As if it wasn’t enough that tweens and teens are getting mani-pedis and blowouts, there are some–in the affluent DC suburbs, at least–who are also have their own image consultants to glamorize them. These Stacies and Clintons are doing booming business, according to an article in this weekend’s Washington Post entitled “Minor Makeover.”
“In the past couple of years, the market of 12-to-20-year olds has absolutely grown,” says Los Angeles stylist and image consultant Abby Michelle Moll, who works with adult clients and their kids. “It’s being driven by the media and the Internet.”
Reality shows like “How Do I Look?” and “What Not to Wear” usually center on the remarkable before-and-after transformations of the participants. Maybe it was only a matter of time before the trend hit teens and preteens. The idea of perpetually camera-ready teens is what youth market analysts call KGOY, “kids getting older younger,” which is, of course, no new phenomenon.
A lot of the girls quoted in the article sound like nice, slightly lost middle- and high-schoolers who are hoping to break out of their awkward phase.
“I don’t have the best confidence,” says Hannah Abrams, 16, shrugging and offering a small smile. “I feel like a makeover will make people look at me in a different way.”
That kinda breaks my heart…once upon a time I was a geek with a bad haircut and not-particularly-flattering clothes, and I can certainly understand how she feels. But I don’t think that an image consultant would have been the silver bullet for my insecurities. Having a professional pick apart the way I looked? Yikes. I would have just felt worse. And I don’t buy into the idea that being thin, well-dressed, well-coiffed or perfectly made up makes you a confident or happy person. In fact, a lot of the most well-put-together women I know are also the most painfully insecure and self-loathing. Personally, I got through my awkward phase–I still cringe to think of it today–because I had an awesome, loving family who never put much emphasis on my looks, my weight or my clothes. As a result, neither did I, and when the occasional Mean Girl made fun of me, it stung, but I mostly just thought she was an asshole for caring about shit like that. Unfortunately, not all moms seem to feel like mine did:
“To find a grown-up who will help my daughter establish how she wants to look is a gift,” her mom says. “I think other girls can sometimes steer her in the wrong direction.”
Well, which direction are YOU steering her in, lady? You’re her mom! Why don’t YOU help her establish her look–if that’s what’s important to her? The article explains:
..the image consultant is not just a sign of adolescent precociousness and privilege. It is also, for some, a balm for the troubles of adolescence. It’s tough being a teenage girl, as it probably has been since time immemorial. That’s one thing Hannah’s mother thinks about sometimes: how tough it is to be her daughter’s age, how critical the kids are of one another, how much less complicated the world seemed when Hannah was younger.
It sounds to me like it’s also a cop-out for the mothers of these teens. Yes, adolescence is tough. I think it’s fair to say that it’s gotten tougher in recent years–one of the girls in the article was quoted as saying she was very depressed after some other girls brutally mocked her skin and weight on her Facebook page, which made me offer up fervent thanks to Ceiling Cat that I went to high school in the pre-internet years. Still, I think the moneyed, upper-middle-class parents in this article are just hiring the image consultants so they can slough off their crucial responsibility to instill confidence and teach their daughters how to respond to peer pressure and lookism. (Full disclosure: some of the families mentioned in this article live in the tonier neighborhoods of my hometown, and the reporter’s depiction of them strikes me as dead on.)
I’m also going to go out on a limb here, and say that based on what this reporter saw in her time with the image consultants, it sounds like they’re instilling exactly the WRONG values in girls:
There is also a brief lecture on body type (“Kate is built like a ruler and can wear little kilt skirts,” she assesses), and for the finale, an individual color analysis during which the girls are draped in various fabrics to determine their most flattering shades.
By the end of the presentation, it has become quite clear that the students are well above average. When quizzed, they rattle off a list of favorite designers as if they’re reciting the periodic table, instantly recognize the significance of Glickman’s purse being a Jil Sander, and rhapsodize over the genius of Andre, a personal shopper at Mazza Gallerie’s Neiman Marcus.
Ultimately, it’s not what to wear that concerns them. It’s the pressure to wear it better.
“I dress for other girls,” admits Meredith.
“It can be pretty competitive,” Kate says with a nod, placing her mini Chanel bag over a slender shoulder. “You don’t want to see someone wearing the same thing.”
Adjusting her Burberry headband, Jane adds, “But we don’t want to be the different one, either.”
Wow. Way to make over your daughter into a body-concious, shallow, conformist, materialistic brand whore! And all for $500 an hour.
Needless to say, these image consultants have an exclusively female clientele. There are no hired guns to tell their teenaged brothers how to gel their hair to maximum effect, or pick out clothes that make their waists look smaller and complexions brighter.
The whole article left really bad taste in my mouth. I know that girls are growing up earlier these days, and I know that they’re exposed to a hell of a lot more pressure than I was. But I think their parents are doing them a real disservice.
I don’t long for the days when kids stayed innocent well into adolescence. Innocence is highly overrated, especially in women, and I find that most parents are actually nostalgic for naivete. Trying to completely cut off girls from our body-snarking media culture–by banning internet use or T.V. watching, as some parents I know have done–strikes me as unrealistic and even dangerous, because you cannot shut the world out forever. Eventually it will find them. They need to be prepared when it does, whether they’re eight or eighteen, so I think parents need to monitor the media-culture dosage and be open and honest and active in their daughters’ emotional development. Hiring someone to fix your daughter’s hair and teach her to buy the latest fashions is none of those things. It might be easier for the daughter and the parents to pretend that a makeover will erase all her social anxieties and adolescent self-doubt, but it won’t, and it sends exactly the wrong message about what will.
This overwhelms me. Like you said, it just teaches them all the worst possible ways to make themselves feel better, and the most ephemeral.
Mm.. I don’t know about this. I think they’re taking it too *far*, but I’m not sure the initial idea is really that terrible.
I’ve never been particularly into being fashionable, wearing makeup etc, but I did spend a LONG time wishing that someone would at least give me some TIPS. Not change who I am or how I dress completely, just, y’know, help me figure out what kind of cuts look good on my not-size-0 figure, that sort of thing. Although my mom spent a great deal of time trying to instill confidence in other ways (encouraging my interests, praising my talents, and so forth) she just isn’t really equipped to help me find ways to look cute that are palatable to me. It’s not a *terribly* important thing, but.. it would have been nice.
And so I do think a kind of “image consulting”, a kind that just focuses on what your body already looks like and what you like and making that work, really can help boost confidence and help young girls become more comfortable in their skin. That said, I admit that the idealized, positive “consulting” I’m imagining is probably NOT what is happening here. And that’s really sad for those girls.
Maybe I’m missing the point, but my first response was, “How do these people have that much money?” So many people right now are struggling to put food on the table, and people think THIS is an appropriate way to spend money?
Oh, and I tried to make myself over several times as a teen (high school movies taught me that the only way to feel better about yourself was to do a total makeover). It didn’t work. I guess being a size 14 at age 16 outweighs looking good in the teen years.
/snark
Okay, everyone who wants to make a torch-and-pitchfork run to Home Depot after work, raise your hand.
I, too went through an awkward adolescence (and really, who’s isn’t?) marked with insecurity and depression- and yes, I was the geeky one with the acne, bad hair, and hand me down clothes that didn’t fit. However, I feel that I would not be the person I am today if not for that. I am confident, happy, and (relatively?) well balanced- I would not have the same level of self respect today if I spent my life pandering to what others thought of me, or if I had given in to anything to seem “popular”. Besides- there are better ways to spend my precious time and money than to waste it on appearance- someone will always be able to find something “wrong” with you and it seems far more detrimental to my mental health to try and look “pretty” (or what the fashion world want to tell me is pretty) than to just love myself for who I am!
Oh, plenty of people are still raking in the dough. It’s obscene. I can’t believe these people live in my area (wait, yes I can).
The “Kids today!” refrain should be changed to “Parents today!” They are not teaching their children coping skills, or helping them navigate the sexist culture in which they live. They’re just accepting it. And they’re helping the media turn their girls into Good Little Consumers.
This reminds me of my best friend when I was a teenager, whose parents transferred their self-loathing onto her and pretty much forced her to get a nose job. Plastic surgeon as image consultant. Let kids figure out on their own which “shades are most flattering” and whether or not they want to wear little kilt skirts regardless of whether they’re built “like a ruler”.
@SarahMC
Totally with you on the “Parents Today!” train. I work retail (lovely, lovely retail), and 99% of the annoying customers are parents, not kids. The salespeople will even try to split up mothers (it’s always mothers, I don’t know why) and kids in the dressing rooms to avoid fights. Ah, Back to School season.
I had a friend in HS who got a nose job (the first of several) for her 17th birthday. As I understand it, nose jobs have become the Sweet 16 gift of choice in some communities. I find nose jobs at 16 sad.
However, I also had a friend in HS who had breast reduction surgery. Obviously there is a physical component to breast reduction that doesn’t exist with a nose job (i.e., no back pain, shoulder strain, etc. with your nose), but said friend pointed mostly to her wish that boys/men would stop staring at her chest, and that she would look ‘normal.’
I’m so much more sympathetic to BR surg, probably because I’ve put one off for over a decade in the interests of breast feeding…but I find myself struggling to figure out where the line between empowerment, and slave to the beauty falls.
I know that this article didn’t address surgery…but I see it all mixed up in my mind. Just different levels…
@SarahMC: Totally agree about it being the parents. These parents need to say to their daughters, “I know she snarked on you on Facebook, but FUCK HER. She sucks and she’s a miserable insecure person. You look great and people will always find something to snark on, so try not to let it get you down and, again, FUCK HER.” Saying “Oh, let’s get your hair done and have a shopper buy you some cute new clothes” only reinforces the lookism and the insecurity.
Also some of the girls in this article went to Yorktown High School. Snotty preppy parents equals snotty preppy kids. No one who went to W-L had a personal shopper at Tyson’s II. Fuck Yorktown.
@ Marie: You just perfectly described my adolescence–all of it. It sucked at times, but, like you, I’m much happier and healthier b/c I got my priorities straight early on.
@TVille: I got a breast reduction when I was 15, although my mother had the same surgery as well. I was a DD at age 13, and I’m only 4’10″ so it did have a very physical component to it, so much so that insurance did cover it. But yeah, it is a fine line between something like that and something like a nose job. It’s not like my operation was necessary reconstructive surgery. Still, it made my teen years a little more bearable…which may be the point of all this. It does get a bit jumbled.
Wealth poisons. There, I said it. Yes, it’s a blatant over-generalization, and I realize this phenomenon plays itself out to varying degrees at all socio-economic levels. Further, having grown up in a hand-to-mouth household, I have no illusions about glamorizing or fetishizing poverty. But when you do not have the means to try to buy self-confidence and acceptance via image consultants, designer clothing, and pricey accessories, I think you eventually learn to cherish and base your self-esteem on those things that are a more integral part of yourself: your brains, talents, sense of humor, kindness and empathy, etc. And you wind up with friends who love you for who you are, not friends who accept you because you have the right look (for now). Sure it’s really tough to be picked on or teased in the short term, and making yourself over into someone new sounds appealing. But a makeover that only touches the outside isn’t meaningful or lasting. The kind of popularity that wealth buys is often superficial and tenuous, and I believe that, at best, it leads to a similarly superficial and tenuous sense of self-esteem.
Ok…so…actually…my mother did this for me when I was a teen. We were solidly middle class, and I certainly didn’t get any designer labels growing up, ever, but my mother I think did it as a mother/daughter bonding thing (it was a group of people, not one-on-one, and not ridiculously expensive) and also as a way to have a conversation about a really touchy subject without starting a fight. (She felt I dressed too old for my age. I felt she wanted me to look dorky and unfastionable.)
Most of the advice was pretty practical and sounds a lot like what the reporter describes above…about colors that flattered your skin tone, how to apply makeup, what sort of skirt lengths flattered what sort of body types, so first of all I call BS on the trend angle, because I did this more than a decade ago.
Second of all, while I’m hardly going to say that this was without bothersome gender performative and body image undertones, I experienced it as more empowering than not. I came out of it with a sense that even though I was being teased a whole ton about my looks, there were things that I could do that would at least make me feel better about how I looked.
I think it’s also relevant that my mother didn’t force it on me as a “you need to shape up or you’ll never catch a man” sort of thing, but did it as more of a response to my feeling “I’m unattractive and it’s hopeless.”
(Also re: the quote you pulled out, I was described as “built like a ruler” or “skinny as a toothpick” a lot as a teenager, and did not at all take it as a compliment. At that age, it’s quite angst-inducing to be too slender (i.e. flat-chested.) So while the comment the reporter pulled out may sound like a fat-shaming sort of thing, I think it’s entirely possible that it was meant much more as a “you may think you don’t like like your body, but here are some positive sides to your figure you may not have considered.”)
@becky – Good ole W’n'L!
@Psyche: I think this could be done in a much more empowering way, as you say. If it’s about saying to the girl “You’re beautiful, fuck the haters, let’s find something that makes you feel great.” then I might get on board. It sounds like that was more your experience. But I don’t think that was at all what the reporter was describing in this article. It was much more a “you are what you wear and if you’re not fabulous, you’ll be made fun of, so you’d better get on board with Big Fashion early on.”
I was really skinny and flat-chested for most of middle and high school, and I definitely agree that being called “straight as a ruler” isn’t a compliment (did you ever get called a “carpenter’s dream”? I still want to punch the girls who called me that.) I thought that comment by the stylist was body-snarking, IMO, and she was an asshole for saying that. Frankly, I don’t think anyone should be critical of a teenage girl’s body, EVER–it happens no matter what size you are and it’s always unpleasant.