WHEN FAT WAS IN FASHION (Published 1977) (2024)

Somewhere in the first 15 minutes of “North by Northwest,” Cary Grant pats his stomach, frowns, and tells his secretary to make a note: “Think thin!” Everybody in the audience laughs in instant sympathy—we are all patting our stomachs and thinking thin as hard as we can. One glance at the art of Rubens, however, shows that this was not always so—obviously, thinking fat used to be the thing. The opulent fleshy beauty of Rubens's women probably made the leaner ladies of his day frown when they patted their own meager stomachs, and wish they could compete in the big leagues.

Yet today the very name of Rubens is apt to produce a reaction of disgust. Those puffy knees, those bumps and hilts of flesh have never had less fashionable appeal than right now, in the very year of Rubens's 900th anniversary. He was born on June 28,1577, and, like it or not, 1977 must confront the Rubens ideal: His enduring importance as an artist commands international attention, even if it can't coerce universal love.

Rubens's greatness as an artist has remained unchallenged ever since the beginning of his career, but by the 1920's Rubens's art had become increasingly hard to like. The rippling exuberance of his nudes seemed to reflect too arrogantly the fatness of his time and of his patrons, and perhaps even the unseemly “fatness” of his own lot.

Rubens did have an incredibly fortunate and prosperous life. Besides quickly becoming famous as a virtuoso of the brush, he was cultivated, learned, very rich, and he had a successful sideline career as a diplomat. He was also good‐tempered and handsome, and he had two happy marriages, the last with a beautiful woman one‐third his age.

Rubens's art reflects the unique abundance of his endowment and his heritage. It combines all the sumptuous and harmonious accomplishments of Italian Renaissance art (which Rubens absorbed during early sojourns in Italy) with native Flemish gifts of nervous energy, graphic skill and a flair for expressive grotesquerie. The resulting rich confections ideally suited the appetites of his own age, but in modern times these confections, epitomized by his active, fleshy nudes, have sometimes proved hard to digest.

The 20th century has been trained in more stringent schools of visual economics. In the past 50 years, taste in physical beauty has shown a marked rejection of bodily opulence—or, to put it bluntly, fat. Why should this be so?

The look of actual human bodies obviously changes very little through history. But the look of ideal bodies changes a great deal all the time, and so the perception of corporeal facts is edited to match. In ordinary life, a common vehicle of expression for this changing physical ideal is the changing fashion in clothes. In art, the nude (whether it is offered by Rubens or Playboy) tends to reflect the same changing standards. Rubens's nude ladies are expertly conceived versions of the fashionable apparel of the day, which favored bunchy satin dresses arranged in thick but mobile folds, especially around the middle. In nude art, shiny satin skin over thick and mobile folds of flesh produced a body perfectly tailored to the chic, erotic taste of the moment. Meanwhile, in real life, people who were thin wore lush, fluid and bulky garments to suggest that they resembled a Rubens nude underneath.

For about 400 years, roughly between 1500 and 1900, bodily weight and volume, for both men and women, had a strong visual appeal. There were variations according to country and century in this standard of good looks, but in general it was considered not only beautiful but natural to look physically substantial. In conventional art, not only refined courtiers but servants and rural laborers were depicted as solidly fleshy, clad in thick clothing, and taking up a good deal of space. Among the desirable qualities of upper‐class elegance, slimness did not figure except as the property of hands, feet or noses, and occasionally the feminine waist all by itself, independent of other proportions. As for bones, they were totally banished from the idealized female nude.

Rubens, reaching maturity at the end of the 16th century, caught the taste for physical plumpness on the rise, so to speak, and gave it a whole new dimension. Abandoning the smooth terrain of the Renaissance nude, he conjured up a hilly and lustrous landscape of flesh—a new Baroque vision of fat.

Rubens's glorification of flesh was an outgrowth of the Renaissance belief in the almost limitless possibilities of the human mind and body. In the visual arts, human importance seemed most appropriately expressed in terms of solidity, of undeniable substance and weight. Thinness of body came to connote poverty and the weakness of disease and old age. It also suggested spiritual poverty and moral insufficiency. A thin body might have been appropriate in the Middle Ages when the Church emphatically preached the unimportance of the flesh, but by the 16th century cultivated opinion had acquired a more worldly view of corporeality, so a thin body looked not only unlovely but unliberated.

Today, slimness is considered an attribute of youthfulness, and both traits are viewed as highly desirable. In earlier centuries, however, youth was seen as an age of blooming plumpness, a time for physical abundance and satisfaction. The “shrunk shank” of Shakespeare was the property of a “lean and slippered” man well on in years. Any skinniness or boniness found in youth was an indication of undesirable morbidity—not only a lack of good fortune and muscle, but a lack of will and zest.

There was more than sensuous pleasure associated with the fullness of body. It was a visual expression of stability and order. The most extravagant compositions of Rubens and other Baroque artists may be full of flying cloth and soaring bodies, but they are all expertly organized, as stable in form as works of Baroque music. Similarly, 17th‐century fashion may have run to clouds of shimmering skirt and dashingly swathed cloaks, worn with lots of floating curls and feathers, but the clothes were also weighty, symmetrical and firmly supported underneath.

Toward the end of the 18th century, a period of revolution in both taste and politics, a certain underground admiration for thinness arose, stimulated by the literary beginnings of Romanticism. The first “Gothic” fiction produced a character afflicted with a kind of fatal slimness, a male or female creature of compelling demonic villainy. This Romantic figure—the Byronic “fatal man” or the femme fatale‐was endowed with hollow cheeks, a tall, wasted frame, and was full of nervous energy.

Such morbid literary thinness was extreme and unorthodox, but it eventually proved fashionable and attractive for its very morbidity, its erotic suggestions of forbidden practices and unholy preoccupations. But the interest in morbidity was a side issue to the more important change in European taste at the end of the 18th century: the growing fascination with Classical antiquity. The impulse to look as the Greeks and Romans looked soon contributed to a taste for slimmer bodies. The fleshy extravagance inherited from Rubens by such Rococo artists as Francois Boucher gradually gave way to the smooth, attenuated nudes of neo‐Classic art. Simultaneously, fashionable clothes were pared down to resemble the drapery of antique sculpture. In both art and life, however, a fatty layer was still needed to guarantee that bones not show and spoil the flowing purity of the line.

Roucher's soft, chubby nudes perpetuated the Rubens ideal in the 18th century.

Passion for classical antiquity prompted a vogue for slim bodies like Ingres's “Odalisque” of 1814, which suggests the smooth marble contours of Greek sculpture.

Revolutions and romantic fiction, scientific leaps and religious disquiet beset the “restless” 19th century, as William Gaunt called it. People soon recognized that the whole order of society could be altered at a stroke. And although bodily beauty remained conventionally solid, there was in the air a commitment to movement and movements, to deliberate action and change, to the overthrow of conventions as well as governments. Stable and weighty humanity had become afflicted with the spirit of discontent.

Princess C. Belgiojoso epitomized the Romantic femme fatale.

For Picasso, the skeletal look of the poor had esthetic appeal.

The change soon became apparent in fashion. Though elegant dress was again bulky, a certain deliberate bizarrerie of shape and accessory, kept in a constant state of modish change (along with unprecedented and complicated layers of underwear), afflicted women's clothes. Female bodies were ideally very plump above and below but extremely small at the waist. Beefy bodies were considered ideal for men, but the bodies were practically immobilized by clothes: a confining strictness of fabric and fit, and an excessive stiffness of collar, hat and shoe.

Paradoxically, both keen sexual awareness and extreme prudery were expressed vividly in dress. Women, for example, covered every inch of surface by day but indulged in extreme décolletage by night.

This tense, unstable sartorial situation was a natural set‐up for reform— and the signs of change were already visible in the political arena. There, thinness of body and starkness of dress came to connote the very spirit of reform and rebellion, of intellectual unrest and dissatisfaction with prevailing conditions. Accordingly, ideologically inspired dress‐reform movements soon arose. In earlier periods, when sumptuous clothing was considered the sacred privilege and even the duty of high rank, no such movements could have occurred. But in a bourgeois world permeated by puritanism and social consciousness, extravagant clothes and fashionable fatness began to seem unseemly. Gradually guilt came to lurk under the corsets, flounces and silk hats, waiting for the later revolutions inspired by Freud.

The 20th century saw many of the attempted reforms of the 19th century become institutions. Two world wars hastened changes already begun. As a result, the thin, simply dressed exponent of reform became the leader of fashion, instead of its underground I enemy.

During the preceding centuries, standards of physical beauty were able to reckon without medical science. Good health was firmly associated with stable plumpness. Minimal food intake and intensive exercise—both essential to maintaining a slim body—clearly had no part in the traditional concept of physical beauty or well‐being. Quite to the contrary, meager diets and constant strenuous activity were known to be the unfortunate fate of serfs and laborers. Good health did not mean good muscle tone and good circulation; it meant freedom from disease.

A Hollywood femme fatale, &wall made bones a Mark of beauty.

Today, people spend money, time and energy acquiring the skeletal look of galley slaves. Fatness and softness‐status symbols for centuries—have become thoroughly déclassé in two generations. They are now in fact the accepted signs of mental slavery—weakness of will, neurosis or bondage to ethnic traditions that are dependent on starchy foods as a staple of diet. Even worse, fatness suggests unhealthiness and early death—just as hollow cheeks and bony frames used to do.

The most common explanation of the 20th‐century passion to be lean stresses the discoveries of medical research. All the well‐publicized news about the connection between fat and the cardio‐vascular system has struck terror to the souls of millions. Fear of death is, of course, verj strong stuff. People who used to be afraid to be thin lest they waste away are now afraid to be fat lest they pop off. They are also afraid to sit still lest they stiffen up, and so stringent exercise, along with a disciplined diet, has often become not just a medical matter but a spiritual preoccupation, especially among relatively leisured people.

There are, of course, certain absolute facts about obesity that were unknown to Rubens and his models but that today must be faced. Overweight can contribute significantly to ill health and can even kill. Yet public knowledge about the medical dangers of obesity is quite recent, in comparison with the public taste for thin looks. The fashion for slimness has actually held undisputed sway since the end of the First World War. It seems as if the authority of science were now being invoked to give a very good practical reason for what has always been, and still is, a complex esthetic matter. Many people want to be slim who are not at all worried about their health—witness millions of teen‐agers. Slimness has become a staple element in ideal physical good looks, a matter not just of health but of established visual taste, which is currently purveyed—just as it was in Rubens's time—through the idealizations of visual art.

It was probably camera vision more than social change or medical knowledge that created the modern dim view of fat. Well before the end of the 19th century, photography increasingly was seen as the vessel of visual truth. Photographs were supposed to show how things really looked, not how an artist's vision edited them. But in fact, the artist‐photographer did “edit” his material. The camera became a tool with which to stylize and idealize images of reality with more insidious subtlety than ever, and that stylization conditioned and trained modern taste.

The camera is committed to motion. Still photography captures the fleeting moment, as cinematography records motion itself. In both cases, the camera eye tends to fatten the figure: It seems to surround it with an aura, an expanding outline. The ideal camera figure, therefore, must be slim in reality to allow for the thickening that occurs on film.

When, in the second decade of this century, the camera became licensed to idealize the whole visual dimension of ordinary life in the form of popular movies, the ideal looks of people had to adjust to camera style. The body had to create an instantaneous image, or series of images, which the eye could instantly grasp‐and admire. Sharply focused, easily understood shapes and lines had to define the figure—no fuzziness of contour, no busy extrusions of clothing, and certainly no bulges. The body had to be slim, and movie dress had to be trim, designed to look good in motion—and to look good photographed in black and white. Bones, unavoidably disclosed by the camera, gradually became requisites of the new ideal figure. The female jawbone, clavicle, rib cage, shoulder blades and pelvic ridges acquired at last their own measure of fashionable elegance and erotic charm.

Yet, surprisingly, homage nas never ceased to be paid to the old ideals. Consider the unique career of Mae West. All her movies show how the creative camera could shape the image of mature female amplitude into something as sleek and sexy as the modern eye could possibly wish. In most of her movies, Mae West was decked in the conventional trappings of that other solid sex goddess from the theatrical past, Lillian Russell: feathers, frills, hour‐glass corseting, a big hat and a wavy blond pompadour. And in this traditional getup, her bedroom eyes wickedly at work in her plump face, she conquered the male sex with one sashay across the room.

Slim as n cigarette, Hepburn embodied the st reatnlined look of 1930's fimes

Mae West wasn't really very fat, but, just as in the time of Rubens, her clothes and her style of wearing them showed how she saw herself: warm and soft inside, under a gaudy, firmly but fully packed surface. Her own ample body made her easy in the world: She was like a walking Hollywood bed, luxuriating in its own pillows under a fitted satin spread. We never really lost our love for endowments like Mae's, and so we loved her for her own pleasure in them, even while we and the whole world were conscientiously thinking thin.

Recent movie images, mostly imported from Italy, may foster a new change in visual taste.

The enormously ample women in Fellini and Wertmfiller films could create a new standard of sexual desirability. Just as perverse taste for scrawny, hollow‐cheeked, morbid images during the Romantic era gradually generated a new ideal image, so the perversely fascinating fatties in the new movies may start an underground vogue which will surface in the future as an acknowledged ideal. In fact, at this present thin‐conscious moment,. fat beauty has all the more edge—all the more chance to be the newest, most outrageous avantgarde trend in erotic taste. We have already had some models to admire: Mama Cass in the 60's, Barbara Cook in the 70's. It may even be that the memory of Zero Mostel's vast grace will bring about the epoch of the ‘ desirable fat man. Other big figures, such as James Coco and Robert Morley, have already expressed personal pleasure in their own size. One of these days, the bulk of us may be on the way to Fat City—just in time, and in better shape, for the next celebration of the art of Rubens. ■

Fellini's infatuation with fat erupts in “Amarcord.”