getting in touch with my american side

The fascination with my Americanness continued after being asked to fill out those cross-cultural questionnaires.

Yesterday a very nice girl in my Spanish cultural studies class presented on a topic we hadn't covered: fashion. More specifically, she told us about how Madrid has banned size 0 models from their catwalks, and the rest of the country (and even Milan) have followed suit. [Pun intended.] Size 0 means size 4 in the UK, and I have no idea what it is in the U.S., which is probably the first time I can't find an equivalent in the States for something as universal as clothes. I've been here too long.

In any case, her topic instigated an hour-long discussion that reached such topics as fashion trends, body image (for women AND men), and health issues like anorexia. A size 0 model had collapsed and died on the Madrid catwalk because she had been eating only lettuce leaves for months, which I think really drew attention to the seriousness of the issue of teeny tiny models for Spanish cultural/fashion/health officials.

However, I do have to say that I did not like how the presenter said that "since most fashion designers are gay men, their ideal of the female form is rather boyish." Something tells me that this is not even true. There are many female fashion designers and a minority of straight male designers, too. Who said that gay men think the female form is "boyish" and why would that be the reason for clothes only being designed to fit walking hangers? Plus, she has linked homosexuality with pedophilia. Does she think all gay men prefer "boyish" men and/or boys?

But I digress.

In the discussion, they asked me about fashion trends in the U.S. If people have such anxiety over their weight and size and body image and finding clothes that fits them. What did I contribute? This: "Well, whatever I have to say is very subjective. Because I am so short, I have to find ankle-length or petite bottoms. This is a very hard thing to do." How insightful, I know. I had the opportunity to say some of the differences between how people want to look here and the image people want to or unintentionally project at home. And I didn't take it. Oh well.

And in my French film class, le prof was interested in where Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) fits in critically and commercially in "North America." (I hate it when they call it that; I cannot speak for all of America let alone for all of Canada and Mexico and Guatemala and Nicaragua and etc., too.) He asked me this because people in the class were curious to how it relates to Diva (1981) and Subway (1985), if this film is also part of the cinema du look phenomenon. Plus, Les Amants is a very famous film, and he assumed that it was so in the U.S., too. And yes, I think cinephiles and foreign film-lovers would know it, so I said that it ranks with Krzysztof Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs: Blue (1993), White (1994), and Red (1994). Yeah, I still think that's about right.

Figures people would only become interested in my Americanness in the last week of classes.