Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
They are still, however, recipients of the culture. Ralph Lauren and the like are very much involved with this happening since they basically define what it means to be attractive. Sure they only have this ability because women give it to them (yay Locke!) but it's still terribly irresponsible to set up a standard of beauty that is dangerous to people, especially younger girls who are much more succeptible to that sort of influence.To end this sort of thing one has to get both the fashion community and women to drop this ideal, they're too closely entangled to expect pressure on one group to have a major effect.
I'm not disagreeing
The idea that culture is to blame, though, suffers the exact same criticism. Also, there is no such thing as "culture", but rather practices of individuals that occur in clusters. One could criticize schools, families and shopping malls as much as they could Lauren.
Could he be sending a better message? maybe, but he'd be out of business.
Also, I feel controversy like this drives the issue to be more invasive of people's lives than it otherwise would. I'm not really "up" with fashion or anything, but don't most people agree that models are too thin? I'd think it is a much smaller proportion of women who hold the Anna style girl up as the ideal than this argument would make you believe.