Pubic hair g-strings and rib ‘remodelling’: why does fashion hate women?

When actress Diane Keaton died early this week, much of the outpouring of public grief for her, and the media adulation of her, focused on her fashion sense.

That’s not because she was a mere clothes horse, or a vacuous “style icon” with nothing else to offer.

Diane Keaton in her signature look – a bowler hat and full skirt with a wide belt. Here she is receiving an award from Woody Allen in 2017.Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Keaton was a notable actress who starred in some of the most important movies in cinematic history – Annie Hall and Godfather movies to name a few.

She won an Oscar, a BAFTA and two Golden Globes.

Rather, it was because Keaton was completely sui generis in a way that no longer exists.

Her clothes were her armour, Keaton freely admitted, particularly her signature bowler hats, which she rarely left the house without. They were a byproduct of one of her many insecurities – she hated her hair.

But Keaton’s sartorial armour was an expression of herself, while also being a carapace.

Her style was loose, mannish, comfortable, quirky and completely undone, in a way that is incomprehensible to the current generation of celebrities and movie stars.

She didn’t need to pay someone to tell her how to dress.

She dressed as she liked.

And what she liked to wear was tailored men’s suiting, but always with an informal, girlish flourish.

She would add a pussy bow or a silk scarf, or perhaps a corsage on the lapel of her broad-shouldered blazer.

The most famous image of Keaton’s style is her playing Annie Hall, in Woody Allen’s 1977 film of the same name.

In the most famous scene – a two-hander with Allen on a balcony – she is wearing oatmeal brown, high-waisted Katharine Hepburn-esque trousers, a collared white men’s shirt under a black waistcoat, and a tie.

Keaton wearing seersucker linen at Paris Fashion Week in 2023.Credit: Getty Images

On her head is the bowler hat.

On her face is a frank, and slightly mischievous smile.

As a girl growing up in Santa Ana, Keaton cut out photos of movie star Cary Grant from magazines and pasted them into a scrapbook.

The young Keaton loved the way Grant wore white sweaters thrown casually over his shoulders after a tennis match, or “a tuxedo with a white bow tie for afternoon tea, just for the fun of it”.

There seems little fun in women’s fashion now – from the Kardashians and their galaxy of influencer-copycats, to the return of the ultra-thin teens on the couture catwalks, it feels like post-feminist beauty standards have become not just stricter, but utterly absurd.

Sometimes it feels like we are being trolled.

Book-ending the week was another news story – Kim Kardashian, billionaire fashion mogul, had put out a line of g-strings with synthetic pubic hair sewn onto the front panel.

The “Faux hair micro thong” cost $US32 and sold out within hours.

Mere months ago, as noted by my colleague Lauren Ironmonger, Kardashian has promoted an at-home laser hair removal device costing $600.

Following the recent haute couture shows in Paris, New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman wrote a piece titled “Why can’t fashion see what it does to women?”

In her opening paragraph, Friedman asks: “What is the purpose of women’s fashion? Is it to create tools of self-actualisation? To profit from insecurity? To carve out in cloth a new place in the world?”

She catalogues a Paris season featuring clothes that hid the models’ faces entirely, enormous platform heels that looked agonising to wear, bodysuits that trapped the wearer’s arms, rendering her, effectively, armless, and fetishistic mouth guards that stretched models’ faces into “rictus grins”.

Do fashion designers hate women, or is the problem that women hate themselves?

There were a few years, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when the body positivity movement meant that plus-sized models, women of colour and others in the “diverse” category of body type (for which, read, “within the range of perfectly normal”) roamed runways and featured in fashion campaigns.

That cultural moment, most critics agree, is over.

This week the Victoria’s Secret fashion parade was back, in all its bedazzled glory, the second year of its triumphant return after being “culturally cancelled” in the #MeToo era.

Now it’s Trump 2.0 and woke is dead.

Even the editorial director of British Vogue has expressed public concern about the trend back to super-skinny models.

The Victoria’s Secret fashion parade came back after being “culturally cancelled” in the #MeToo era.Credit: AP

Chioma Nnadi told the BBC last year that “we’re in this moment where we’re seeing the pendulum sort of swing back to skinny being ‘in’, and often these things are treated like a trend and we don’t want them to be”.

Ironically enough, it was the Kardashian sisters who led the charge away from the Size Zero era, with their plump bottoms and full décolletage.

But the Kardashian beauty aesthetic is nothing without a nipped-in waist, so small you can wrap your hands around it.

To that end, the Kardashians have marketed corsets, or “waist trainers”, to their legions of followers.

These were followed by corsets for the face, supposed to arrest a drooping chin.

Nnadi said she thought the popularity of Ozempic, and other weight-loss drugs, had something to do with the return to skinny.

But even a weight-loss injection won’t necessarily get you the perfect body shape – that’s where surgeons come in.

“Rib-remodelling” is becoming more common in the United States, according to media reports.

Kim Kardashian at the wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in June.Credit: AP

A first-hand account of the procedure published in New York magazine reports the surgeon “explained it as making a greenstick fracture, as if you took a pencil and bent it until it slightly cracks. It’s still attached, but now it’s at a different angle. So I’d still have my ribs, but they’d just be at a smaller angle”.

It was ever thus – foot binding of girls began in China in the 10th century and continued until the 20th.

Western women had corsets and then high heels, which only got higher as women’s liberation advanced.

But the difference now, perhaps, is that women are chasing beauty ideals that are truly unreal, in the literal sense.

It is very unlikely, for example, there exist any un-touched photos of the Kardashians on the internet, so in a funny way we have no idea what they really look like, despite their ubiquity.

Recently, an AI company introduced the first ever AI actress named Tilly Norwood.

She is perfect, and not real.

She would never wear a bowler hat or a whimsical scarf.

She would never blurt out “la-di-da, la-di-da” when nervous, as Annie Hall so winningly does.

Not unless you programmed her to.

Jacqueline Maley is a columnist and author.

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