This is where we share stuff we can’t share on Facebook page for fear of being kicked out! Read why here. Usually the posts are about body image.
- ‘What painting portraits of naked women has taught me’
Artist Aleah Chapin, 28, has caused controversy with her realistic paintings of nude older women. Now, she has a new London show that celebrates the female form at every age. Here, she opens up to Claire Cohen about body image and the perils of social media.
Thanks MLG!
- Instagram bad for body image, says study
According to a survey undertaken by US Glamour magazine, 64 percent of women said looking at photos of women on social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram is what made them feel worst about their bodies.
- Playboy models from Miss March 1954 to Miss January 1979 on meeting the male gaze then—and now.
Still, for the women of Playboy who decided to step back in front of a photographer’s lens for New York, that sense of control, however illusory, was a large part of the appeal of posing — both then and now. There is, according to Playboy magazine’s official style guide, no such thing as a former Playmate. Once earned, the cultural designation as sex symbol, according to Hugh Hefner’s surprisingly embracing philosophy of beauty, is one a woman retains for life. “When you look at pictures of yourself from long ago, you see this young girl,” Cole Lownes says of her own centerfold. “You look into the eyes of the model, and you realize she doesn’t know what she knows now.” In these portraits: some knowledge.
- Trying to make the topless swimsuit happen in 1964
When we think of the monokini today, we picture those fiddly one-piece swimsuits that give you awkward tan lines, popularised by the Kardashian and Hilton sisters. But the first monokini was in fact originally a topless swimsuit that exposed the female breasts, conceived in 1964 by avant-garde designer Rudi Gernreich, who predicted (rather accurately) that “bosom will be uncovered within five years.”
While the design initially had a harder time catching on in the United States (the first American model to pose in the swimsuit, Peggy Moffitt, received death threats), the monokini appears to have found itself more at home unsurprisingly in Paris, at the legendary Piscine Molitor, where the first bikini was revealed to the world nearly twenty years earlier in 1946…
I loved the paintings of Aleah Chapin. I am amazed that people have problems with them. To me they are beautiful, interesting, and realistic. I look at them and feel nothing but admiration and even a bit of peace. We need to see older women’s bodies as the normal process it is.