The time period “Snow Bunny” is an unshakeable a part of ski tradition and ski historical past.
Whereas the precise definition of a snow bunny adjustments relying on who you ask, the final thought behind the time period is a newbie or intermediate skier (lady) who wears flashy clothes on and off the resort snow.
Shutterstock/Kiselev Andrey Valerevich
An English as a second language web site helps non-native audio system navigating this slang time period. The lesson explains that “snow bunny” is an idiom originating within the Nineteen Fifties, “when it was first used to explain a lady on the slopes. Bunny was already getting used as a phrase to explain a reasonably lady and snow was added to suggest the enjoyment of the lady spending a variety of time on slopes with snow.”
This definition devolved as slang does, dramatically, over the approaching years, with associations to drug use and different inappropriate messages we won’t publish in POWDER.
Regardless of the adverse connotations, the snow bunny character made appearances in movies, pages of magazines, and advertisements used to promote the romanticization of snowboarding to each ladies and men by objectifying ladies in a fast-growing sport.
Appearances in historical past embody the 1965 movie Ski Social gathering, the place a gaggle of school buddies embark on a ski journey and the male essential characters search for girlfriends. Look ahead to the glamorous ski bunnies beneath.
A long time later, the 2001 Hollywood movie Chalet Woman, that includes a skateboarding feminine protagonist, equally garments the lead in posh winter gear to show her into a stunning magnificence on the ski resort.
Even whereas the terminology has come to imply many alternative issues over time, “snow bunnies” are hardly a factor of the previous.
In 2014, Condé Nast Traveller printed a chunk titled “Snow Bunny Type: Ski Gear for St. Moritz or Aspen” detailing which items skiers should purchase in the event that they wish to obtain the snow bunny aesthetic at numerous highfaluting resorts.
Their suggestions embody suede earmuffs, a selected pair of skis based mostly solely on their colour, white boots, a fur vest, and fingerless gloves. Sensible? No. Enjoyable and dressy for an exercise that usually doesn’t prioritize type attributable to climate? Positive factor.
Slim Aarons/Hulton Archive/Getty Photographs
I’d be remiss to not contact on the sexist implications of this time period. Sure, it’s low-hanging fruit. It nonetheless deserves our, albeit transient, consideration. This column’s objective is to discover how vogue and snowboarding go hand and hand, or, on this case, bedazzled, fur-lined mitten and mitten. In some way, nevertheless, evidently males can use vogue as a technique to separate or elevate their superstar personas, whereas ladies are penalized for “taking vogue too critically.”
Or maybe that is merely one other concern underneath the umbrella of large-scale business sexism. Flip by a difficulty of POWDER simply 20 years in the past. The January 2004 concern’s first picture of a feminine was on web page 30, within the type of an advert depicting a lady with solely a bra on, which was actively being undone by male palms. What was the advert promoting? Snowboarding at Whistler Blackcomb. The caption? “Looks like the primary time.”
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Maybe it mustn’t come as a shock that when ladies are included in snowboarding, if they don’t seem to be one of many prime few professional athletes, their contribution can be to and for the male gaze.
Snow bunnies are for the male gaze, by and thru. It is a level that may merely be explored by asking oneself, “is that this a development for which there’s an opposite-gendered counterpart?” On this case, I had a tough time developing with the male model of the snow bunny.
Furthermore, the gendered streetwear websites HypeBeast and HypeBae each boast ski attire that can be utilized to make vogue statements. Nevertheless, whereas lots of the objects listed on HypeBae would flip the skier right into a strolling snow bunny, those self same objects worn on a male skier would in all probability go with out a catchy time period to pigeonhole the individual sporting that merchandise.
In different phrases: when a lady wears an costly, impractical ski coat, she is a snow bunny. She is shallow and unskilled on the exercise we “ought to” base our opinions off, and regarded a consumerist.
When a person wears an costly, impractical ski coat, he’s assumed to be wealthy, and easily utilizing his shopping for energy to exhibit his success, versus being a sufferer of the habits, as the lady is portrayed to be.
The guardrail of humor additionally appears to serve one, however not the opposite gender.
A comedy-in-development discovered on IMDb titled “Snow Bunnies” depicts three bikini-clad ladies holding skis, with the slogan “steep, deep, and low-cost.”
IMDb
However, traditionally, males have been in a position to put on ludicrous outfits, even on POWDER covers, whereas nonetheless displaying their snowboarding prowess.
A POWDER from 1982 highlights a extremely impractical outfit of a striped shirt and what seems to be denims. This outfit is at worst a joke the place we’re laughing with the skier, versus at him. See beneath.
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The opposite unlucky implication of the time period snow bunny, moreover the fast judgement of a skier’s appears to be like above their efficiency, is the sexualization it not solely allowed, however inspired in snowboarding. Women and men have been snowboarding side-by-side for over a century: The Girls’ Ski Membership, the oldest ladies’s alpine ski membership on the earth, was based in 1923.
Nevertheless, with the introduction of the time period snow bunny (amongst different issues) ladies as soon as once more turned simply categorized by bodily look, even inside the bounds of collaborating in a sport.
Curiously, there are athletes who’ve seemingly reclaimed the snow bunny type with out receiving the adverse implications of the time period. Lindsey Vonn, for instance, shows her world-class snowboarding usually in shiny, tight, or in any other case ostentatious outfits. The responses match the viewers, which is stoked and impressed.
The time period snow bunny is, largely, a sexist and outdated time period to explain trendy or fashion-forward ladies within the ski world. All of this being mentioned, there’s a likelihood for the way forward for snow bunny type to be reclaimed.
Increasingly more, we’re seeing that intentional clothes kinds, and dressing in a female approach, don’t exist inversely to athletic expertise. The 2 can, and do, coexist.
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