For a minute I’m going to ignore the ridiculous political correctness of this world and say this: I like size zero models on the runway. It’s a difficult aesthetic to understand, but I think the clothes look better that way.
But that’s not the point of this blog post. Lately there has been a movement towards having healthier models in the fashion industry, which I suppose is all right. Go health. I really do wish women wouldn’t starve themselves, smoke, do drugs or harm themselves in any way. But there are women who are naturally thin and if the industry wants them, the industry wants them.
To me what’s more disturbing than the fact that so many women suffer from eating disorders is that the mainstream media have begun to treat them with scorn. There’s this strange binary created: ‘real’ women vs models.It’s true that models have a particular body type that isn’t quite so common among non-models, but does no one find it problematic to say ‘real’ women? Because the suggestion is that models aren’t ‘real.’ But see, they are. They’re human, just like anyone else.
It’s also disturbing that these size-zero models are called anything from ‘genetic freaks’ to ‘skeletons’ in the media and no one complains.
I also remember this episode on the Oprah Show (this was back when I could stand the woman) about various body disorders. They got a woman suffering from anorexia nervosa on the show, and yes, she was extremely thin and not in the healthy/natural way. The general attitude toward her was very negative. For example, when the woman said she still needed to lose weight in certain parts of her body, the response was one of shock and disgust. It was a spectacle and an uncomfortable one at that. It points to people not bothering to understand the disorder in the first place. And the Oprah Show is supposed to be educational.
And here’s the thing about political correctness: it isn’t applied uniformly to everything/everybody. If it’s rude to be insult people who are overweight, why is it OK to call thin people skeletons? No editor in his right mind would allow a headline that reads ‘Fat people susceptible to diabetes’ so why is OK to say ‘Skeletons on the Runway: The Size-Zero Debate’?
No, I’m not arguing for political correctness; I’m pointing out a major flaw in the way it is practised.
I dunno. I’ve seen little of this, but perhaps I’ve been sheltered? I find it difficult to believe people argue that it’s okay to attack women who are naturally so thin. It’s also difficult to believe that it really stacks up as a societal issue next to the pressure that most women feel to be thinner. But who am I to argue that? For the record: naturally thin women are normal too. The problem lies in the fact that very thin women dominate the depiction of women in the media in a way that is not representative of the general healthy population. That shouldn’t lead to nastiness, of course, but it really is nastiness directed at privilege which isn’t okay either.
I may be biased, because I really find the parade of size zero models troubling– and terribly unattractive. Not unattractive in terms of the women itself, but in terms of the laziness it implies. It seems a cheap shot for designers to focus their work on women who serve essentially as ciphers or human hangers. A designer with confidence in his or her work should be interested in the whole range of healthy humanity. If it has reached the point when even magazines like Vogue are complaining that the sample sizes are too small for most *models*, then someone has lost touch with reality.
I’m old enough to remember feminists complaining about the supermodels of the eighties being too thin. Do you realize that some of them would nearly be plus sized by today’s standards?
And I hasten to say that I am not saying that naturally thin women are or look like human hangers. It is the designers and stylists who treat them that way.
You’re absolutely right. If they can be that way and be healthy, great. If they’re forcing themselves to be that way, not so great–but how is shaming going to help?
At some level its not only the design industry but even the glam & media industry that must be held responsible for things like this. But more so you have to hold yourself responsible too. Each persons perception of what is beautiful is skewed. On the other side of the fence large people are given the all common word ‘fat’ or better still ‘obese’.
But what is healthy? Can you define it? Each persons definition is different and influenced. While this is part of being human; why do people and industries push it upon others? Another money pushing exercise i guess. this video has been around a while should help shed light on perceptions from my perspective. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U
@frumiousb
I don’t think you’ve understood my point at all. Most top designers, especially the European ones, do prefer size zero models because the clothes so look better on those kinds of models from a particular aesthetic point of view. But these are a different kind of clothing altogether in the sense that they’re NOT clothing. They’re art pieces. No one’s going to wear them on the street or even to a party — not even those models showcase them on the ramp. The pret lines should and generally do cater to a larger group of women, besides there are plus size lines etc etc.
But that’s all a different argument.
My point is simple: it’s OK if you don’t want extremely thin models, but t shaming (that’s a good word, Nicholas) such women and implying that they’re not ‘real’ is just as bad as going around calling people fatsos.
@ Nicholas
I’m glad you agree!
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I do agree with your point that it isn’t okay to make nasty remarks about naturally thin women. I was reflecting on why it happens. Which led me to the rest of the post. Don’t you think that it’s difficult to consider one without considering the reasons why it happens?
And I do think that it’s at least a little bit difficult to focus on that in particular, given the very real job discrimination and (yes) nasty headlines that heavy women face. (Recent example: a politician in NY’s mistress was described as a “chubby siren” in a headline. The article mocked him for not only having an affair, but for having one with an ugly woman– i.e., heavy.) Perhaps you could agree that it[‘s part of the broader spectrum of behavior that makes it okay to focus on a woman’s size at all?
(I disagree that it isn’t laziness for designers to work with size zero models– clothes or art regardless. If they want hangers to distinguish their work from mere clothing, then why don’t they use hangers? But I agree that it’s a different discussion.)
@ Valhallen
Oh god, the Dove ads. Those are just as insincere as any other ad campaign. I’m not inside the fashion or advertising industry, but it’s an awful lot of money to take a model who you think isn’t right for your campaign and then photoshop her to the extent they’ve done in the ad. Dove is doing it because they want to make a politically correct point that isn’t actually politically correct. But in general, if you want a thin, unblemished model of a certain height and certain measurements, you’re going to take someone who comes as close to that as possible and then airbrush her a little.
And this whole ‘real’ women thing by Dove is vomiticious. The women they get in their ads may not be size 0 or 2, but they’re all very attractive. They’re as real as the skinny models being accused of genetic freakishness and they’re certainly not representative of what all women look like.
In all practicality i agree with you. I work with people from the industry. My dad WAS a designer and i DO have Photoshop & i know its overdone. The ad is only to point that what is a rule of thumb. The common thought of ‘Oh i have to be oh-so-pretty like so and so.’
My question was can YOU define what is healthy? There’d be a hundred different definitions.
Is the ad correct? Yes! Is the ad healthy? NO!
Is what designers do right? Yes! But is what designers then do healthy? NO!
Is asking for a model above or below size healthy? Yes & No!
Actually its all about your perception and your requirement to make money. Right?
@frumiousb
I’ll agree that in general people who are overweight suffer from far more than those who are underweight. But when we’re talking about political correctness, it’s somehow OK to say skeletons and real women and all kinds of idiotic things and not OK to say fat. It’s a double standard.
I think it’s laziness to suggest that designers are lazy when they make clothes for size zero models. The same designers make clothes for women with curves even if we’re not talking plus-size models. The fashion industry is not restricted to runway.
What makes you think it’s easier to dress size zero women in the first place?
Ridiculous.
Sorry if I have hit a sore spot. Double standards are never good. We agree on that.
By laziness, I mean aesthetic/artistic laziness– no opinion about being harder to dress a size zero woman than a size eight. And then again we are getting into a philosophical discussion about design and use, on which I suspect that you and I would have different perspectives. And yes, I do get the difference between design as art and design as something to wear. I do, however, think that that difference is used as the excuse for a lot of bad choices. This isn’t a new point of view, nor is it even very far out of the mainstream in the design world itself. There are designers working with clothes-as-art who are doing exactly the opposite of what you suggest– exploring and celebrating the interplay of body and clothes. Those designers are often working with the broader range of frame and form– selecting on factors like age and race as well as size. Other designers who really want the emphasis on the clothes have started going the other way– they’ve respected that it’s hard to choose one particular look and body type without saying something very unpleasant to their audience, and literally have tried other ways to display their work– hangers, space installations, etc. That is farther out of the mainstream.
I really do question, and this may make me politically correct, how safely you can divorce the way that fashion-as-art chooses to position itself and how much most of it is really art as opposed to a luxury good that uses art as a label to excuse its exclusivity. I’m a size six– eight before modern size inflation– healthy bmi and no real body issues. I was shocked to discover when I was in NYC buying a dress that my size was often the largest available in any of the given lines. Out of curiosity, I asked why– the assistant answered “our clients like the stores to be exclusive, and our designers respect that.”
We clearly disagree, but I don’t think that makes either of us ridiculous or lazy.
I’m aware of these different movements, though I haven’t paid that much attention to them. But I don’t buy the artistic/aesthetic laziness argument either. If we were talking poetry, would we accuse poets who stick to traditional forms or conventional syntax of laziness? People do it, all the time, but I don’t find the argument valid at all. If designers want to work with size four models, size zero models or hangers or whatever, it’s up to them. I’m happy with celebrating diversity, though I will say that the same haute couture dress on a thin model often looks much better to me than on a more filled out person.
That is essentially it, and we have diverged sufficiently from the original thing. Sorry I suggested that you were lazy, but this is a tiresome argument to have to do all over again. Why should models look like hangers etc.
I really do question, and this may make me politically correct, how safely you can divorce the way that fashion-as-art chooses to position itself and how much most of it is really art as opposed to a luxury good that uses art as a label to excuse its exclusivity.
You can’t divorce the two, especially not safely.
Disordered eating is a difficult mindset to grasp from the outside, and yet I would venture to say that most american women have disordered eating practices (anything from fad diets to pills to exclusion of anything deemed unhealthy–even in small bits, or even periods of binging).
Still, we scorn those who embody our own shame. Perhaps we think calling a size zero names will somehow make people not notice the TrimSpa in our bag or the fact that we are doing something as silly as counting fat grams.
It could also be that we feel better about our own body image/weight issues when we demonize those who have obtained some ideal we hold.
It’s very schizophrenic…and yes very damaging.
I don’t like the ‘real women’ or ‘real beauty’ campaign except for those movements that encourage fashion editors to NOT hopelessly photoshop their models to the nth degree and present it as reality. I don’t like that the ‘real women’ movement has glorified an unhealthy body weight. We shouldn’t be venerating size 16s unless they’re 16s for being of amazonian build.
For my part, i’m not thin. I’m not fat either. I’m trying to be healthy and that means shifting my body composition away from fat and more towards muscle. Some have said i look too thin, but i’m 140lbs and can leg press a grown man!
No matter what a woman does, someone is going to criticize her for it or scoff at her or scorn her. My niece, my 14 year old niece said she didn’t want to exercise or play sports because she would get all muscly and ugly. She thinks it’s better to just eat like a bird and be small–that’s why boys want, she thinks. Kid you not!
Who taught her that? I’ve no idea.
Just to clarify: I am not so sure I am with you on the “predominantly very thin models on the runway is okay” front. I just agree that whatever one says about the ideological content of such choices on the part of designers, eliding the “real womanhood” of the real people on the runway or calling them names is a counter-productive way of making one’s case.
Nicholas,
I realise not too many people like thin models, but that was just a side comment that I chose to, crazily enough, begin this post with. I was glad we were on the same page about the name-calling, etc.
Ali,
I was looking at some of those real beauty ads, and what’s interesting is the American ads seem to have at least attempted to have varying shapes and sizes. The Indian dove ads do not have any overweight women, as far as I can remember. They may be unconventional looking or a bit older in appearance, but they’re all extremely good looking and quite thin. I wonder why there’s such a huge difference.
I did realise it was a prefatory comment. Sorry if I’ve made it any more central to this particular discussion thread than you wanted it to be.
Heh, no need to apologise! You didn’t do anything.
I shouldn’t thought this post out better, in terms of structuring it, but I was angry. Still am.
I think it’s a terrible trend where it’s acceptable to dehumanize the thin or ultrathin as “unreal” or otherwise “less than.” Now, I think that it’s not going to be exactly akin to attacks on the overweight, simply because there is an envy behind it. That takes some of the sting out and redirects it at the one doing the insulting.
I, too, hate the ‘real women have curves’ mentality–the phrase is parroted quite a bit. I’ve known plenty of women who were thin or have had little in the way of breasts and/or hips and/or bottom, and yet these were and are still real women.
From an artistic standpoint, yes, the clothes do tend to hang better on thin models, and that doesn’t bother me. From a consumer standpoint, a runway show is almost useless to me because it only gives me an idea of what the ready-to-wear might look like and nothing about how those might hang–and I’m a pretty slender woman myself.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing so many skinny models if a) I believed they all were that way naturally, and had a healthy lifestyle and b) *someone* used models that weren’t so skinny c) less airbrushing and photoshopping was involved in ads. That Ralph Lauren ad that made the news was horrible–there was nothing wrong with the model’s body the way it was before, and the argument for clothes hanging better on a thin model is moot when the jeans have been photoshopped along with the woman.
I’d like to see more variety in attractiveness and size in TV shows and movies, where clothes aren’t (necessarily) the point. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie with a female protagonist who was more than a size 6. I do think having more variety in the media (because, let’s face it, TV and movie characters are role models, for better or for worse) would help. Every time I read “nothing tastes as thin feels,” or body size being equated with beauty, I wince.
On a personal level, I’d prefer to see more actresses like they had in the ’80s. Joan Cusack and Andy McDowell and Molly Ringwald are all attractive women, but they’re normal-pretty, not perfect-ten-beautiful. In a way, that adds a hint more depth to a movie, because part of what I like about romcoms is seeing what characters like about each other, why they’re attracted to each other and not anyone else in the world. It’s not surprising when a man falls for Scarlett Johanssen or Natalie Portman or Sienna Miller’s character at first sight. Of course he’s attracted to her. It’s more interesting when a man falls in love with a woman who could be anyone–who could even be me.
Then again, I’ve only recently gotten over the idea that you have to be beautiful to wear beautiful clothes or to be attractive (see: silk purse, sow’s ear), so some of this may be leftover teenage insecurities.
I liked your comments about fashion and art. The catwalk makes sense if you consider it as a gallery.
To my mind I see the attacks on thin women to be a result of bandwagon mentality. Tabloids and newspapers saw the opportunity to vilify a group of people and generate sales and they took it. But don’t get me wrong, we shouldn’t be blaming the media for this. Any position taken by the media is based on the will of the people. Otherwise they wouldn’t get any sales. To many people it is okay to ‘shame’ models as they are not ‘normal’ women and earn oodles of money for what a lot of people perceive is a job that corresponds with eating disorders and egos. This is obviously ridiculous. As you point out the double standard is right there in front of our faces, and yet there is this feeling of justifiable contempt for the models that perform in these fashion galleries. Many of the women performing are naturally thin, though I should also say that I believe that if a woman has an eating disorder, hell if anyone has an eating disorder, they should seek help. But if the models are able to maintain a healthy, naturally thin body, and if designers want to continue employing them then so much the better.
Now, if you wanted to start on the topic of photoshopped images…
Most people worth any mention are not real in some ways by virtue of being different to the point of being noteworthy. And they always will be labelled as abnormal with some sort of a negative connotation for some reason or the other. So just move on.
@Aditi: Whew, thanks.
@Anomalizer: That’s a little glib, isn’t it? There’s a meaningful difference between the sort of negativity that gets thrown at thin runway models and the vanilla negativity that accrues to celebs for, oh, throwing multimilliondollar weddings, or punching out paparazzi, or for just plain being famous.
@Ali
“Still, we scorn those who embody our own shame. Perhaps we think calling a size zero names will somehow make people not notice the TrimSpa in our bag or the fact that we are doing something as silly as counting fat grams.”
This isn’t necessarily true. Anecdotal: Most of the people I’ve known who talked about the “real women” thing were dudes who didn’t particularly pay attention to what they ate.* Even given some hypothetical case where it is a women holding those views who is also on a diet or something, it shouldn’t at all be a stretch of the imagination to consider that that woman might have the good-faith belief that her behavior is okay, that the behaviors of the “fake” women are not okay, and that those two views are not contradictory.
The kind of generalization you’re making is ridiculous. Usually when I see someone say “so-and-so-type people only think such-and-such to cover up for their insecurities,” I tend to discount the credibility of their entire argument.
*(Interestingly, the views they expressed about “fake” women didn’t actually translate to any kind of behavior, including dating, use of pornography, and admiration of celebrities for their looks.)
@Anomalizer: What?
Nicholas, have a look at the world sees others and you shall see what I mean. The college jock (sports stud) is someone who probably didn’t spend his time trying to top his SAT. A geek is someone who locked himself up in this room and didn’t go out. Likewise, I see a runway model as someone who has different diet habits. Interestingly enough, both of these kind of men get labelled as unreal. So, this unreal thing is an almost certain label to people who stand out (and I am not being judgmental here over whether they are considered noticeable for the right reasons or not)
[...] Aditi objects to the media targeting size-zero models: To me what’s more disturbing than the fact that so many women suffer from eating disorders is that the mainstream media have begun to treat them with scorn. There’s this strange binary created: ‘real’ women vs models.It’s true that models have a particular body type that isn’t quite so common among non-models, but does no one find it problematic to say ‘real’ women? Because the suggestion is that models aren’t ‘real.’ But see, they are. They’re human, just like anyone else. Linked by kuffir. Join Blogbharti facebook group. [...]
Anomalizer, of course I would not disagree that anything that strays from the norm in a particular context gets labeled and pigeonholed (and in truth this happens even to the norm). What I am objecting to is the reductivist generalisation that it’s all the same thing, which your earlier post implied. No, it isn’t the same. It is similar, but there are points of difference that are worth mentioning and can’t just be dismissed with a cynical “oh, the world’s like that all the time”. And sometimes it is not right to “just move on”.
Aditi,
) – it denigrates the other side. But I do not like seeing Size 0 on the runway, and probably wouldn’t like seeing a size 20 either, because neither when “artificially” reached is healthy. And, in my POV, Size 0 is not the norm – I do not know any Size 0 women, have not known any my entire life. The only Size 0 women I see are in the malls. The average size in the US is Size 14.
If you’re saying that it’s bad to ridicule women over their size, whatever it may be, I agree with you. However, why we’re not so outraged over women being called skeletons, as compared to if women were called, say “chubby” – that’s because women are forever being fed this image of the “thin”, “perfect” woman, and expected to measure up, and ultra-thin models are used to flaunt this “beauty standard” in our faces. You think people are going to object when the very same models get some of the same medicine (even if it is the nature of their work) ?
I don’t get the word “real” either (when I think real hard about it
While Size 0 might look better to you, the outrage against it stems from the implication or what it stands for, and I don’t think I can separate the aesthetic appeal from it’s social message, in this case.
@ Aditi
“The Indian dove ads do not have any overweight women, as far as I can remember”
This might be because America has such an obesity problem that it’s hard to get away from in any regard. We cannot have a campaign for ‘real beauty’ without representing the dominant body shape–even though the so called ‘plus’ models used are often only a size 12 while the national average is a 14-16.
America’s Next Top Model caught flack a few seasons ago for a size 10 ‘plus model’ winning both because she wasn’t actually a plus size and for promoting ‘unhealthy’ behavior.
@Lane
That’s understandable, but I’m just speaking from personal experience. I’ve never touted it as /the/ answer, it’s simply one observation.
This naive article just lost you a long-time reader.
It’s interesting that you posted that comment anonymously, long-time reader. It makes it much easier to deal with the loss.