’s house, I opened a drawer stuffed full of vintage totems. I pulled out a tangle of Miss Selfridge silver pendants and, as I toyed with them, my emotional reaction was visceral. I could remember afternoons spent in my bedroom, carefully placing the necklaces over precisely chosen outfits before applying slicks of blue eye shadow and heather shimmer lipstick. Those afternoons were my way of finding myself in the world, of feeling my way into young adulthood. And being reminded of them made me think about those girls on the bus: how similar my desires and intentions were to theirs – that at their best, the tools of fashion and beauty can be a great supporting act.
This new generation’s way of presenting themselves may at times feel chillingly dystopian, but equally, as much as everything changes, it’s through finding common ground that we can best understand and guide our kids to see beyond the screen.
Illustration: Edith Pritchett
