An Appeal

to

Cinema Actors, Directors, Fashion Designers, Models, Painters and other such like Personalities

of

the Glamorous and Fashionable World

In the true and proper interests of humanity and considering the considerable influence you exercise on the public mind, this petitioner finds it fit to momentarily inflict his society onto your exalted selves and thus bring to your notice a matter of the most pressing significance – you. The masses have since time immemorial tended to emulate and with schemes of representation being what they are today, you are the models on which millions fashion themselves. This is all as it should be except for one miniscule matter – you are all too perfect.

Indeed, too perfect. You must all be commended for realising in form the perfection imagined by earlier generations in stone and on canvas, for maintaining, even to the perdition of your own clayey cages, that delicate beauty formerly the preserve only of the gods. In this, in sustaining long standing traditions of beauty and excellence you are to be praised and your efforts entrusted to the continual perusal of posterity. Yet, you are too perfect, too perfect.

One recommends your perfection, yet one cannot but condemn it. Condemn not as much the attainment of perfection but the very idea of perfection, of standards created to be achieved. For the standards you propagate and create are suspect at once to adoration and immediate emulation, to the eager, hungry eyes of the deprived, ordinary multitudes who look up to as veritable gods, models of perfection to strive for.

This being so, it will not be out of bound to assert that to these multitudes, to these adoring multitudes you have a responsibility, the responsibility of ensuring that the standards which you propagate and create are as inclusive as can be. As it is, beauty and perfection move in narrow bounds limited by archaic considerations of colour and form. It is up to you and you alone to enlarge these horizons and thus, doing so, open as yet unexplored vistas for the labouring masses: to allow them, i.e., not a standard but many standards, a multitude of choices for a multitude of people. For you, rightly, are mirrors of society, reflecting and representing human passions and forms in all their multifarious multitudes as well as inspiring all that you reflect in those from whom your baser matters are formed.

Therefore, as long as the perfection you portray remains ideal, idealistic, you shall continue inflicting an injustice upon your followers, upon those who look to you for inspiration and who live thwarted and deprived existences in their need to be more like their gods, you. Let us then, O directors, have actors of all forms; let us, O designers, have clothes of all types – and without the connotation of ridicule associated as of now with difference; let us, O painters, see muses of all sorts, not unattainable figures of fancy; finally, let us, O actors, see you put on some weight, be baggy and humanely human, not the animate mannequins you are now.