Comments

• Christine said:
  

  I would love it if the fashion industry would use a healthy girl with muscles as a fashion muse instead of the ultra thin anorexic models that are in vogue right now.

  -February 11th, 2010 at 10:14 pm
• Rob Fisher said:
  

  I think Christine is perfectly correct - it would make a refreshing change. Part of the problem at the moment - certainly here in the UK at least - is the drive toward using younger models who consequently don’t have the physical maturity to have developed body muscle/mass, but who stay well within the industry’s ‘code of practice’ on weight and food.

  -February 13th, 2010 at 12:13 pm
• Jacquelynn (Author) said:
  

  Indeed, but it is not hopeless. The ultra thin, very young model rules the catwalk and the editorial pages of most fashion magazines, but has competition. There are fashions in bodily beauty that compete with the catwalk look. Beyonce, Halle Berry, J. Lo, Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Christina Hendricks (Mad Men), and Jennifer Biel are not professional models but nonetheless ‘model’ on the Red Carpet and other events, and are role models for many. While American, they are world-wide icons of beauty; they are women, not teenagers, who model not only clothing, but age, mature toned muscle, ‘flesh,’ and traditional female fat patterns. In the current celebrity culture that focuses on film, television, and music, they are more likely to appear on the covers of fashion magazines than the so-called supermodels. Of course, there is the phenomenon of ultra-thin celebrities (I don’t need to name them, do I?), who ape the catwalk look, even if they don’t have the height or the age.

  -February 13th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
• Rob Fisher said:
  

  Sky News have been running a story today about “size 16″ models at London Fashion week; there is sharp division this year about the size issue, with designers like Paul Costelloe refusing to use models under a size 8. Several agencies dealing only with size 16 models have been inundated with requests for castings and go-see’s. The attitude seems to be: the average size women in the UK shops in Debenhams, Marks and Spencer’s and is a size 14, size 16 - and that is what buyers want to see on the runway.

  But yet again, I’ll go back to my age comment above. They are right - but a lot of designers are gearing their stuff towards younger markets - New Look, for example, and consequently need younger models who don’t have a developed physique to model their clothes. The debate, it seems to me, is rather senseless unless some of the defining characteristics of a) who the target audience is and b) how do you model for that audience - are taken into account. Age matters just as much as size, and younger models not only can’t model bigger sized clothing - it would be inappropriate for them to do so if the target market is, say, 30-40 year old women.

  The news reports really ought to show more responsibility in defining the issues rather than the headline grabbing ’size zero controversy’.

  -February 20th, 2010 at 10:23 am

Trackbacks

There are no trackbacks