Looks Can Kill
Fashion industry tweaks its ultra-thin image
Lisa Zinn
Issue date: 10/16/06 Section: News
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The fashion industry has introduced a new fall fashion look, one that includes that amazingly tasty stuff called food.
After many years of allowing models to get dangerously thin, organizers of a recent international fashion show in Madrid realized their mistakes. By presenting these almost down-to-the-bone models, the fashion industry was doing nothing but encouraging young women everywhere to join the eating disorder club.
Medical associations and women's advocacy groups took part in bringing the parade of overly skinny models to a halt. When the selection process came to choose models for the upcoming show, a minimum body-mass ratio was set.
Although the ratio still allowed some models to be slightly underweight, it rejected the sickly, under-100-pounds models altogether. This screening is part of an ongoing process that will hopefully raise the bar and the scales a little more every year.
A coordinator at Avalon, an eating disorder treatment center located in New York, noted the following facts about anorexia:
-- Approximately seven million girls and women in the U.S., 43 percent between the ages of 16 and 20, struggle with eating disorders. The three biggest influences are parents, peers, and the media.
-- Most fashion models are thinner than 98 percent of American women, and an astounding 80 percent of those American women are dissatisfied with their own appearance.
-- Part of Avalon's program is to teach patients what really is healthy weight and body image. This consists of proper nutrition and body mass index.
This change in refusing to showcase unhealthily undernourished models could seriously help to change the way body image is viewed in the future. It's sad to see that eighty percent of children that are a mere ten years old are already afraid of being fat.
To many concerned parents or authority figures, it's about time that the industry started thinking about the negative affect they were having on young women everywhere.
Although the industry is attempting to drop the unnaturally thin models, is that what America truly wants to see, asks Marissa, a student at Ramapo College of New Jersey and once an aspiring actress. "When women or men open a Vogue magazine it is the thin, clear-skinned, beautiful women that appeal to us. It is those girls that are so much more beautiful where we'd rather look than a mirror."
Is changing that look to a fuller and healthy figure going to still make us buy fashion magazines, or does America unknowingly find attraction in these models that we know are so nutritionally compromised.