With Oxford Fashion Week around the corner, all eyes will be on the catwalk. Mine will be watching to see whether the range of models represents the makeup of the fashion industry or Oxford in general. I recently came across an article by the Harvard Gazette detailing the findings of a medical school psychiatrist and her studies into Fijian culture. As television only became widespread in Fiji from 1995, a three-year study was conducted to see how it would impact on cultural norms.
In 1995, there was a distinct absence of the kind of eating disorders which have plagued Western girls for years. However, by 1998, after the arrival of late night TV, suggestive adverts and music videos, 11.3% of girls reported that they had been sick at least once after eating in an attempt to lose weight. As part of a later study in 2007, over 45% of the girls questioned admitted to having made themselves sick to lose weight.
The media’s depiction of beauty is disconcerting to say the least. We’ve all heard somebody complain about models being “too thin”. What we may not have heard about is the number of models who have died as a result of their eating disorders. Problems are beginning at a younger age. In the UK, girls as young as nine have been receiving treatment for eating disorders.
The average woman in the UK is a size 16 but models at size 12 and above are often considered “plus size”. British women are effectively being told by the fashion industry that “big” is two sizes smaller than average. What’s more, models are much taller than the general population, making their appearance slimmer still.
Size dysmorphia isn’t the only thing wrong with Western modelling. It’s also a predominantly white industry. Models have been turned away because casting agents “already had one black girl for the job”. Naomi Campbell is one of many models to hit out about the racism in fashion, explaining how last year’s New York Fashion Week featured 82.7% white models; hardly representative of the ethnic diversity of the city in which it took place.
Vanity Fair was recently accused of ‘whitewashing’, having featured the Twelve Years a Slave actress Lupita Nyong’o in photographs appearing several shades lighter than she does on the front cover. Some blame lighting; others describe it as symptomatic of a beauty culture refusing to move with the times. Ethnicity and skin tone aside, any model or actor is unlikely to see a real reflection of herself in the pages of magazine. Women are photoshopped to have a longer neck, longer legs, higher cheekbones, bigger bust, fewer wrinkles and pores. Men have their abdominals chiselled and their boxers stuffed. Frankly, we need more realism in how our beauty ideals are reflected. When the world’s most beautiful still need to be tweaked and perfected to be ‘photo-friendly’, something is wrong. The fashion industry should provide us with clothes for a variety of bodies – not just enough for one skinny, pale, “perfect” body. Fashion needs a makeover.
