What Happened to Modest Celebrities?

I just finished writing a paper for my English class and thought I would share it. The assignment was to pick a trend or a change in society or culture and scrutinize it. It was supposed to be about 300 words, but mine ended up at 545. Oops. lol. Here is what I wrote:

Over the past 30 years, celebrity fashions have become more and more risqué amid the trend of showing off as much skin as possible in a desire to be the most talked about. Where modesty and class were once ideologies valued by society, wearing outfits that reveal as much skin as possible has become the new symbol of class while modesty is not given a second thought. When, at one time, these women would have been labeled hussies and society would have shunned them, they are now revered for taking fashion risks. The media craves and applauds young female celebrities for wearing revealing clothing while those who go a more modest route are considered prudes or boring.

From the 1980s until now, fashion has gone through many trends, but the one that has grown the most is the trend of women wearing less and less. Society is no longer scandalized by a woman going shopping in shorts that could pass as underwear and shirts that are see-through. Society no longer abhors when women go out in public wearing clothing that reveals their private parts. Media proclaims a scandal whenever a starlet has a fashion mishap or is caught in moments that expose more than they should, yet they sensationalize the event and broadcast it to the world. Any desperate fading star knows that all she has to do to get back in the news is flash a bit of skin and she’ll be back on people’s minds again.

The media’s obsession with scantily clad celebrities and the desire of those women to be the most focused on has gotten to the point where CBS sent out a memo prior to the Grammy’s asking, in a very specific manner, for women to cover up. Mainstream media loves the nakedness, but a television station has finally decided that the amount of cloth in some women’s dresses has shrunk far enough. When CBS’s memo came out in the press, many journalists and fashion commentators slammed CBS as being the fashion police or their attempt to institute a semblance of modesty as hilarious and worthy of web-wide mockery. Some have said viewer numbers would be down because the public does not want to see properly attired stars. Fashion bloggers claim the public flocks to these award shows to gape at the crazy outfits and to see who can pull off the most barely there design, not to see who actually wins anything.

How did we get to this point? How have we gotten to a place where modesty is considered restrictive and the more naked a person is in public, the more popular they are? How have we gotten to a point where popularity and celebrity rise and fall based on how one is attired? Celebrities who ‘push the envelope’ of modesty and show as much skin and cleavage as possible are hailed as sexy and confident and given more attention than their more modestly attired counterparts who are labeled as dowdy and are either barely mentioned or end up on a worst-dressed list. It is a sad indication of the state of our society when the modest woman is deemed barely worthy of attention while the skin-baring and body-flaunting women are now looked up to as icons of class and fashion.