Why do fashion designers have such a problem with normal?

Jill Kortleve is fashion’s new darling. She was “the bride” in Chanel’s couture show on Monday, and as quaint/old fashioned as that sounds, that’s still a crowning milestone in a model’s career.

Then again, for all their talk about being agents of change, despite their spouse of gender fluidity (one brand recently responded to a stylist’s emailed query about whether the bags they’d sent for a shoot were for men and women by declaring that “gender is so 2019”) there’s a range of issues where the fashion world demonstrates astonishingly quaint/old fashioned values.

Normality is one of them. Ultra thin it can do, endlessly. Size 20 plus? Not a problem, up to a point. Back in the early naughtiest, designers fell over themselves to work with Beth Ditto. Ditto, funny, feisty and fiercely voiced, was an early poster girl for body positivity. But she was an outlier. And hardly “normal”. Fashion loves extremes. Dominatrixes in cartoonishly wide shoulders and 14 cm heels are eventually superseded by barefoot waifs. Polarizing volte faces are the propulsion that moves fashion’s wheel. Average doesn’t.

Even brands whose bread and butter are selling normal-ish clothes to normal-ish women like to give an avant-garde top a spin on the catwalk. An extreme body can help promulgate the idea they’re doing something daring.

What’s more daring if you’re in the business of normal-ish clothes, is to use Kortleve. Of Dutch, Indonesian, Indian and Surinamese extraction, she’s an exceptional beauty by any standards. But at 26, five feet seven and size UK 12, her body is normal. That makes Kortleve’s ascendancy of note. Having first been spotted by Nike, she appeared on Alexander McQueen’s catwalk in 2019, then Michael Kors and Max Mara. She has modeled for Zara, Fenty beauty and H&M. Mass brands are faster to embrace body diversity because they need to sell clothes to millions of women. Luxury brands don’t.