Adriana Lima: Licensed to Change?
There are certain professions where you’re not allowed to age if you want to stay in the game. Not even gracefully: the concept of ageing is almost incomprehensible. Unless you look as if you were sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber with a plastic surgeon on speed dial, you might as well get off the celebrity rolodex. Because the next piece of meat in her prime is waiting to jump in. Women are the primary target of this cruel grind which can’t handle the fact of mortality. We’re all here with an expiration date, but if you’re in the fashion industry or showbusiness, it’s hard to acknowledge it. Otherwise the cosmetic industry would hardly be as profitable as it is right now. It’s very indicative that one of the wealthiest people on the planet is the Arnault family, owners of the mammoth LVMH conglomerate.
Their portfolio includes famous luxury fashion brands like Dior, Fendi and Louis Vuitton. The billions in their bank account are the result of our obsession with beauty, external validation and status symbols. They can’t be held accountable for any kind of sustainability. If the industry were to truly practice something that’s not plain greenwashing, the wheels would stop turning and cause a chain reaction killing everything from Black Fridays in your local malls to jobs in third-world countries where your new sneakers are made in separate sweatshops to stop underpaid workers from stealing and selling them. Along with magazines like Vogue, an important cornerstone of all this are models. You know, those that tease you into buying an overpriced moisturizer because, allegedly, you’re worth it.
Models became a big story in the 1990s and the group now known as the supermodels, like Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell. They were the paragons of an era that’s now regarded as the Golden age of high fashion. It was the time before body positivity, #Metoo and vegan leather. What changed? A lot. Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, political correctness and social media influencers. This spawned modern celebrities like Kim Kardashian, marketing their private life as business franchise. Victoria’s Secret employed a host of models to sell you the idea expensive lace is the theeasiest way to a girl’s private parts. Their models were called Angels and one of those was Adriana Lima. The Brazilian beauty hit the catwalks as a teenager with piercing blue eyes and full lips.
People who shaped the pop culture of the 1990s are now hitting retirement age. Many refuse to give up though the media is less than subtle in suggesting them to retire. Instead they’re trying to keep up with new kids on the block. This is a losing battle, but it’s also a symptom of side-effects of pop stardom. Once you’re too tired for a demanding dance routine and a provocative persona, every new media stunt becomes a health hazard. Madonna proved it with problems she experienced before her Celebration tour. There are physically less demanding styles of pop. I don’t remember watching Whitney Houston with backup dancers. The vocal part was the exact opposite: Madonna admitted her singing wasn’t exactly top notch. Houston, on the other hand, could sing the roof off a full house.
Adriana Lima caused waves of reactions in the media when, after a hiatus, she resurfaced into the public arena in a very different shape compared to what her fans were used to. Though by no means obese, curves replaced the originally slender physique that earned her Victoria’s wings. While I wouldn’t call the look appalling, some of the feedback she faced was slightly underwhelming to say the least. Our lives change, along with our priorities: Lima has five children and business ventures outside modeling, with the cosmetics brand Maybelline. It’s understood that her body changed as well. Women should be allowed to change. Yet, those who are supposed to tease and appease you with their beauty don’t have this privilege. They are supposed to remain forever young, sexy and alluring.
We shouldn’t dismiss it as a yet another form of misogyny, through it did contribute significantly to the issue. The other side of this comes from women themselves and the hyper-competitive peer pressure girls are exposed to from an early age all the way into adulthood. Someone always has better clothes, gadgets, boyfriends, husbands. Slowly it grows into tribalism that’s brilliantly portrayed in the 2004 film Mean Girls directed by Mark Waters. It suggests that high school cafeteria battlefields outweigh large scale military conflicts by far. It’s not very far away from the truth since the tactics are more or less the same, minus the body bags. Primarily because in this case the bags are too small and too expensive. Your phone, keys and credit card barely fit inside. As well as the pride of your nemesis if you squeeze it hard. Everyone has one, don’t they? Enemies, not the phone.
If you know how to play the game, you’ll find a way to the top. The hard part is staying there. In the movie The Favourite, Rachel Weisz plays the scheming Duchess of Marlborough that turned the distressed Queen Anne into a puppet. Things slowly start to change when the impoverished aristocrat Abigail gets a job in the royal scullery and slowly ascends to the top of the ladder, surprising the Duchess that severely underestimated the girl. However Adriana Lima is a 21st century woman, not an 18th century maid. She married the Serbian basketball player Marko Jarić and decided to do the unthinkable: devoted herself to family and motherhood. Instead of prancing on a runway with angel wings strapped to her back to please the masses, she did something that belonged only to her. In a toxic culture where you’re supposed to flaunt it while you got it, she went the other way.
By her own admission, she’s no longer 16 and feels good in her own skin, embracing her age. Why wouldn’t she? Just like the rest of the runway girls, she’ll never need a food stamp because she can afford to have someone do it for her. Though to me, she doesn’t have the vibe of someone who’s got staff for each and every maintenance need at home. Maybe that’s where the shift in shape comes from: no fancy private chef can match the experience of baking a pizza with your children. It doesn’t need to be sprinkled with fancy toppings because it’s already sprinkled with a mother’s love. The Brazilian model managed to avoid traps that would lead her in the wrong direction, like the American Gia Carangi who died in 1986 after having contracted AIDS. At 26 years old, she was one of the first celebrity victims of the disease and sometimes referred to as the original supermodel.
According to Vogue magazine, Lima experienced this change in perspective in 2017, which drove her to withdraw from modeling. In her own words: “I am tired of the impositions, we can’t [continue] living in a world with such superficial values, it’s not fair.” This is just a symptom of what’s happening on multiple social levels, and it all comes down to the same thing: external criteria designed by someone who doesn’t have suffer the consequences that come along with living up to the task. Models are supposed to be a blank canvas on which you projects your wishes and needs. That’s what fashion is for. It doesn’t matter what it looks like on you as long as others like what they see. However if it doesn’t make them want it, there’s no point in having it. This is the legacy of an industry that now wants you to believe whatever is good for business equally benefits the planet. Don’t fall for it.
