sustainability and body image pt.2

Size-zero hero: Fashion's high priestess calls time on 'size zero'

 Stella McCartney Lingerie Advertisement

In 2009, Editor in Chief at Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, spoke out against the size-zero.

In writing, to some of the biggest names in fashion including Alexander McQueen, Karl Lagerfeld and Stella McCartney, she begged for a ‘recast (of) the beauty ideal’. She blamed these fashion houses for encouraging eating disorders by designing clothes that even unrealistically skinny models would have to squeeze into. Shulman admitted that Vogue were often to touch-up models; not to cover up blemishes or air-brush imperfections, but to make them appear larger than they actually were. (Measure, 2009)

This was the first time that a fashion magazine was to confront fashion designers with regards to the size-zero debate; and it was in this same year that London Fashion Week was to team up for the first time with an eating disorder charity, Beat.

This was obviously a major step forward in terms of health and fashion but was it just fashionable; trendy or a passing fad?

For years campaigners have been pushing for legislation banning size-zero models from the catwalk, and for years, no progress. Although guidelines and directives do exist to ward underweight and underage models off the catwalks; these are easily forgotten. 

 Chloe Memisevic for Erdem, 2011

Maybe one day London, Paris, Milan and New York will follow in the footsteps of Israel, who late last month passed a new law stipulating that fashion models must be of a minimum BMI.  

Adi Barkan, one of the country's top model agents, sees a direct link between eating disorders and the fashion industry. He sees that young women 'become skinnier and sicker while struggling to fit the shrinking model of what the industry considered attractive.'

As Israeli law-sponsor Dr. Rachael Adato states, 'Beautiful is not underweight'. (Sieczkowski, 2012)