The fashion model as pedagogue

This paper analyses the literature that investigates how the body of the fashion model impacts on young girls. It highlights how fashion model bodies are situated in this research as disorderly catalysts in the lives of young girls and, in doing so, will argue that this research is limited by particular epistemological assumptions about female bodies as disorderly bodies. It shows that existing accounts may too easily overlook the degree of precision with which young girls read the body of the fashion model. The paper thereby suggests that it may be useful to re-conceptualise the fashion model/young girl relationship as pedagogical work in order to account for the precise ways that young girls engage with fashion model bodies. Demonstrating that the fashion model is unthinkable as an effective female teacher, the work argues that it may be possible to think of her as an efficient pedagogue of precise bodily knowledge. Drawing briefly on accounts of pedagogical relationships in pre-modern history, the paper illustrates how the fashion model may be thinkable as an effective transmitter of embodied knowing.