Ami McClure braids her
daughters’ hair in their
home in New Jersey
while the twins, Alexis
(in pink) and Ava (in
purple), fix their dolls’
hair. The McClure twins’
beauty-industry career
began with a focus
on natural hair after
they’d become popu-
lar on YouTube. They
have nearly two million
Insta gram followers.it. The new definition of beauty is being written
by a selfie generation: people who are the cover
stars of their own narrative.
The new beauty isn’t defined by hairstyles
or body shape, by age or skin color. Beauty is
becoming less a matter of aesthetics and more
about self-awareness, personal swagger, and
individuality. It’s about chiseled arms and false
eyelashes and a lineless forehead. But it’s also
defined by rounded bellies, shimmering silver
hair, and mundane imperfections. Beauty is a
millennial strutting around town in leggings, a
crop top, and her belly protruding over her waist-
band. It is a young man swishing down a runway
in over-the-knee boots and thigh-grazing shorts.
Beauty is political correctness, cultural
enlightenment, and social justice.IN NEW YORK, there’s a fashion collective called
Vaquera that mounts runway shows in dilapi-
dated settings with harsh lighting and no glam-
our. The cast could have piled off the F train after
a sleepless night. Their hair is mussed. Their
skin looks like it has a thin sheen of overnight
grime. They stomp down the runway. The walk
could be interpreted as angry, bumbling, or just
a little bit hungover.
Masculine-looking models wear princess
dresses that hang from the shoulders with all
the allure of a shower curtain. Feminine-looking
models aggressively speed-walk with a hunched
posture and a grim expression. Instead of elon-
gating legs and creating an hourglass silhouette,
the clothes make legs look stumpy and the torso
thick. Vaquera is among the many companies
that call on street casting, which is basically
pulling oddball characters from the street and
putting them on the runway—essentially declar-
ing them beautiful.
In Paris, the designer John Galliano, like
countless other designers, has been blurring
gender. He has done so in a way that’s exagger-
ated and aggressive, which is to say that instead
of aiming to craft a dress or a skirt that caters to
the lines of a masculine physique, he has simply
draped that physique with a dress. The result is
not a garment that ostensibly aims to make indi-
viduals look their best. It’s a statement about our
stubborn assumptions about gender, clothing,
and physical beauty.
Not so long ago, the clothing line Universal
Standard published an advertising campaign
featuring a woman who wears a U.S. size 24. SheAmerica, and Africa has forced designers to con-
sider how best to market to those consumers
while avoiding cultural minefields. They have
had to navigate skin lightening in parts of Africa,
the Lolita-cute culture of Japan, the obsession
with double-eyelid surgery in East Asian coun-
tries, and prejudices of colorism, well, virtually
everywhere. Idealized beauty needs a new defi-
nition. Who will sort it out? And what will the
definition be?
IN THE WEST, the legacy media are now sharing
influence with digital media, social media, and a
new generation of writers and editors who came
of age in a far more multicultural world—a world
that has a more fluid view of gender. The millen-
nial generation, those born between 1981 and
1996, is not inclined to assimilate into the dom-
inant culture but to stand proudly apart from
REDEFINING BEAUTY 109