While I was out to eat with some of my favorite people from SXSW, the conversation turned to the documentary “The September Issue” and the surprising differences between the two most powerful women of Vogue: Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington.

Anna Wintour and who?

Precisely.

For all her genius, Grace Coddington is hardly a household name.  She is the sole reason I continue to buy Vogue – had I not seen the documentary, I would have ceased to crack its cover after it ran a feature on a “plus-size super model” who wears a size 4. I don’t care about the designer dresses the trust fund twenty-something crowd wears to the token benefit galas they use to justify the $1600 expense, nor am I interested in Vogue’s “compelling” celebrity interviews.  What I am interested in is the latest gorgeous photo shoot dreamed up by Coddington, the magazine’s Creative Director.  Anna Wintour may be the face of Vogue, but Grace is the visionary who elevates fashion to an other-worldly, awe-inspiring art.

Coddington is a bit of a rogue within the Vogue offices.  At 69, she’s refused to have any work done (a decision that stems, in part, from the series of operations she had after a car accident).  When she’s not pleased with a decision Wintour has made, she’ll march through the corridors to her office in her standard attire: plain black dress, black shoes, flaming-red hair flying in all directions.  Wintour, on the other hand, always looks impeccable: hair perfectly coiffed, she embodies the lifestyle Vogue preaches to the masses.

Our conversation about the documentary made me question the role of appearance in our careers and the opportunities we have for recognition and success.  I wondered if Grace’s “appearances be damned” attitude was one of the reasons she hasn’t been popularized by the press, or focused on during the media-frenzy that surrounds fashion week.  Little is said about her, though she regularly sits next to Wintour during the shows.

Wintour (left) and Coddington (right)

In spite of her now-stark contrast to Wintour’s manically crafted image, it’s interesting to note that Coddington’s looks launched her career in the fashion industry – she won the Vogue Young Model competition in England, and later landed a job as a stylist with British Vogue.

As it turns out, our propensity to favor more stereotypically attractive people is something ingrained in our brain.  In a study conducted with 100 babies, none of whom were more than 3 days old, Dr. Alan Slater found that when the infants were shown pictures of average women and female models, they spent 60-65% of their time looking at the more attractive face.

Furthermore, favoritism toward attractive people begins at birth, reports Dr. Gordon Patzer of Roosevelt University. Patzer explains “in a nursery, before new-born babies are released from a hospital, those babies higher in physical attractiveness – at this level defined as more cute – are touched more, held more and spoken to more.”

In their study “Beauty, Productivity and Discrimination,” researchers Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle found that “Unattractive men earned 15% less than those deemed attractive, while ‘plain’ women earned 11% less than their more attractive counterparts. What’s more, the possibility of a male attorney attaining early partnership directly correlates with how handsome he is.”

If Coddington is a reminder that image doesn’t always trump talent, Wintour is the champion of the idea that “it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”  In the documentary, she goes so far as to suggest that a cameraman who steps in to play a part in a photo shoot have his belly Photoshopped out.  Upon hearing this, Grace calls the art director and demands that he leave the camera man untouched.

She explains, “Not everything can be perfect in the world.”

I’m interested to hear your thoughts – how much of an impact do you think appearance has on one’s career opportunities, and do you have any experiences or stories to relate?

While in college, I interned in a pretty diverse array of work environments (corporate, recently-launched small business, and an internet startup).   While I loved the nature of my work at the startup, navigating the office culture proved to be quite the quagmire.  Come time for a meeting, and the team was cohesive, collected, and enthusiastic.  Behind closed doors, the “unified front” was anything but…particularly between the women in the office.

As soon a colleague was out of earshot, the claws came out. The griping wasn’t always unfounded, but it put me in an awkward situation as an intern who had no prior knowledge of the office’s rather tumultuous history.  Aside from generally making me feel uncomfortable, it opened my eyes to just how nasty cloak-and-dagger office politics can be.  I’d experienced some degree of not-so-friendly female rivalry in the classroom, but I’d always assumed that females felt a strong sense of camaraderie in the workplace.  After all, we still make up only 15.7% of officers in Fortune 500 corporations, and there are hundreds of professional networking associations whose sole mission is empowering women to help other women succeed.

Glenn Close & Rose Byrne on FX's Damages

Apparently, I assumed wrong.  Those “female compatriots” often turn out to be wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Grace wrote a great post last September about the rise of female bullying in the workplace.  The same Workplace Bullying Institute study she cites also found that in addition to targeting female coworkers 71% of the time, female bullies use different tactics than their male counterparts.  Men tend to favor more outright forms of bullying such as verbal abuse, while women prefer more under-the-radar techniques including sabotage and abuse of authority.

In her book Mean Girls Grown Up, Cheryl Dellasega discusses women’s “relational aggression” and how it often manages to pass unnoticed in the workplace (unless, of course, you’re the target of said aggression).  The Harvard Business Review explains that such relational aggression includes “rumor mongering, sabotage, exclusion, and public ridicule, all carefully calculated to wreak havoc in the lives of targets.”  Is anyone else having haunting flashbacks of middle school? HBR goes on to urge managers not to dismiss this aggression as something women need to “just get over;” it has a lasting impact on the workplace environment and, more importantly, real implications for the organization’s bottom line.  (Of course, some issues become overblown and aren’t worth the hassle: we as employees need to learn to distinguish between true bullying and personally overreacting to criticism or a comment.)

I’ve caught myself being unfairly critical of other females (cue snarky “who does she think she is?”), but have realized that my initial reaction often stems from my own jealousy or feeling like my “turf” is threatened.  When you recognize that someone has more talent than you, it’s easy to try to bring them down or minimize their accomplishments. Instead, opt for taking a long, hard look at why and how it is they’re great at what they do and learn from it.  Ask them for their advice.  Challenge yourself to step up your game.  And, if the situation is appropriate, collaborate; don’t compete.

I’m not advocating for the preferential treatment of women by their female colleagues, but I’d encourage all females (and males, for that matter) to treat your co-workers the same way you’d want your sister or friend to be treated.  And, if you’re going to be a big mean jerk, be gender neutral when unleashing the wrath.

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.

This is the third of a four part series on fashion marketing and ethics.  You can read my previous posts here and here.

I’d really like to know who decided to rebrand Extra Gum as a “snack substitute and weight-loss tool.”  Or who gave the green light to publish the book authored by Bethenny Frankel (of The Real Housewives of New York fame) entitled Naturally Thin: Unleash Your Skinny Girl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting that reads as a guide for developing and rationalizing anorexia.   Frankel champions numerous eating disordered behaviors; ordering dessert and eating only one spoonful; eating half a bagel, but after removing the bulk of the bread so what remains is essentially the crust.  If you follow her recommended “diet,” you’ll end up eating fewer than 1,000 calories a day.

It’s been a long time since the media did much good for women’s body image, but when did they stop merely suggesting that women “slim down” and begin the point-blank recommendation of unhealthy behaviors that beget eating disorders?

The average woman sees 400-600 advertisements a day, and though only 9% contain messages directly pertaining to appearance, 50% of ads targeting women reference physical attractiveness.  As I previously pointed out, the average model weighs 23% less than the typical female, yet 69% of women claim that their perception of the ideal body is influenced by images of models.  We have been conditioned to idealize a body that is genetically infeasible for the overwhelming majority of us.

After the controversy caused by Ralph Lauren’s disturbing retouching of an already waif-like model, Newsweek created a photo-essay of the “decade’s biggest airbrushing scandals.” It’s interesting to see that the Hollywood beauties held in such high esteem by publications such as W and Vogue fail to meet the definition of beauty required to grace their pages.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that women’s perception of their own body was negatively affected after viewing just 30 minutes of television programming which presented an “idealized” body shape.  68% of women participating in a study at Stanford University reported feeling worse about themselves after looking through women’s magazines.  In fact, after looking at magazine ads, 49% of women “were influenced by magazine pictures to want to lose weight, while only 29% were actually overweight.”

90% of women overestimate their body size, and the same percentage report being dissatisfied with their body in some way.  How much of that dissatisfaction stems directly from our comparison to the increasingly unrealistic ideals propagated by mainstream media?

As easy as it is to acknowledge that such ideals are unhealthy and detrimental to our psyche, truly believing that statement (and not feeling inadequate while flipping through Elle) is a different animal.  When will we step back and say “enough is enough?” Or will we settle for reminding ourselves of the powers of photomanipulation, take such advertising “with a grain of salt,” and passively accept the damaging messages spoon-fed to us?

This is my second post in a series regarding ethical issues and fashion marketing.  My first post, “Runways, Ready-to-Wear, and Cognitive Dissonance” can be found here.

Imagine, for a minute, you’re at the National Championship of the American Kennel Club (bear with me here).  Countless hours have gone into preparing for what amounts to a mere two or three minutes in the limelight.  The competitors here are the best of the best – what an institution has deemed to be the near-perfect representative of their species.

Knowing that these animals will be idolized by countless pet enthusiasts and breeders the world over, you expect to see healthy dogs in the prime of their existence.  Instead, you’re greeted with a parade of dogs looking like this:

Would you be angry?  Horrified?  Deeply disturbed?

How long would it take for PETA to be up in arms?  How much time would pass before the crackdowns for neglect, animal abuse and mistreatment began?

There’s no doubt in my mind that a media frenzy would ensue, deploring the “inhumane” conditions these animals were subjected to.

Funny, isn’t it — how we feel outraged, and morally obligated to act, when we see animals in this state of malnourishment, yet we tolerate the fact that an industry worth $298 billion in the US alone has decided that they’d like to showcase their wares on human hangers. While the fashion industry doesn’t go so far as to physically withhold food, the pressure to conform to the “industry standard” results in many models adopting eating disordered behaviors to maintain a disturbingly low weight.

In the early 1990s, the average runway model was a size 6.  Now, size 0 is the prevailing standard.  American Vogue recently published a feature article on Lara Stone, whom they labeled a “plus-size supermodel.”

She’s a size 4.

In 2006-2007, three international models died of complications relating to an eating disorder (namely heart failure and malnutrition) within a six month period.  One of the models, Luisel Ramos, died only moments after stepping off the catwalk.  She was 5′9, clocked in at under 100 pounds, and had subsisted on a diet of lettuce and Diet Coke for months. With an average BMI of 16.3, fashion models are considered medically underweight (“normal” is 18.5 – 25) — and at an increased risk for a myriad of complications relating to malnourishment.

In 1965, the average fashion model weighed 8% less than the average US woman.  Today, she weighs 23% less. (Coincidentally, the incidence of eating disorders in the United States has doubled in the past 40 years).

This decline in weight could be because girls are stepping onto the catwalk at a younger and younger age.  However, one who might be naturally slim and lithe at age 14 fights a battle with basic biology to keep the same child-like figure fashion designers so like to dress.

Robin Givhan wrote the following after observing a casting call for designer Tracy Reese’s fall show.  “A model walks into the casting with an elegant face and short, dark hair. ‘She’s beautiful,’ Reese says quietly, ‘but she’s less than a 0.’ The model ducks behind a screen and slips into a pair of trousers. They hang on her like sweat pants meant for someone twice her size.”

Fashion industry leaders in Europe have addressed the issue of “starving models” head-on: Milan has instituted a requirement that all models be at a healthy BMI before they’re allowed on the runway, and Madrid has taken similar steps.  However, these standards are ignored or scoffed at by other industry professionals.  Karl Lagerfeld, creative director of Chanel, justifies the use “extremely slender” models by pointing out that “no one wants to see round women” in the “dreams and illusions” that characterize the nature of fashion.

If designers think their clothing looks best on a human skeleton, perhaps they’re in the wrong industry.

I hear there’s a looming shortage of morticians.

With New York’s Mercedes Benz fashion week just around the corner, my heart can’t help but pitter-patter with anticipation.  Madison is hardly the fashion mecca of the US (though we are the headquarters of shopbop.com, holla), but a keen sense of personal style is not exclusive to those living on the coasts.  While I openly admit to immediately shedding my pants upon arriving home from work and changing into less-than-trendy sweats, I still lust after 4” gladiator heels (despite my 6’ tall frame) and will discuss at length the genius of the Yohji Yamamoto & blogging prodigy Tavi.

However, I’m hesitant to start ogling the latest of next week’s runway photos on Style.com.  Coming from a family with a history of eating disorders and having seen their devastating consequences first-hand, I can’t help but feel angered by the hostile environment our culture presents to those who suffer from an eating affliction.

As someone who plans to build a career in the field of marketing, I feel that the fashion industry’s continued use of grossly underweight models is a serious ethical issue that we can’t afford to ignore any longer.  The vast majority of media outlets need to take a hard look at potential impact of the weight-obsessed messages they bombard us with, instilling the belief that “true happiness is only a pants size (or 10) away.  I don’t claim (or believe) that the media causes eating disorders: research has shown that both genetic and socioeconomic factors play into their development.  But, if genetics has loaded the gun, it doesn’t take much for the media to pull the trigger.

This is the first in a four part series examining the issues surrounding eating disorders and the media-at-large.  The seriousness and difficultly of treating an eating disorder is often overlooked; I now wince when I hear that someone told Mary-Kate Olsen to “just eat a sandwich.”  Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, and anorexia’s mortality rate amongst women ages 15-24 is twelve times higher than all other causes of death combined.

Our idealization of “thin” is beginning to affect women at an alarmingly young age.  In 1970, girls began to diet around age 14; by 1990, the age dropped to 8.  By age 10, the equation thin=good=happy has already permeated the female psyche, as roughly half of girls report being happier when on a diet.  Michelle Lelwica, author of The Religion of Thinness, points out that “…eighty percent of fourth-grade girls interviewed in the Chicago and San Francisco areas said they had already been on diets. Roughly the same percentage of women in the mid-fifties report a desire to be thinner. For many, this desire amounts to a life-long ambition.”

When you hear the word fashion, what associations come to mind; is “thin” part of your schematic map?  Do you recall the age at which you first became body-conscious and experienced dissatisfaction with your weight, or can you honestly say that you’ve been happy with your physique?

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If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, you’re not alone.  Reach out and ask for help, and know that a full recovery is possible.