We hate our bodies. What does fashion have to do with it?
No One Told Me #1: A conversation with esteemed psychoanalyst Susie Orbach
Fashion has always had a great influence on ideas around self image, the body and its modifications, gender formation – this is nothing new. But right now, it’s on steroids. In the past three decades, fashion has become deeply established as a form of entertainment – with its tentacles gripping cultural and business fields around it – while continuing to shape how we ‘fit in’ on the relational plane. But what is the significance of identity formation and how we dress on a wider social level? What does it mean if there’s hardly any respite from being presented with idealised bodies? How does body psychology come into the frame of the image sold to us everyday? What responsibility could a new generation of designers and image makers take?
We set out to answer some of these questions. For this first edition of No One Told Me, we had the privilege and pleasure of speaking with the UK’s leading psychotherapist, Susie Orbach. Susie has been making significant contributions within the field for decades. A child of the women’s liberation movement in the 60s, she co-created The Women's Therapy Centre in 1976 and The Women's Therapy Centre Institute, a training institute in New York, in 1981. In the time between then and now, she has written over twelve books including Fat is a Feminist Issue, Bodies, and In Therapy. She is also a frequent columnist for the Guardian. With her deep understanding of themes such as body image, eating disorders, and transgenerational trauma, we thought of noone better suited to kick off this series. Susie received us in her Hampstead home, which is also her office. A stunning piece of modern architecture, flooded with light, it certainly helped clear the mind to discuss pressing issues.
So, to start off with… from a psychoanalytical point of view, how are beauty standards created and enforced?
I come at this the other way around, which is: why are people so preoccupied with their bodies? What’s going on at a wider cultural and economic level? What are people trying to show? What has the body become? And then I might look at psychoanalysis. Where then psychoanalysis comes in is questioning how we internalise the offerings of the [fashion and beauty] industry in a way that we don’t even realise we’ve internalised them. How have our parents – who give us bodies – internalised the strictures and constraints so that when they introduce us to clothing, they’re already encoding a set of values to do with class, geography, gender.
Now people take it for granted that they’ll feel shit about their bodies.
How have you seen the shift within your own practice when it comes to body image? Because you’ve been engaged with this topic since the 1970s.
I think the major shift that I experienced, which is why I wrote the book Bodies, is that in the beginning people came with eating problems; they wanted help with that, and with their body image. Now people take it for granted that they’ll feel shit about their bodies. And that is a position they have to find a way of caring for. That speaks to the undermining of the body and I think the fashion industry has a lot to answer for. I don’t think it’s the only industry; obviously there’s L’Oréal which makes phenomenal profits like LVMH. I suppose for me, I’ve been trying to make the argument for body diversity. Given we live in a world in which we decorate our bodies all the time – we’re not clothing our bodies, we’re signalling with them. How can we be allowed to be in our bodies in a matter of fact way? How do we not make people feel rubbish about their bodies?
That’s a very big question.
I have lots of other ways of thinking about that. Part of the answer is to make an argument for sustainable clothes on sustainable bodies. Because, of course, many women today don’t have sustainable bodies. They have bodies that break down or need to be repaired all the time, or have to be squashed in. So how we do it at the level of the fashion industry is a lovely challenge for young people. How do they learn how to pattern cut so that it isn’t simply computerised? We know that you don’t make the same proportion of lapel on a large or small woman. How do we actually design for a real, not some mythical person?
There are some positive things happening and technology is perhaps one part of that. There are apps now that can scan your body’s measurements from an image and send this to a brand for a more customised fit.
I don’t know why it’s taken so long? I mean, we took that idea to the British Fashion Council 24 years ago and said, “Why don’t you do that?” It’s economically insane; most people are different sizes. Walmart figured that one out in the States a long time ago. Now other shops are figuring it out but it’s still very slow.
I think many more brands are taking notice today, also when it comes to ethnic diversity and representation.
Also, we know that Armani sells more clothes in size 14, but it won’t exhibit them.
Yes, we still want to have ‘the image’.
Well, who’s the ‘we’? Of course we want to have the image if that’s the image that’s given. That’s ludicrous. We know very well that we don’t simply want ‘the image’ because when we [are presented with] wide trousers we don’t like them at first. And then we begin to feel our current trousers look tatty or old-fashioned and we notice… “Oh, I really like those wide trousers.” It isn’t that ‘we’ like that thin silhouette, it’s that the thin silhouette is what’s represented. That’s a no-bloody-brainer, actually.
It’s just culture that’s fed to us by the big brands through marketing.
It insinuates itself into us. It is [their aim for us] to consume a lot of clothes – so that isn’t necessarily sustainable – and to consume them in relation to whatever the current aesthetic is.
It’s quite hard to step outside of it when we live in a culture that’s so dominated by the image.
I think it’s a very hard thing, yes. I don’t want to sound like I don’t like clothes, I love clothes. I mean they’re obviously less significant now. When you’re an old lady it’s not the same as when you’re young. But I like fabric and the way things fall.
How is it different for you now then? Isn’t there something fundamental about dressing and clothing?
You can be thin or fat; you’ll have lumps and bumps the way you didn’t on a younger body. You can look silly in certain things. I used to wear bright colours a lot. Also, I’m not interested in signalling whatever you’re signalling when you’re younger.
That makes sense. I think you made this point in the introduction of your book Bodies that a century ago women only had to look good for a very short time.
Yes, a minute and a half. Absolutely. You had to find a man and that was it. That shift started around the post-war Hollywood, the democratisation of glamour, Jean Shrimpton, the Twiggy period which broke down the class markers and it kind of went… “Oh wow, we can get everybody to feel fucked up about their bodies forever!”
The various industries definitely caught on.
I was just in the chemist and there’s a guy in there, he’s 45. “I really like this moisturiser, I’ve been using this.” So the cosmetics industry worked out: we can go to every country, we can go to men, now we can go to children.
Maybe people are becoming more conscious, too. There’s a different focus on health and wellbeing today.
There is but it’s difficult.
It is. We’re talking about the masses and it’s a very individual journey.
And also you could be a person of a size like mine or yours who’s as messed up about their bodies as somebody who is large. Size does not encode content.
Can we dare to accept ourselves and get on with the things that are about actually making a contribution to the world instead of making a performance?
Not at all. I had some thoughts and questions around the idea of ‘perfection’.
Yes, where the hell does that come from? That’s just such a crazy idea.
It’s probably created by a man.
Yeah. I really do think it’s a troubling idea, perfection. It doesn’t express anything about… I can’t think about perfection in any form. I mean, do you make a perfect pasta, a perfect drawing, do you make a perfect sentence? It might be a very small personal act to say exactly what you want to say in a sentence, or to play the violin. But perfection? It's a really tedious notion.
I guess there are certain ‘idealised’ ideas about the body, which are ever-shifting. Think about Kim Kardashian. A few years ago she was all about voluptuousness and promoting that ideal. Now she is as skinny as everybody else. It must be so hard being a teenager, especially if you have a more voluptuous body. You’d think: “Finally, somebody affirms my body is great as it is.” Followed by, “Oh, so do I now have to be skinny again?”
I guess that’s the commercial pressure, isn’t it? To change, to have Ozempic, to have cosmetic surgery, to slice this up, and then: “Oh no, next year I have to get a Brazilian bum.”
It’s never-ending, it’s exhausting.
Also for young people, it’s that they have to be all things at the same time. They have to wear their combat boots with a frilly top.
Clare Chambers made this point in her book Intact, that as women we’re screwed in so many different ways. If we do look model-like, then you must be a bad wife; if you’re a good mum, then you’re not achieving success at work; if you’re having success at work, then you must be awful in some other way. It’s concerning that we have to live with this constant anxiety of not being enough.
You can contest it.
Definitely.
And that’s a sell, but you have to contest it. I was lucky enough to have been brought up in the women’s liberation movement. I don’t think those were our values. It was a particular moment in history.
Yes, and now we’re…
…in a particular breakdown. Kind of fascist forms of thinking and regulation. Which we do for ourselves.
It’s pretty internalised I guess. Do you have any advice for people on how to step out of it?
The only thing that I ever knew how to do was get together with other people and think: “Why are we like this? What the fuck are we doing? Can we dare to break out of it? Can we dare to accept ourselves and get on with the things that are about actually making a contribution to the world instead of making a performance?”
Because that’s not really living.
The problem is that we now live in this post-Thatcherite period, in which everything is about the personal (in the non-psychoanalytic way) rather than being about contributing and about what you might have to offer or give. For me, what I would want to provoke if I was a younger person is questioning: what do we have to give? We can see that in struggles around climate change. And of course, fashion is so much part of the problem of climate change. It’s absolutely central.
Can we ever be ‘happy’ through body modification? What are your thoughts on that?
I’m sure that for some people it’s helpful.
Helpful.
However, the very fact that girls are having labiaplasty, or that young people in their twenties and thirties are doing botox is sparking profound levels of disturbance. It’s not quite the same as dyeing your eyebrows.
My issue with things like botox is that it becomes a new idealised version of self – and that ideal is perpetuated through culture – so where do you stop when you’ve accepted the botox face as your actual face?
It’s very weird. Ageing is quite interesting. It’s tough in lots of ways but if you can still stay curious, that’s much more interesting than the five minutes you look at yourself in the mirror when you might think: “Shit, I didn’t know I look like that. I look like my mum or my dad or auntie Mary. I don’t recognise that person.” Because the inner experience of engagement is different. I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt.
Of course the push for body modifications is totally comprehensible: if you don’t feel good, you have an attempted solution. If you’re selling little girls body modification through apps when they’re three or four, it’s perfectly understandable that they’re going to think: “Oh when I’m a grown-up, I can put cheekbones in.”
That’s concerning.
[Sarcastic] It’s gonna be so great.
This makes me feel really uncomfortable.
“My labia doesn’t look like that, oh that must be horrible, I must get rid of that.”
I find labiaplasty almost more upsetting than women wanting to do a bit of botox to get rid of wrinkles. That’s just an ideal perpetuated by what men look at through porn. That to me feels violent on an even bigger level, that you’re actually going to do that to your own body.
A lot of men do things now too. They do cheek implants, chest implants. You can’t tell how old anybody is now. What you can tell is that there’s something wrong with their face. It doesn’t move right. Or you look at women my age and you think, “Wow”, and you look here [points at chest], and you think, “Oh my God, they have the same here as I do.” [Laughs]
I guess maybe the big difference from when you wrote Bodies in 2009, is that it was before face filters and social media.
And before sex dolls for men.
When did that start, really?
Maybe it started around that time. But it wasn’t like, “You can get one and she can be any woman you want her to be. She can be Eurasian or she can be Hawaiian, she can be English, she can do different voices. She can do everything for you.”
Wow, the next stage of objectification.
What I was trying to write about with Bodies was this really strange conjunction of being simultaneously dematerialized because of living with chips in one way or another, screens and robotics. So we’re being dematerialized all the time and yet we’re desperate to create some materiality of the body. It’s just one of those really weird things that I think is going on.
We’re being dematerialized all the time and yet we’re desperate to create some materiality of the body. It’s just one of those really weird things that I think is going on.
It’s sometimes hard to try and stay positive in the face of all this.
I think the way of staying positive is being interested and curious. I don’t know what else it means. Happiness is a ludicrous idea: “Have a great day!” although it’s complete shit. Have the day you’re having, and let’s see, sometimes they’re interesting.
As it is.
Exactly.
A bit of a closing question. What can designers and image makers tangibly do that makes a change on a deeper cultural level?
Rankin did something very interesting years ago, when he photographed disabled bodies. You looked at them and thought: “That’s so beautiful, I want to look like that.” There’s something about the artist’s eye that can make things so interesting. I’m saying that because I think he did do that as an exercise. I think it must be so constraining for people working in fashion to have to do it on one type of body. That their aesthetic is built on something that they’ve already received rather than it’s something they can expand.
Less imaginative, less fun and maybe more alienating if your own body isn’t that.
Yes. Nobody tried that after him, which is really a shame. Because the photographers and the designers, they’re brilliant. They’ve got interesting eyes but we don’t often see them. And I’d like to!
By Jorinde Croese
Further reading and resources
Susie Orbach’s books on the topic have been fantastic reads with insights from her decades-long psychotherapy practice. A few recommendations: Fat is a Feminist Issue, Bodies, and On Eating.
The book Understanding Body Dysmorphic Disorder by Dr Phillips guides readers through the basics of the disorder and through the many treatment options that work and don't work. Not just for those who are bang-in-the-middle experiences the disorder; it’s also a great resource for friends and family to grow understanding.
A brilliant academic article in the journal Cogent Social Sciences on the relationship between the images we are presented with in magazines and body dissatisfaction.
A book that was published fairly recently, Who Is Wellness For explores “the commodification and appropriation of wellness through the lens of social justice, providing resources to help anyone participate in self-care, regardless of race, identity, socioeconomic status or able-bodiedness.” We haven’t read this but it sounds on-point in today’s climate where wellness has become a buzzword and trend that capitalism banks on; continuing to make us feel bad about ourselves to make a buck.
A powerful personal essay by Charlie Squire on eating disorders. A compelling passage: “I feel an immense political guilt in my desire to be thin. I do not want to be thin. I have read all the literature, I understand the classist and colonial underpinnings of institutional and interpersonal fatphobia, I see it as a necessity of any good radical politics to tear down our current conceptions of fatness and embrace body neutrality.”
New York Times best-selling author Roxane Gay is well-known for her essay collection Bad Feminist, which she followed up with the book Hunger, diving deeply into what it means to be comfortable in one's body.
For those who would like to explore body image in therapy but can hardly afford to do so, here’s a list of organizations offering low-cost therapy in the UK.
In general, the Counselling Directory (UK) is a brilliant place to search for therapists if you have a bit more to spend, and you can filter based on topics that worry you.
Some affordable options in NYC: Zencare’s list, Low Cost Therapy List.
An ongoing podcast series Appearance Matters by the Centre of Appearance Research with a wide range of themes.
For help with eating disorders, visit Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity.
Further sources of support for people with appearance concerns can be found here: https://www.uwe.ac.uk/research/centres-and-groups/appearance/about/sources-of-support