The different sides of fashion
Arku Jasmine
Features
A friend told me an embarrassing story of the heavy fall of a young fashion conscious lady at the Kumasi airport the other day. Hers was the ugly side of fashion.
Tiny as she was, in the name of fashion, she was wearing nothing less than a four inch high heel which threw her body off balance as it does with some of them when they try to walk in pencil heels four inches or more.
Her walking to the aircraft obviously caused a stare. The shoes were a bit too much for her, one could tell. But in the name of fashion, this young lady was towing the line of fashion walking wobbly as if she was on mars.
Before long, she lost her balance, tripped and fell heavily exposing her underwear as she was in a much shorter dress.
Does fashion put stress on women, more than it does on men I have wondered? I believe it does.
Once it is the fashion of the day, good, bad or ugly, there are women who will do everything to be seen in what is trending, whether it is shoes, bags, clothes, hair, nails, eye lashes et al, so long as it puts them in the season of the day and in tune with the times.
These days majority of young ladies want to wear high heels, the type that raises their heights beyond what they themselves can carry around.
It is fun sometimes watching the high heeled ladies twisting and turning their waists as they struggle incoherently to stand on shoes that obviously tilt them in different directions.
It has become almost like the must wear for those women who are often at the front of the business and in everyday touch with the bank’s customers. I do sometimes watch them with admiration for their courage to do what I dare not do at my age.
In our time, pencil heels and platform shoes made their debut to the extent that even going to lectures, we found it was the fashion to be seen in one.
I remember as a group of young ladies, we later learnt that too much of those types of shoes had their bad side for the pelvis and consequently, having babies later in life. True or not, that perhaps saved some of us from being dependant on high heeled shoes merely in the name of fashion.
The other line of fashion very much in vogue is the hair. Talk about a woman’s hair and the fashion these days is the wig, long and short, Brazilian or Afro human hair. Overnight, everyone has grown longer, thicker hair making the wig business one of the most lucrative, supporting our economy. They come in all shapes, length and colours.
The true fact about wigs is that they have become one of a woman’s best friends and so the young and the old have all found a beauty complement in wigs. They have come in very much in time to cover the greys, the baldness and the general hair loss, thanks to fashion.
One line of fashion that has caught my interest lately is the fuller body figure. In my current travels and expeditions walking around malls and big departmental stores.
I have been intrigued with the newest fashion in women’s underwear – padded buttocks. I had heard a few jokes in the media about women padding their backs to enlarge their hips.
My reaction had been that if true, then perhaps fashion experts were finding alternatives to such beauty surgeries as Botox and mummy tuck.
Now I am seeing for myself, the reality in those jokes. Busy on sale now in many of the departmental stores I have visited are displays of padded supports that could be worn on the buttocks to kind of inflate the hips and backside of women to give it a fuller feel.
Fashion indeed revolves and comes around many times but in different shades depending on which year. It is indeed a cycle. As I go through the shops and spot these padded buttocks, they bring my mind back to the days of our mothers and grandmothers when they would wear one or two layers of cloths under their clothes just to make them look fuller as they wrap their cloths on.
The only difference perhaps is that the padded buttocks as I touched them felt soft and real.
It looks to me now that the fashion of the day is no longer the size zeros of times past when women wanted to look thin and delicate just as the models and stars who starve themselves just so they could show off a pencil-like figure that fits into a dress size described as size 0. With brassieres that give women fuller busts and now softly padded buttocks that give a natural feel, are we in for a fashion of the fuller figure type?
In our times, perhaps, the fashion that was played up a lot was a flatter kind of tucked in body.
Most women found feeling good in using corsets and belly bands just to tuck in the stomach a bit and hideaway the excess buttocks. Today, the opposite seems to be evolving. The fashion of the day is encouraging a bit of fullness.
Looking at fashion as it evolves with years therefore, the repetition in the cycle becomes very clear. The good side of it is that you never throw away what you used to have.
Tiny as she was, in the name of fashion, she was wearing nothing less than a four inch high heel which threw her body off balance as it does with some of them when they try to walk in pencil heels four inches or more.
Her walking to the aircraft obviously caused a stare. The shoes were a bit too much for her, one could tell. But in the name of fashion, this young lady was towing the line of fashion walking wobbly as if she was on mars.
Before long, she lost her balance, tripped and fell heavily exposing her underwear as she was in a much shorter dress.
Does fashion put stress on women, more than it does on men I have wondered? I believe it does.
Once it is the fashion of the day, good, bad or ugly, there are women who will do everything to be seen in what is trending, whether it is shoes, bags, clothes, hair, nails, eye lashes et al, so long as it puts them in the season of the day and in tune with the times.
These days majority of young ladies want to wear high heels, the type that raises their heights beyond what they themselves can carry around.
It is fun sometimes watching the high heeled ladies twisting and turning their waists as they struggle incoherently to stand on shoes that obviously tilt them in different directions.
It has become almost like the must wear for those women who are often at the front of the business and in everyday touch with the bank’s customers. I do sometimes watch them with admiration for their courage to do what I dare not do at my age.
In our time, pencil heels and platform shoes made their debut to the extent that even going to lectures, we found it was the fashion to be seen in one.
I remember as a group of young ladies, we later learnt that too much of those types of shoes had their bad side for the pelvis and consequently, having babies later in life. True or not, that perhaps saved some of us from being dependant on high heeled shoes merely in the name of fashion.
The other line of fashion very much in vogue is the hair. Talk about a woman’s hair and the fashion these days is the wig, long and short, Brazilian or Afro human hair. Overnight, everyone has grown longer, thicker hair making the wig business one of the most lucrative, supporting our economy. They come in all shapes, length and colours.
The true fact about wigs is that they have become one of a woman’s best friends and so the young and the old have all found a beauty complement in wigs. They have come in very much in time to cover the greys, the baldness and the general hair loss, thanks to fashion.
One line of fashion that has caught my interest lately is the fuller body figure. In my current travels and expeditions walking around malls and big departmental stores.
I have been intrigued with the newest fashion in women’s underwear – padded buttocks. I had heard a few jokes in the media about women padding their backs to enlarge their hips.
My reaction had been that if true, then perhaps fashion experts were finding alternatives to such beauty surgeries as Botox and mummy tuck.
Now I am seeing for myself, the reality in those jokes. Busy on sale now in many of the departmental stores I have visited are displays of padded supports that could be worn on the buttocks to kind of inflate the hips and backside of women to give it a fuller feel.
Fashion indeed revolves and comes around many times but in different shades depending on which year. It is indeed a cycle. As I go through the shops and spot these padded buttocks, they bring my mind back to the days of our mothers and grandmothers when they would wear one or two layers of cloths under their clothes just to make them look fuller as they wrap their cloths on.
The only difference perhaps is that the padded buttocks as I touched them felt soft and real.
It looks to me now that the fashion of the day is no longer the size zeros of times past when women wanted to look thin and delicate just as the models and stars who starve themselves just so they could show off a pencil-like figure that fits into a dress size described as size 0. With brassieres that give women fuller busts and now softly padded buttocks that give a natural feel, are we in for a fashion of the fuller figure type?
In our times, perhaps, the fashion that was played up a lot was a flatter kind of tucked in body.
Most women found feeling good in using corsets and belly bands just to tuck in the stomach a bit and hideaway the excess buttocks. Today, the opposite seems to be evolving. The fashion of the day is encouraging a bit of fullness.
Looking at fashion as it evolves with years therefore, the repetition in the cycle becomes very clear. The good side of it is that you never throw away what you used to have.
The ugly side of fashion yesteryear comes back as the adorable fashion of today due to a slight tinge. Whether it is the wig, the pencil and platform shoes, padded buttocks or false nails, the minis and the maxis they all have come around and they do stay around too.
By Vickey Wireko
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