The Canvas of Fashion
Fashion has entered its most exhausting phase: the era in which it wants credit for being kind more than it wants responsibility for being beautiful. Inclusivity is now the preferred language of brands that still quietly worship the same narrow ideal they always have. The evidence is embarrassingly simple. Walk down any luxury street in Paris, Milan, or New York and look at the windows. Count the plus-size mannequins. Take your time, you won’t need much. Inclusivity, it turns out, is very loud in campaigns and very shy where money, desire, and aspiration are actually negotiated.
What we are witnessing is not a revolution of aesthetics but a rebrand of conscience. Fashion did not suddenly change its eye, it changed its vocabulary. The industry still designs samples for lean frames, still photographs clothes on narrow bodies, still uses thinness to communicate sharpness, authority, and control. The difference is that now it apologizes while doing it. Inclusivity has become advertising copy—something to be said, not something to be structurally believed. A moral performance layered on top of an unchanged truth.
This confusion stems from a larger mistake: the belief that fashion is obligated to represent society rather than distort it. Fashion has never been a mirror. It has always been a fantasy machine—selective, exaggerated and unfair by design. Runways are not politics. Models are not politicians. They are tools of proportion, movement, and silhouette. Thinness on the runway is not a judgment on human worth, it is a technical choice that maximizes line, fabric behavior, and visual impact. Pretending otherwise does not make fashion more humane… it makes it dishonest.
There was a time when figures like Karl Lagerfeld simply said out loud what the industry privately whispered. Not because they were cruel, but because they were uninterested in pretending. Today, the same opinions circulate quietly—joked about at dinners, whispered backstage, acknowledged through casting—but never admitted publicly. Fashion did not become more ethical, it became more afraid. And fear, dressed up as sensitivity, has proven far more conflict to creativity than honesty ever has.
Elegance has always communicated something very specific: restraint, discipline, hierarchy, and choice. A lean, cared-for body reads as intentional. It suggests boundaries. It suggests priorities. This is not a moral statement, it is a visual one. Just as excess has always read as excess. There are limits on both ends, and pretending otherwise does not make us progressive… it makes us sentimental. When fashion is asked to validate everyone equally, it loses the ability to seduce anyone intensely.
The most telling symptom of all is how diluted the idea of modeling has become. Saying “I’m dating a model” used to imply rarity—a profession built on extreme physical specificity. Not everyone could do it, and no one pretended they should. That wasn’t cruelty, it was realism. Standards are not oppression. Exclusion is not abuse. Fashion does not need to be rescued from its own nature. It needs to be allowed to remember it. And deep down, uncomfortably, almost everyone already knows what looks best… they’re just waiting for others to say it first before admitting it out loud.
WRITTEN BY FREDDY ESPINAL
