A feminine icon

When I was at uni (more than ten years ago now) one of my disappointments was the mannish style of appearance of the young women on campus. The women would typically wear boots, jeans, a T-shirt, and a windcheater, with no makeup or jewellery or ornamentation of any kind.

They actually managed to look a bit boring, despite being in the full bloom of their womanhood age-wise.

I felt a bit robbed. I thought it a waste of youth, both theirs and mine.

Shortly after I left uni, the Australian fashion designer Alannah Hill rose to prominence. She was the exact opposite, style-wise, of the campus women. She was almost improbably feminine. I was mightily impressed, having been starved of the sight of a feminine woman for so long.

Earlier this year, Alannah Hill was interviewed for The Age newspaper. True to form, she described her fashion philosophy as follows:

I spend most days designing the most romantic clothes so that girls when they wear them will evoke some gush of love from the opposite sex.

Now, I am not suggesting that Alannah Hill is a conservative role model, or that women should aim to dress in quite the full-blown feminine way that she does.

Even so, it's a refreshing change for a woman to admit to wanting to inspire love in a man, and to do so by appearing feminine and romantically attractive. It sure beats campus grunge.

Does appearance count?

Pop star Christina Aguilera has removed 11 piercings, including those in her eyebrow, lip and tongue. A friend explained this decision as follows,

Christina feels she's past the whole piercing thing now. She's really happy with her boyfriend and associates piercings with unhappier times in her life.

According to newspaper reports, Miss Aguilera has previously admitted that she had the piercings done when she felt down.

I find this interesting as it's always seemed likely to me that people who wear jutting pieces of metal in their face do so because of some inner disquiet. It's like a kind of physical scarification to match the emotional one.

Which brings me to a quote I like from Hugh of St Victor. He wrote that,

Body and spirit are but one: disordered movements of the former betray outwardly the disarranged interior of the soul.

I think there's some truth to this. The way we present ourselves does matter, because it reflects our inner condition and because, as Hugh goes on to point out, it can be part of a discipline of improving our inner condition. Hugh writes on this theme that,

inversely 'discipline' can act on the soul through the body - in ways of dressing, in posture and movement, in speech, and in manners.

There is of course another, very simple argument for good presentation: it is more attractive. I can still remember my disappointment at the grungy appearance of the women students when I was at university. They were at an age when they ought to have been at their most beautiful, but they were deprived of this by the entrenched grunginess of youth culture.