BODY IMAGE: SHOULD CELEBRITIES BE AMBASSADORS FOR THEIR BODY SHAPE?

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

Last week, Christina Hendricks was in Australia to promote her new range of glasses for Specsavers. As anyone with a new product to flog might, she took interviews from key press. During one such appointment, she was asked:

"You have been an inspiration as a full-figured woman. What is the most inspiring story that you can remember where you've inspired someone?"

Christina stopped the interview, asked for the question to be rephrased and when the same question was asked again she said, off air, "I think calling me full-figured is just rude". 

Some context here; Christina plays secretary Joan in Mad Men and has been described "oozing sensuality" and having "curves in all the right places". Basically, she is not your standard super slim actress but nor is she exactly "full figured" in the great scheme of things, given that we live in a world of ever rising obesity levels and a UK average dress size of 16. What's more, the question implies that by appearing in popular TV shows and films, Hendricks is automatically an inspiring role model for women who have breasts and a bum. 

Hendricks in Mad Men

There was a comparable story in this weekend's Times magazine in which Caitlin Moran interviews the writer, director and star of Girls- the forthcoming new sitcom about the realistic, non-airbrushed lives of twenty something New York girls-  Lena Dunham. One of Dunham's most remarkable traits is apparently that she has a soft covering of fat making her not at all big or obese but just the way quite a lot of girls look when they don't worry too much about what they eat or how much exercise they do. Moran includes a remarkable, or not so, story about one of Dunham's first forays into film...

"The first time Dunham appeared naked on camera it was in a film she made at university, in which she climbed into the campus fountain in a bikini and pretended to shower and clean her teeth, before being moved on by a security guard. When she put it on YouTube, it went viral, and got 50,000 hits. However, it also sparked a debate, in the comments underneath, about the size of Dunham’s thighs, and whether she was fat or not. What she had seen as just a jokey film had turned into a debate about her shagability, and she eventually deleted it"

Lena Dunham at the Emmy awards

This reminds me of an episode a while back in which Alexa Chung posted a picture of herself with her Mum on Instagram. it was intended purely as  a sweet Mother/ Daughter pic but became a voracious debate about whether or not Alexa was too thin. The photo didn't ASK anyone to comment, just as Dunham's video begged no opinion of its star's body however the comments came flooding in free and fast, whether Dunham and Chung liked it or not and with apparently no holds barred on the searing honesty of the observations. 

This isn't a problem with the press, or with any one group of people in particular. It just seems so wrong that there is a collective feeling of entitlement to put female celebrities in a box- whether that's full figured, a bit of puppy fat or  way too skinny- and to expect that they might want to be defined for being that way. If you think about the best or worst thing about yourself, maybe your lovely pert boobs or your long skinny legs, your pinchable bum or your lumpy thighs, no matter how awful or great it is in your opinion, would you want it to be the one and only thing people really obsessed over about you? I think that would get pretty tiring. 

GIRL POWER: FORGET SUPERMODELS, ATHLETES ARE WHERE IT'S AT

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

We can never hope to achieve this...

But we can get close to this

"Girl power" has had a sudden resurgence in usage these past two weeks. As we have witnessed women breaking records, running fast and far, jumping high and long and displaying seemingly inhuman feats of strength, agility and physical skill there has only been one way to sum it up in a Twitter hashtag and that is #girlpower. Whenever another Team GB female (or females) won a medal, "Girl Power" was sure to be trending and appearing in Facebook status updates within minutes. It feels like a breakthrough. You only have to take a glance at the dreaded DM's sidebar of shame to see that a little something has shifted. In the last fortnight those stories about Kim Kardashian's gym visits or TOWIE Lauren's latest diet have been significantly peppered with stories of women who have triumphed to win medals or just compete, whether that's Saudi Arabia's Sarah Attar running 800m as her country's first ever female track and field competitor or Gemma Gibbons winning her Judo semi-final and mouthing "I love you, Mum" towards the sky, before going on to win Silver. Where girls have been really quite unpowerful in celebrity media until now, the Olympic athletes have shown that girls can worry about more than boys and fat bottoms. Hadley Freeman and Elizabeth Day (both at The Guardian) have written in the past day or two about how we can embrace Olympic athletes as our new body image role models. You see, anyone can look like an Olympic athlete because these men and women come in all shapes and sizes but are united by the fact that they are the very best version of themselves. You don't have to be freakishly tall, thin and ethereal as you do to even approach supermodel standards. While Kate, Naomi, Stella et al looked awesome last night in their golden Brit designed gowns, we could never hope to emulate their figures because they have one in  trillion kind of genes. But go for a run, swim some lengths, pedal a few miles, lift a few weights and elements of an Olympian body will be yours. We need to harness the girl power.

CAN VOGUE TURN THE TIDE ON THE CULTURE OF "THINNESS"?

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

We, world, are messed up; on the one hand, one in four adults in the UK is obese with that figure projected to double in the next 20 years. On the other, there is a widespread obsession with 'thinness', which is almost always blamed on the fashion industry. But, do nine year-olds read Vogue? No, they watch TV, and use the Internet.

On the Daily Mail website today, a quick count down the infamous sidebar-of-shame shows 24 different stories which refer in some way to a female celebrity's body, whether she is 'showing off her tiny tummy' or 'heading to the gym after her fast food slip up'. Vogue has a circulation of around 200,000 while the Daily Mail has 52 million unique visitors each month. Nobody has boycotted the Daily Mail or Heat magazine yet, so all of us who check the site or the read the magazine, even as a guilty pleasure, are feeding the monster.

A Kardashian hits the gym today to work off the burger she ate yesterday. 

The Daily Mail today uses this picture as confirmation of Drew Barrymore's pregnancy. WHAT?

Vogue, Elle or Grazia would never be able to write a story along the "look at her cellulite", "ooh she is thin" lines;  they would be villified. So how does the Daily Mail get away with it?  The readership is complicit.  However, judging by a triumvirate of comments coming from Camp Vogue this week the power players of fashion are sick of the culture of thinness in the media and are fighting back, and to my mind winning.

On Monday, Vogue's new Fashion Editor Fran Burns told Business of Fashion," I never want to make women look ugly or depressing or too thin or miserable. None of those things."  Also on Monday, Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani told Harvard University "We will do our best, but it will be impossible to fight this widespread idea of thinness all by ourselves". In an interview which she gave to The Guardian this weekend, British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman explained the thinness problem (which she has tried to address in the past by writing to the world's biggest designers) in this way-

'I find it very frustrating and I don't know quite where it comes from, but I think if I had to absolutely nail it, [it's] probably the designers, because they're the ones who are cutting the clothes so small. And if the girl can't fit into the clothes, then they won't get booked. So then you've got the model agent saying: 'You've got to lose weight.' And then, when it comes down the wire, the photographers – and to some extent the fashion editors – want to use the girls that they think are the cool girls, and the cool girls are the ones who have got to be working with the designers, so it kind of feeds itself'

I'd like to give high fashion magazines a break when it comes to this problem- they do seem to have a done a lot to address issues in the industry over the past few years. But it's hard, when on one side they are duty bound to use healthy but slim models for their pages, yet when it comes to actual celebrities their standards slip. They need girls like of of the moment, 'cool girls' like Alexa Chung on their pages, but if she were just a model they probably would not hire her because she is too thin. It is a catch 22.

Barely a week goes by when images of her wearing exactly the kind of fashion Vogue needs to feature are beamed around the world. Alexa in a Chris Kane dress or J.W Anderson paisley PJs are gold dust for British fashion. Alexa has become scarily thin of late yet she is still in Vogue and nobody dares mention it. There's a lot of skirting round the issue, like interviews which mention her playing with her food and sort of forgetting to eat it.

I think it IS terrifying that Alexa is the girl every fashion obsessed teen and twenty-something wants to be, but also that someone isn't making sure she's being looked after. We have to separate the fashion from the girl.

I hope people remember Alexa is not just a clothes horse (image from www.glamourmagazine.co.uk)

If you have an eating disorder, then you ARE ugly, depressed and miserable. And I know, because I had anorexia for four years when I was a young teenager. I'm no psychiatrist but I would hazard a guess that my problem, and that of hundreds of thousands of others, is not really rooted in fashion magazines but in our relationships, genetics and personalities. In fact, I'd be quite offended if someone had tried to explain away my problem with a prescription of fashion cold turkey. As Hadley Freeman said in her brilliant column on this subject last year, 'eating disorders have existed for hundreds of years, predating, amazingly, Kate Moss'.

Maybe designers need to use a bit more fabric so that they can make their sample sizes more realistic. But that's not going to un-fuck-up a world where a normal sized person thinks they're fat or where it's fine to say 'oh my god, you're looking so skinny' but unheard of to tell an obese person that they're doing themselves no favours. I am really happy that Vogue is taking up this issue, but I hope that everyone else doesn't think it's just Vogue's battle to fight. It's really patronising to those suffering with eating disorders to tell them that their life threatening, debilitating illness has been brought on by them looking at some pictures of thin people in nice clothes.

ARE PLUS SIZE MODELS BAD FOR OUR SELF-ESTEEM?!

Posted by Fashion Junior at Large

Just when we thought we might finally get some respite from the great weight debate...

Porenza schouler AW10

These are just a small selection of the size related stories I've spotted over the past couple of weeks:

Marc Jacobs insists he didn't use 'curvier' models in his AW10 show as a means to comment on the industry's ultra-skinny fixation: 'It wasn't a statement on age, and it wasn't a statement about body shape'. (WWD)

Michael Kors vows not to employ models under the age of 16, Natalia Vodianova admits to developing anorexia after the birth of her child, and Anna Wintour calls on designers to reverse the 'tyranny of sample sizes that barely fit a 13-year-old on the edge of puberty' (The Cut)

Twiggy claims all she ever wanted was 'A fairy godmother to make me look like Marilyn Monroe. I had no boobs, no hips, and I wanted them desperately' (AP)

Debenhams introduces size 16 mannequins in a bid to be more representative of the average woman (Belfast Telegraph)

Precious star Gabourey Sidibe is snubbed by Vogue insider: 'She's a joke in the fashion community. What she wore on the red carpet at the Academy Awards wasn't a dress, it was a tent' (NY Daily News)

 You may even have seen French ELLE's plus size spread featuring the lovely Tara Lynn:

The question is how do you feel about it? New research from Arizona State University suggests that images featuring 'normal sized' women (whatever that really means) can actually make us feel worse about ourselves. The study divided women into three groups based on their Body Mass Index - underweight (below 18.5), normal (18.5 - 25), and overweight (25-30). The participants were then asked to evaluate their feelings whilst looking at adverts featuring models who ranged from very thin to very heavy. 

The women classified as overweight were unhappy whether they were looking at tiny models or heavier ones, feeling uncomfortably similar to the latter and upsettingly distant from the former. In contrast the underweight participants were (smugly) comfortable whatever image they were viewing.

More surprising perhaps were the results from the group with normal BMIs. These participants were consumed with anxiety when faced with the larger models, imagining themselves to be much more similar to these women than they were in reality. For some reason we feel better about ourselves looking at unfathomably thin models! (Perhaps it's down to a classic case of numbness through over-exposure. Like when an English character pops up in an American film and for some reason they sound foreign). This is a thought that has been plaguing me for a while now. For years we imagined that if only editors would agree to feature more realistically sized models we would all feel a whole lot better about ourselves. Now our wish has finally been granted, only to leave us just as dissatisfied as before.

Whilst I fully agree that the fashion industry should shoulder some responsibility (in my opinion the model at the top of this post is painfully ill-looking and was probably an irresponsible hire) it irks me when people (my mother included) try to position it as a big bad machine sucking up perfectly ordinary happy girls and spitting them back out as anorexics. Anorexia is a vicious, all consuming, life ruining mental disorder. Friends of mine who are sufferers have much greater demons at work in their minds than simply the desire to look like waif-era Kate Moss. There will always be people thinner and more beautiful, but if we can cultivate better self-esteem and a foundation of worth based on intelligence, independence and morals we should be able to view magazines as, in the words of Karl Lagerfeld, 'dreams and illusions'. 

Maybe it's ok that magazines don't reflect reality. They represent escapism and perfection which serve to energise and inspire readers - hopefully in a positive way.

Pic credits: Catwalking.com, fashionfoiegras.com