Styles always change, body image remains

By Jessica Pickens 

A & E editor

Jessica PickensStyles come and go, but the reason they start is all the same. Men and women want to present the best body image they can to impress others, but the ways they present it has changed from decade to decade. 

Today, women wear too much eye makeup, tan until  orange and show off their cellulite with too-short shorts and too-tight leggings. 

In the 1920s women wore shorter dresses, but it was to show their new independence and that they were like men too. Cutting their hair short and flattening their chests were efforts to look boyish. 

 Looking boyish doesn’t mean you don’t look cute. Take Clara Bow or Louise Brooks, still were beautiful, cute and sexy with bobbed haircuts.

No bras and femininity became cool again, and women were wearing slinky, silky gowns in the 1930s. The decade before, women didn’t want their bosoms noticed, but they flaunted them in the 1930s. In the older films, you can tell most women weren’t wearing bras, especially Jean Harlow.

 Harlow also began the hair craze as the original blonde bombshell. Before Harlow, many vamps of the 1920s were dark-haired. Harlow was the first to make white-gold hair sexy.

World War II changed the way women dressed, and victory was the main accessory. Skirts got shorter to save wool and stockings were hard to come by. Lips were emphasized with lipstick and legs were the main eye candy. 

The emphasis on legs transitioned to an emphasis on boobs in the 1950s with stars such as Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Hourglass figures were much more desirable than stick figures. Sexy was in, as long as it was classy.

The 1960s was one of the last really defined decades of style. Eyes were emphasized with false eyelashes, eye shadow and eyeliner. Hair got bigger and skirts got shorter.  

Guys’ style hasn’t change as much, but has degenerated from sophisticated and stylish to relaxed and unkempt.

One of the biggest sex symbols and manly men of the 1930s and 1940s was Clark Gable. He dressed well, had big ears and all the women swooned for him. But male sex symbols were all very different. 

Cary Grant was  an average height and weight, but full of charm. Jimmy Stewart was likeable, lanky and slim, but seemed like ideal husband material. Even Bing Crosby made women swoon, but it wasn’t his physique it was his warm singing voice.

It seems now that movie stars hold one cookie-cutter body image: the women, all skinny with long hair just like Isla Fisher, and the men are ignorant beef cake; Matthew McConaughey. 

Body image changes from decade to decade, but instead of getting better, it seems to degenerate.