Redefining Beauty Through an Unhuman Embrace
Written by Trey Prater
This tweet, written by Twitter user @kirbysfatankles and viewed over 7.4 million times, perfectly captures the essence of beauty that society must embrace. To be alien is to be undefinable, unopposed to change and the unknown, especially as aliens largely exist only as creatures of our wildest imaginations. With increasing numbers of people voicing discontent for the limitations that contemporary beauty standards place on us, humans have the opportunity to champion a movement toward non-human aesthetics in order to make space for everyone. To do this, we must recognize the momentum that has been building toward moving past the limitations of the gendered human form, all with the goals of embracing inhuman aesthetics and redefining modern beauty.
Rei Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 1997 collection Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body for Comme des Garcons highlights the abilities of fashion to contradict expectations of the body as a stiff, unchangeable form. Often referred to as the “lumps and bumps” collection, the pieces presented exaggerated silhouettes, subverting the current societal expectations of the feminine form. In a quote for Unlimited Comme Des Garcons, Kawakubo declared her motivation for the collection was to highlight that “clothes could be the body and the body could be the clothes.” The collection presented the body as a safe haven for an alternative form by creating a variety of genderless and sexless forms. As we strive to champion an inclusive fashion industry, we can look to Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body as a blueprint for how to deconstruct and redefine the capacity of the human body to communicate gender (or lack thereof) through fabric and garment manipulation.
While the framework that Kawakubo constructed was largely left unutilized, many alternative creators have applied body modification techniques to curate a genderless existence through both garment construction and prosthetics. For creative duo Fecal Matter, the body exists as a form to be altered, and they have birthed an otherworldly aesthetic absent of gender both in online and offline spaces. These alien adjacent beings use prosthetics, fashion, and editing to create a look undefinable as “feminine” or “masculine”. Through modifications to the human form, Fecal Matter redefines beauty outside of the restrictive bounds of contemporary gender constructs. For the pair, the body has become a canvas where clothing, makeup, and editing freely interact with one another to enhance and alter what is currently understood as human.
Recently, high fashion brands such as Rick Owens and Balenciaga have also embraced prosthetics and body modification on the runways to distort gender and exaggerate beauty standards. During Rick Owens F/W 2019 show, models featured protruding facial prosthetics, large foreheads, and chalk white faces reminiscent of our galactic neighbors. Similarly, at Balenciaga’s S/S 2020 show, makeup artist Inge Grognard utilized prosthetics to create large lips and sharp cheekbones, distorting models otherwise human faces and generating a hybrid facial form. It is clear that the fashion industry has taken an interest in understanding what a human society of alien pretty people could look like. Now it is up to us to ensure it stays.
Co-opting alienesque aesthetics embraces the unknown of the intergalactic world and acknowledges our animalistic and natural world, presenting an endless opportunity to reconstruct our definition of what it is to look human. Society must absolve its fear of an altered body outside of what is currently deemed acceptable; often a changed body simply for the assimilation into current beauty standards. Instead, it is time to push ourselves to modify our physical forms in untraditional ways with clothing, makeup, editing, and even surgery to progress beyond these limiting standards.
As consumers, we cannot simply rely on meaningless rhetoric and companies rebranding t-shirts as “gender neutral” to address inequalities within the self expression industries and society at large. The responsibility for change lies not in the hands of corporations and politicians, especially as movements to limit expression outside the gender binary relentlessly spread throughout the United States, but with us. It’s time to embrace and look towards the efforts of fashion industry leaders to redefine what is beautiful and the capabilities of the human form in order to move forward into a world that celebrates gender and human diversity.
Seriously, it’s time to dive headfirst into the unknown. Shave your eyebrows, give yourself a six-head, be unafraid to experiment with voluminous clothing, wear a bold, alien inspired makeup look for your next night out. Regardless of how you do it, working to expand the societal expectations of beauty through what is considered alien will be the great equalizer in the future of society and the fashion industry.
Special thanks to my dear friend Hanna for her support throughout the writing process <3
Edited by: Annie Stockwell, Margot Bond, Sloane Fuhr, and Roan Vaughan
Reviewed by: Lauren Veum and The Vault’s DEI Team
