You don’t often hear Super Bowl and Fashion Week mentioned in the same sentence, but there is a link between the two, and it involves body image.
Looking Beyond the Runway for Answers on Underweight Models
While a vast majority of Americans spent Sunday on a sofa watching men shaped like large appliances move a football up and down a 360-foot field, 15,000 New Yorkers, who probably wouldn’t know a pump fake from a wishbone formation, spent the day ogling women shaped more or less like coat racks move dresses up and down 400 feet of runways in Bryant Park.
You don’t often hear Super Bowl and Fashion Week mentioned in the same sentence, but there is a link between the two, and it involves body image. Skinny models became a hot-button topic when the global news media got hold of the public relations mess the industry stumbled into after two models in South America died of anorexia nervosa last year. Suddenly trade groups around the world started wringing their hands about eating disorders.
The Spanish banned underweight models. The Italians decided that in the future (meaning probably not until 2008) models would have to be over age 16, have a license and a body mass index above 18.5 percent to gain employment. The French, maintaining they already had strong rules on the subject, predictably dismissed the issue.
In this country, where polls drive most things, the industry response gained impetus from a Nielsen Company survey of 25,000 people in 45 countries, which found that 81 percent disapproved of “extreme thinness.” In short order, the modeling agencies that manage the most notoriously underweight women abruptly benched them.
All of a sudden some of the most in-demand models — the Eastern European blonde giantess, the knock-kneed Russian beauty with the far-off expression, the multiply pierced beauty with the Olive Oyl limbs — disappeared. Just as suddenly, the picture every agency photographer was assigned to grab backstage at the shows was of a model sitting with a plate of food.
Commendably, the Council of Fashion Designers of America convened a symposium on Monday morning to ventilate the issue and to put forward some recommendations for addressing the customs of a business that, far from showing much historical concern with the health and well-being of models, views them as commodities. No one who has spent any time around fashion is a stranger to the notion that models, like milk, have “use by” dates. No one has failed to hear tales of scouts who discover some beauty working in a doughnut shop, who dangle promises of wealth, fame and escape from the family pig farm (true story) and then hand her strict instructions to shed the excess cruller pounds.
Curiously, the evidence of model shrinkage was there all along, easy to track. “In 1986, the standard size was 4 to 6,” Ivan Bart, the creative director of IMG models and arguably the most powerful agent in the business, said on Sunday at the Diane Von Furstenberg show, referring to standard sample sizes. “Then it was a solid 4. Then 2 to 4. Then zero.”
Ms. Von Furstenberg, who is the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, also brought up dress size. “Models have always been skinny and tall, and that’s fine as long as they’re healthy,” she said. Scanning a room where 50 rangy but apparently well-nourished women hired for her show were lounging, she posed a question.
“What size do you think my dresses are? A 6.”
Perhaps that is so. But is the point that models in general have been encouraged to conform to unnatural shapes or that everyone has?
“What about Hollywood?” asked the Canadian model Irina Lazareanu at the Luella Bartley show on Sunday. “What about ballet schools? What about gymnastics camps?”
What about cheerleading clubs or racetracks, where jockeys have blithely been destroying their health for decades by abusing with laxatives and diuretics and emetics in the effort to make weight? What about gyms, and not just the steroid temples of extreme bodybuilding?
“We shouldn’t look only at an industry that happens to be in the headlines during Fashion Week,” said Dr. Evelyn Attia, a director of the Eating Disorders Clinic at Columbia University Medical Center. This is far from the first time that models have been singled out, and not coincidentally moralized about, as potentially unhealthy and somehow inherently bad. Healthy or ill, their images are always reliably good for improving ratings and newsstand sales.
“It’s hard, with obesity being so urgent a health issue for such a large population, not to encourage thinness,” Dr. Attia said. “But with it comes a vulnerability, probably for a small group, but an important group, with a mortality rate as high as that of any psychiatric disorder.”
To the surprise of some, the most articulate speaker at the Council of Fashion Designers symposium was the model Natalia Vodianova, who talked about what food meant to her growing up poor in Russia and what it meant once she became one of the world’s most sought after models, had a child and gained 15 pounds.
It happened that I visited a French Vogue shoot in Paris months after Ms. Vodianova gave birth to her first child and was as impressed as anyone else at how quickly she regained her gamin figure. At the time, I thought she must be genetically blessed. But of course she was starving herself because designers had complained that she no longer fitted the clothes.
“You have to look at this as a cluster, with models as just one part,” said Dr. Cynthia M. Bulik, a professor of eating disorders at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former president of the Academy for Eating Disorders, after Monday’s meeting, which she termed an anemic response to a major problem.
“A number of industries are now making people reach weights in order to be effective in their jobs,” Dr. Bulik said. “The N.F.L. is beefing people up to unhealthy proportions. Modeling is chiseling people down.”
Designers like Donna Karan blame agents for sending them underweight models. Agents blame the designers for demanding skinny girls. The people who run fashion wring their hands and express a sincere although not altogether focused concern. Fashion Week comes to an end on Friday. Will the issue disappear when the caravan moves on?
About Editor-in-Chief, Madeline Jones
Always an activist and looking to bring plus size women into a fashion forward mentality, in 2006 she combined forces with friend and online magazine publisher, Valery Amador, to create PLUS Model Magazine, where they could respond to plus women's demand for fashionable clothing displayed prominently on appropriately sized models. Since then, Ms. Jones has quickly become the, 'Anna Wintour' of the plus size industry where she is frequently called upon for her expertise and insight; Appearances and interviews include ABC World News with Diane Sawyer, Entertainment Tonight, Coco Perez, Fox News, HuffingtonPost.com and 200+ other media sources.
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