The first two decades of the 21st century have passed with a diffuse aesthetic canon. Call it diversity, cultural appropriation, inclusion or the body positive movement… The truth is that it would be difficult to identify a silhouette, a body, some features or a haircut that define the times that are running. It is said that at the end of the decade, and in fits and starts, fashion and beauty replaced exclusivity with diversity, and where before there were rigid rules and even mathematical formulas (the Pythagorean theorem measures, among other things, the symmetry of the perfect faces) now reigns, at least in appearance, a certain anarchy.
The woman's body, specifically the ratio between her waist and her hips, known in scientific papers as WHR (waist hips ratio) has been the subject of extensive study because it is a trait that only females present in the human species and that emits a lot of information about age, health and fertility, essential in the perception that their potential partners have of their attractiveness.
Researchers Jeanne Bovet, from Stony Brook University, and Michel Raymon, from the University of Montpelier, reviewed the bodies of the models of the great classical painters, and then that of the Playboy girls and the winners of beauty contests between 1920 and 2014, and concluded that the canon had been stable for nearly a millennium. "Contrary to the belief that the female body has changed dramatically in the last 50 years due to the influence of the media, what we have verified is that the canon change is much older than the media, and dates back to the 15th century," They explain in their work.
On the other hand, evolutionary anthropologists from the University of Texas have determined the optimal angle of the lumbar curvature: 45.5 degrees, regardless of the measurements of the rear, as specified in a study.
All these sterile approaches to beauty have been blown up several times in history. One of them when the flappers let go of the corset, hid their breasts with a band and inaugurated a straight silhouette without curves that gave no clues to fertility but moved with a self-confidence unknown until now.
The flapper movement also had its dark side, as it inaugurated the obsession with weight in the Western world, which then only suffered from extravagant characters such as Isabel of Bavaria, Empress Sissi. Before the second decade of the 20th century, it was almost impossible to weigh yourself or see your entire body, the popularization of household scales and large mirrors made it possible to scrutinize defects and extra pounds.
The roller coaster of the female silhouette took another dramatic turn with the new look by Dior (1947), which brought back all the splendor of the female curves to welcome men returning from the war. The hourglass silhouette prevailed and the breasts, a decade later, would be sheathed in the so-called torpedo bras that sought to give the chest exactly that aspect: missiles ready to attack.
As explained by the writer Francesc Puertas, author of El sostén, mitos y leyendas… y manual de uso (Arcopress, 2012), “it was commissioned by Howard Huges to an aeronautical engineer to project the chest of Jane Russell in The Outlaw (1943). . Fashion was consolidated with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and it was unbeatable for almost 30 years in which 90 million torpedoes were sold in 100 countries.
The 1960s and 1970s pushed thinness to the fore until the 1980s when Jane Fonda's aerobics arrived, adding a bit of muscle mass to that fascination with angles, collarbones, and jutting jaws. The athletic look and the obsession with health led the body down the path of movement, the bodies were exercised daily with abundant cardio and toning exercises, until the nineties brought the haggard look and unkempt hair known as heroin chic, incarnated like no one by Kate Moss.
What would then be the female beauty canon of the twenties of the 21st century? Beyoncé? Riahna? Kim Kardashians? Zendaya? Bella Hadid? Difficult to find a common denominator between them, except that they are beautiful women. And this is the first novelty, beauty opens up and escapes any mathematical formula or attempt to define it. But it is a time of great contradictions. While the body positive movement is gaining ground among the youngest, who are not afraid to cancel a brand that does not sell sizes for normal people (just refer to Victoria's Secret's reputational crisis), on the latest catwalk From Paris, starving bodies were seen again with the excuse that the YK2 aesthetic has returned.
Freedom and tolerance coexist with the slavery of Internet filters, which are increasingly ubiquitous, realistic and perverse. The Bold Glamor filter was downloaded 16 million times in less than 48 hours and cosmetic surgeons are starting to have people in their offices who want to go into the operating room to get the filtered version of their faces. It would be unfortunate if the aesthetic canon that prevailed in this century were our face improved according to the criteria of Artificial Intelligence. I prefer that we find ourselves a beauty canon in a hurry. We are on time, the new twenties have just begun.
