The Hot Body Part of the Moment: The Clavicle

In a surprise move, it’s trendy to look like skeletor. I can’t say that I’m terribly thrilled or shocked about this recent turn of events. With voluminous spring fashions, the hot part of your body to show off is your clavicle. The clavic-what? It’s that bone between your collarbones, prominent on super-skinny celebs like Kate Bosworth and Kiera Knightly.

Even though everyone and their mom is obsessed with thinness, it’s definitely a strange part of the body to be stressing about. I mean, it’s just a little bone. The real appeal of showing this bit off is that it proves that under your billowy new dress, you’re skinny little thing. “The clothing threatens to make you look overweight and so you need a certain body to undo that threat,” said an expert on women and beauty, “In that clothing, one has to find a way of revealing an authentically thin body.” How delightfully twisted.

Although the look has gotten popular recently, Rachel Zoe, the famous spindly stylist, has always tried to emphasize the area with deep V-neck tops on such skeletal clients like Nicole Richie. I suppose if you’ve taken the trouble to starve yourself down to nothing, you probably want to show off your bones and make everyone else uncomfortable and a little queasy. Two thumbs up for making bones cool Rachel!

The author of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body,” said that many of the girls she interviewed for her book, “talked about how far their collarbone stuck out,” with pride, as proof of how skinny they were. For a lot of girls, getting that chic bony frame is like getting into Harvard or something.

Awesome… As if our generation isn’t screwed up enough already without having the clavicle being the new “in body part”. I mean, most of us are completely nuts about our weight already. About 10% of college women already have eating disorders. I don’t want to be another voice blaming the fashion industry, but isn’t this a little too blatant?

When I was reading about this in the New York Times style section during lunch today, I literally went a little nutso. I was eating delicious Vietnamese take-out (shrimp with hot pepper sauce over lemon grass and vermicelli) and I literally spent the next 30 minutes googling Vietnamese food to figure out how many calories I just ate and then I slipped into the bathroom to see how my clavicle shaped up to the clavicles of the cool kids on the pages of Elle. Son of a bitch. Needless to say, my lunch was completely ruined.

I miss the days of the super supermodels—Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, Naomi Campbell (even though she’s a huge bitch apparently). Now all the models look like sad manual laborers, complete with frowns and dark circles—nothing super about that. Sigh… The second people start having surgeries to enhance their clavicle, is the second I’m moving to a country that isn’t full of complete wack-jobs.