This is the final post of a four part series on fashion marketing and ethics. You can read my previous posts here, here, and here.
Our generation has been bombarded with an increasing number of advertisements featuring ever-diminishing women since the time we were in diapers. While everything else was getting bigger and better (Hummers, McMansions), the women rising to celebrity epitomized the phrase less is more. Women continue to make strides in education and in the business world. We are leaders; we capitalize on and create opportunities to make our talents known; we demand to be treated with respect. When did we start buying into the idea that the perfect woman is one who takes up the least amount of space? And more importantly, what or who can inspire change?
I truly believe that Anna Wintour has the power to single-handedly change the fashion industry’s size-zero status quo should she set her mind to doing so. The woman can send a designer into a fit of panic (and inspire him to rework his entire collection) simply by giving a disapproving look when reviewing it before it heads to runway. Currently, she has all of Milan in an uproar after announcing that she’ll cut her visit to the city’s fashion week short this year. Watch The September Issue; you will be flabbergasted by the sheer clout of her opinion.
Wintour could start a revolution with a single statement: Vogue will not cover/attend the runway shows of designers using models who are at a medically unhealthy weight (say, below a BMI of 17.5).
However, given that the likelihood of this happening roughly approximates the chance a snowball has in hell, there are a few other ways the industry (and we as consumers) can inspire and demand change.
Still need your fashion magazine fix? Ditch the American versions – go European. Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, made a public statement decrying the use of emaciated models. She mentioned that British Vogue “is now frequently retouching models to make them larger.” Shulman noted that “we have now reached a point where many of the sample sizes don’t comfortably fit even the established star models,” encouraging magazines to hire impossibly thin models to showcase the designs. Brigitte, the leading women’s magazine in Germany, stopped working with professional models as of 2010. Andreas Lebert, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, explained the decision saying, “For years we’ve had to use Photoshop to fatten the girls up…But this is disturbing and perverse and what has it got to do with our real reader?”
You know how magazines always say they want to hear from you? Let ‘em have it…because there’s no reason for American magazines to delay getting on this bandwagon.
Hello, OSHA. The mission of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration is to “prevent work-related injuries, illnesses, and occupational fataility by issuing and enforcing rules called standards for workplace safety and health.” If an industry’s employees are at an increased risk for a multitude of mental and physiological consequences, how is OSHA not yet involved? While the “size zero rule” may be unwritten, it’s blatantly obvious, and has been recognized as a health risk in numerous other countries. If the risks of your job included liver failure, heart attack, infertility, seizures and electrolyte imbalance (among others), and you felt obligated to remain in that condition to continue employment, wouldn’t you welcome a little third-party intervention?
I’m 6 feet tall. At one point in my life, I was a size zero. I’ve never felt more unhappy, hopelessly unfulfilled, and terribly alone. It was, without a doubt, the worst year of my life, and is not an experience I would wish on anyone.
The so-called “angles” fashion photographers love to shoot don’t look nearly as glamorous without studio lighting and airbrushing. In the real world, there’s no Photoshop to mask just how deathly a body that’s “skin and bones” really is.
