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We’ve heard it justified a million times; designers want skinny models to walk their runways so that the clothes “hang” better on them. But as designers who create clothing that’s meant to be worn by women, shouldn’t we be considering the fact that real women aren’t actually hangers? If the clothing we design only looks good flapping on a skeleton, there’s something inherently wrong with the situation in fashion today. Instead of beautiful clothes that flatter a healthy woman, accentuating her curves and highlighting her hourglass shape, we end up seeing a flat swatch of fabric hung over a skeletal girl stumbling down the runway.
It seems like wherever you turn you see a fashion ad with an overly skinny model. Movie stars, pop stars and nearly every fashion conscious young woman out there seem to follow the skinny rule: The skinnier the better.
There is no red line, when we see shoulder bones protruding we get impressed when a few ribs pop out we admire. The ideal female figure nowadays has nothing feminine about it. It is an abstraction of a female. The models we admire usually look like weird malnutritioned aliens
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The question is, who’s this alleged “beholder”? Who decided that impossibly skinny is best? And it’s not like skinny has always been the ideal shape. Look at any Renaissance painting and you’ll see a hell of a lot more curves than anywhere nowadays. That was way sexy then.
Staying fit and skinny is a hard thing to achieve, especially in western culture when all prepared foods are packed with chemicals and sugar. We lead fast lives and feed on fast foods. The skinny look becomes an exclusive “luxury” saved for the selected females willing to starve themselves (or merely live off of one meal a day).
Approximately 5 million Americans suffer from anorexia and bulimia. About 20% of people suffering from anorexia will prematurely die from complications related to their eating disorder, including suicide and heart problems.
The poster-girl for skeleton-women, Kate Moss, once said Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. How F***’d up is that?
Thing is, most of us have some basic preservation instincts (or maybe just a lack of will-power?), and we eat. We don’t always exercise, but we eat. Then we get frustrated that we can’t attain this impossible ideal, and we start to hate our bodies and sometimes ourselves.
Not all things in the 80′s were great, but there seemed to be a healthier concept of the female figure: women then couldn’t just slim down to look right, they needed to combine a healthy balance of exercise and proper diet, for the toned and fit look. There were beautiful supermodels back then such as Cindy Crawford, Paulina Porizkova and Elle Maspherson.
We’re here to say that it’s time for a shift in the fashion world. It’s time to bring healthy back into style, and as designers it starts with us. No more anorexic models!
