Isn't She lovely project

Thesis Series 1 of 2

This project entails collaging advertisements from over the past century of products that promote and uphold beauty standards for women with images that have been posted on Instagram promoting the same social norms in present day. It was important for the series to include a title that posed a question. My biggest wish for the viewer as they interact and engage with the newly created images is for an internal thought process to bloom, questioning whether they enjoy, agree with or are completely fed up with the beauty standards I am presenting. This is an important topic for me for several reasons. I feel very overwhelmed from the necessity my generation of Millennials has with constantly being connected over various social media platforms at the same time, but also, doing so while looking your absolute best- especially as a woman. Also, I found it important to collage these Instagram photos onto older ads illustrating the same beauty standards to really emphasize how long we have robotically followed these beauty guidelines (note that I say ‘we’ in order to include myself). These standards have been pathetically reintroduced using new terms and wording time and time again to make women think that certain looks are fresh, on trend and worth trying. The perfect example of this is the oh-so passé use of corsets to change the shape of your waistline which now exists as a beauty standard renamed as ‘waist training’. It is tactics such as a simple re-jigging of words that is estimated to make the beauty industry $62.4 billion by the end of 2016 in the United States alone. This project has been a great tool for me to use my own images in order to question the beauty standards I once loved, and some that I still do. There is no definite answer out there as to what is an appropriate beauty standard to uphold and what is not, but, what is most important is that we, as women, begin to ask ourselves these questions.

Created: December 2016