Runway Models:
Are They too Thin?
By
Sarah Jane
Coleman
Professor
Jacqueline Bradley
Southern
Methodist University
English 1302,
Section 03
5 April 2007
A beautiful young woman opens up the latest issue of a high fashion magazine.
Her vision is flooded with images of six foot tall, 110 pound, size zero
anomalies of the human body. Who are these women you might ask? They are
runway models. Blessed with devastatingly gorgeous legs and bodies, these few
women enter an extremely competitive, and sometimes dangerously competitive, job
market. With tall and thin being chic in the high fashion and runway style in
this day and age, it is not uncommon for young women to develop destructive
eating disorders in order to keep booking jobs. Unfortunately, the skinnier the
women get in pictures the more they manipulate the average woman into thinking
she isn’t beautiful and her body isn’t good enough.
The
amount of pressure put on women to look good and be thin has increased
substantially within the past decade. Models are forced to lose weight or lose
their contracts. A change needs to be made in what the fashion world deems
beautiful, or else the self-destruction of young women increases in
inevitability. Diversity in the modeling world needs to occur now. Not all
women are 6-feet tall and a size zero. In fact, “the average woman in the
United States is 5-foot-4 and weighs about 140 pounds and wears a size 12 to
16.” This weight is healthy and attractive and very manageable.
The picture to
the right, figure 1, is a photo of a typical runway model, but she looks
overwhelmingly thin. So thin in fact, I gasped when I first saw this photo.
This beautiful woman is withering away and literally killing herself for the
business and this is the message that fashion industries are sending to young
girls all over the world. They might as well be saying, “You are not beautiful
unless you look like this” and women do not need to have that kind of pressure.
Right
now, a select few fashion designers have stopped calling for ultra thin models.
Lisa Roberts quotes Stella Jay Brown of Stella’s Talent Agency in Leesburg as
saying, “My models are sizes 6 to 8, which is good.
That's a healthy size.” French designer Jean Paul Gaultier recently put a plus
sized model on the runway and “challenged society’s beauty stereotypes.” Figure
2 to the left is Gaultier’s plus size model he put down the catwalk. The model
pictured on the left, Crystal Renn, was hand picked by a scout when she was just
14 years old. She was told she could be on the pages of high fashion magazines
if she dropped a substantial amount of weight. She developed anorexia that
became out of control and caused her to reevaluate her eating habits. After
gaining weight back to a healthy size 12, she emerged on the fashion scene once
again, not as an emaciated girl, but as a plus size model, and she still
continues to book many high profile clients. Crystal Renn has become an
excellent role model for the ability to overcome such a destructive disease and
still come out on top. Sadly, some women are not so lucky.
Ana Carolina Reston in figure 3 to the right, came
into the modeling world at a very early age. She was a world-renowned model
signing with agencies such as Ford models and Elite, both top agencies, when she
was just 18 years old. From ages 16 to 20 are some of the toughest times in a
girl’s life, and when she will be the most vulnerable. Tom Phillips, a
journalist for The Observer England, says Ana “traveled unaccompanied by
either a personal friend or family member, someone who could help her negotiate
a way through the lonely castings, where personal criticism came as standard.”
She had no one to turn to for self-confidence or moral support, and the industry
started to take its toll on her spirit. Phillips also quotes a booker who saw
her when she arrived in China for a fashion shoot as saying, “She arrived in
China the guys looked at her and said, "You're fat." She took this very
personally.” The constant demand for perfection and the cruelty of the fashion
world ultimately took the life out of Ana and she died of anorexia in 2006. Two
other models followed her the same year, both also passing away of anorexia.
Unfortunately, even after the deaths of a young
runway models due to eating disorders, most designers still want nothing more
than women with bean sprouts for bodies. In order for change to occur, these
high profile designers and the media need to emphasize the importance of a good
body image, and stress that even though there are women out there who are born
tall and thin, not all women look like what is used to market their products.
Campaign for Real Beauty, a new campaign from Dove, is doing just that. The
women shown on Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty commercials and advertisements
are average women who are confident and proud of their bodies. Figure 4 below
is an advertisement for one of their products. They have incorporated every
type of woman into their campaign with all different body types and all
different sizes. Theresa Howard reports in USA Today, “Print and TV ads in the
campaign that just went 
national
in the USA feature candid and confident images of curvy, full-bodied, real women
— not traditional models.”
Promoting a healthy body image and maintaining
the truth that even without the façade of airbrushing or layers of makeup, you
are still beautiful bare and real.
Women do not need to be changed. The threats of debilitating diseases and poor
self-esteem are brought on by the refusal of the fashion industry and the media
to change its perception on women. Even the few born with perfect model bodies
are ridiculed and crushed by the demanding fashion world. These women are not
property nor emotionally vacant; they have confidence and troubles just like
average woman. More needs to be done about the pressure women put on themselves
to reach “perfection” and that will only come when the average woman can open up
that fashion magazine and see a woman like herself fill its pages.
Phillips,
Tom. (2007, January 14). Everyone knew she was ill.
The other girls, the
modeling agencies. The Observer,
p. 25.
Crystal Renn: A New Beginning. (2006 September 11).
People. 124
Howard, Theresa. (2005, July 8). Ad campaign tell
women to celebrate who they are.
USA Today.
http://web.lexisnexis.com.proxy.libraries.smu.edu/universe/document?_m=f08ecb8fc28506a8637799f81c7f7e63&_docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVzW-zSkVb&_md5=941191cf3b58219163c77fda0bf7bb17
Style.com. (2006, September). Retrieved
April 2, 2007, from
http://www.style.com/slideshows/fashionshows/S2006RTW/JPGAULTI/RUNWAY/00590m.jpg