"Nebbia" means "fog" in Italian.
This woman is wasting away, disappearing as if in a fog. She looks so frail and thin, moving through the background like a ghost, nearly blending in if it wasn't for her headpiece. The colorful flower arrangement breaks through the fog with a call for attention.
Thin bodies and high fashion strangely seem to go together in our society. Is this so nothing is bouncing on the runway and distracting the eye from the clothes?? I don't know but chasing this ideal is dangerous and counter productive.
While we may crave attention and praise from society for how we look, at a certain point the woman herself starts literally shrinking, taking up less and less space in the world, becoming less visible and in a sense closer to death. How should this garner attention and praise?
When I was at my thinnest after a year on a raw vegan diet in pursuit of health and beauty ideals, one day I looked in the mirror and was shaken by my disappearing body, it had gone too far. It wasn't just my body that had diminished but also my fire, my ability to focus, and my connection to myself.
I felt like I was floating around a lot of the time, often blissed out, but fading further away. While I received a certain amount of positive attention for how I looked, and sometimes heard the ultimate compliment "are you a model?", it wasn't the way I wanted to invest my time and energy on this planet. I knew there were important things I wanted to contribute, even though I didn't know what those things were yet.
It's a contradiction that taking up less space is deserving of more attention, a reflection of our warped society and the fog of confusion that many people endure in regards to their body image. Focusing so much on the outward appearance of our bodies is a distraction from things that actually matter and a form of procrastination. Surely we can make much more profound contributions to the world than our appearance, and allow our bodies to take up whatever amount of space they require to optimally do so.