Pride and Glamour on the Catwalk: Fashion Models as National and Ethnic Icons

Abstract

Since the global expansion of fashion in the 1980s, fashion’s visibility in the media has increased dramatically. Several fashion events have become high-profile international events, and both outstanding designers and models have acquired celebrity status. Particularly since the rise of supermodels in the late 1980s, models have become powerful icons embodying ideal identities that capture popular fantasies globally. Previous research has shown how, since their first appearances in the mid-nineteenth century to today, the cultural history of modelling reveals a successive addition of meaningful signs, such as physique, age, gender, nationality, ethnicity and class, among others (Soley-Beltran 2004). These qualities turn fashion models into complex cultural signifiers and reveal the impact of socio-economic and cultural context in the drawing of the ideal ‘model identity’ they embody. Regularly paraded at international fashion shows and contests (as well as in a multitude of media outlets), mannequins embody and glamourize a normative identity that serves and supports consumerism. Although the roles fashion and design play for the construction of shared cultural meanings has long been established (Barthes 1983), the contributions made by fashion models in the constitution of ethnic and national identities has been generally under-researched.