Speaking Dolls. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fashion and Advertising Models

On the basis of qualitative empirical data gathered by means of semi-structured interviews with former fashion models, secondary oral sources and autoethnographical data, in this paper I analyze the embodiment and representation of beauty ideals as the result of bodily and emotional work carried out by fashion models. Given that models supposedly embody the aesthetic and identitary ideals proposed by media and advertising, they constitute key informants to explore bodily and identity performances in agreement with hegemonic aesthetic patterns, as well as to analyse the construction of such ideals. Models' bodily work illustrate more general processes carried out to adjust to gender presentation norms, and testify to the performance that sustains beauty representation in media. Their experiences reveal their own strategies to adapt to and, at the same time, resist objectification, their diferente degrees of bodily self-identification according to gender, and their critical vision on the ethics of image production. The role of silence in the performance of beauty - a technique to empty models of the personality in order to facilitate the projection of desire sustaining the construction of glamour - is broken in this anthropological incursion to fashion's backstage.