Flip through any issue of Vogue, Elle or Harper’s Bazaar and you will be greeted with stick thin models drowning in velvet jumpsuits and organza dresses from the latest runway shows. They wear frowns underneath their thickly painted purple or red lips and they look hungry and tired. When people think about the fashion industry, they think about the designers, the fashion shows, the clothes and the magazines that cover them. What they rarely think about, however, are the models.
They are at the bottom of the fashion hierarchy, bodies paid to merely display the clothing of designers from Marc Jacobs to Chanel. Few make it to super-stardom like Kate Moss, Heidi Klum, Miranda Kerr, Tyra Banks or Naomi Campbell. And few have careers that last a fraction of the length of those women.
There is a stereotype that follows models, that they are airheads and do nothing more than pose in front of cameras and walk down runways, though to some, models can barely do just that. There are plenty of videos on YouTube of models stumbling and crashing on the runway. What many don’t know, however, are the struggles that models face just to earn a living. The fashion industry places high standards on models that no woman could attain, at least healthily. It’s those standards that are forced on them, seen on runways and in magazines that eventually trickle down to young girls and women around the world. These standards are forcing models to be skinnier, requiring they be younger and putting them in sometimes painful situations.
Girl Model, a recent documentary shown at SXSW and the Toronto International Film festival, highlights the search and scouting of young girls in the modeling industry. The trailer opens at a model casting in Siberia, displaying young wafer thin models posing for quick shots in their bathing suits or underwear, while having their bodies judged by model scouts, particularly Ashley Arbaugh, the model scout and former model at the center of the film. The documentary follows Arbaugh and Nadya Vall, a 13-year-old Siberian model Arbaugh scouts who travels to Japan for her first job. Vall finds herself in Japan all alone, not speaking any Japanese or English. She arrives in Japan with just a piece of paper scribbled with the address of the modeling agency she is supposed to go to. Alone in a foreign country, Nadya struggles to adapt, and at one point, calls home sobbing to her mother. “Home. I want to go home, mom,” Vall cries.
Girl Model reveals the fashion industry’s obsession with youth and the scary situations it places young girls in, just to get the job done. This obsession is such a problem that many models often lie about their age. Take Agyness Deyn for example. She is a famous British model known for her work with fashion labels such as House of Holland, Burberry and Jean Paul Gaultier. The model confessed to The Guardian back in February 2012 that she had been lying about her age, admitting that she was actually 29 and not 23 like she had claimed, a difference of six years. Many have speculated throughout her career that she had lied about her age, and although this admission was not entirely surprising, it was still a shock to hear from such an established model.
“When I decided I would really do modeling I was like 18, and I think at the time that was quite old for a new face, so we knocked off a few years,” Deyn told The Guardian.
This just goes to show how important youth is in the modeling industry, and how it could lead one to knock a whole six years off their age in order to remain relevant.
At a screening of the documentary, Victoria Keon-Cohen, model and the co-founder of Model’s Union, said to vlog FashotTV, “It’s just a problem with young girls as young as 12 or 13 being sort of pushed around the industry under this sort of Cinderella mirage and chasing this dream where the reality is not like that anymore.”
Coco Rocha, a famous Canadian model known for her work with Zac Posen, Chanel and Balenciaga, made a similar point to Anderson Cooper on his talk show Anderson. “We come into this industry so young and you have to learn to take it as it is… If you think of a 15 or 16-year-old, especially girls, they’re thinking of their body and how they’re changing and if they’re changing and why they are not changing. And then you’re taking them out of high school, out of their parents and putting them in an industry that is treating them like adults. They do not know how to work with that.”
Rocha has struggled with her weight in the industry, probably the biggest problem models today face. She lost jobs for being too heavy and others for being too thin. “It goes back and forth. You never can please everyone, especially in our career. You’re too big for one person and too small,” said Rocha to Cooper.
If we continue with those model stereotypes, the biggest of all would deal with their weight and their battles with eating disorders. Anorexia and bulimia plague the modeling industry, some models losing their lives to the diseases. One such French model, Isabelle Caro, died in 2010 at the age of 28 after a long battle with anorexia. The disease had put Caro in several comas, waking up confused with no idea who she was. She even lived off of one square of chocolate and a cup of tea a day at one point in her life. Her face became known worldwide after posing for a campaign for the Italian fashion label Nolita. The campaign highlighted the dangers of anorexia in order to spread awareness and make a change. At the time she shot the campaign in 2007, she weighed merely 60 pounds.
Models in fashion magazines and on runways appear gaunt and skeletal. “If you’re selling clothes to women in America, you know, women in America come in all shapes and sizes. It’s amazing to me how in magazines it’s just one body type that is viewed as being the body type to have,” said Cooper on his talk show.
Cooper made an excellent point that women in America are of all body types and the women we see walking down the runways and in magazines don’t represent American women or even women globally at all. If I was sitting at a fashion show and saw a skinny and skeletal 13-year-old modeling the latest in couture, I could not relate to her. I’m 20 and have meat on my bones, so seeing that would confuse me. I would not be able to picture myself in the designer’s clothes. That is an immediate disconnection for me as a viewer and potential buyer. So why hasn’t it changed? Well, rather than change it, the fashion industry has kept it that way and it’s us, the viewers and the buyers, who are changing our bodies to fit with the industry’s perception of what beauty is and what our bodies are supposed to look like.
If struggling with their weight wasn’t hard enough, models also have to put up with the clothes. As fun as that might sound to someone as fashion obsessed as I am, it can actually be quite painful. From wearing six-inch heels to tripping over floor length dresses and being cinched and sewn into circulation cutting bodices and bandage dresses, getting dressed at fashion shows can be something to fear for a model. Back in Fall 2011 when the end of Paris Fashion Week was nearing, pictures began surfacing online of the bruised and battered feet of models from Louis Vuitton’s runway show. Their feet were yellowed, purpled and blued, with marks of dried blood and blisters speckled around ankle straps and pointed toe heels. The images were disturbing and caused a bit of an uproar.
“Models know their feet are in for a tough time during the shows. The majority of catwalk shoes, like the clothes, are sample size, normally a size 40. Unless they’re lucky enough to have size 40 feet, the girls face four weeks of either squashing their feet into shoes that are too small, or trying not to fall out of shoes that are too big,” said an industry insider to Mailonline.
As terrible as all of this is, there are strides being made to help models and change the industry. Israel passed a law in March 2012 that bans the employment of models that are underweight in the hopes to combat eating disorders. The law will require that models provide medical records for fashion shoots. These reports must not be any older than three months and establish that the model is not malnourished according to standards set by the World Health Organization. This will take into account each girl’s BMI (body mass index). With two percent of Israeli girls between the ages of 14 and 18 suffering from eating disorders, those who support the law hope that healthy models will act as good role models and provide positive images of health and beauty to the girls of Israel. This is a great step forward for the fashion industry and models everywhere, but until other countries follow suit, including all the big fashion capitals of the world, models will continue to struggle to fit the industry’s image of what is attractive.
Although models may choose their own career path and therefore are not forced into these situations, the standards placed upon them are important to women and girls all throughout the world. We read fashion magazines, see advertisements on TV and may even catch a runway show. These images stick with us. The fashion industry forces these standards of beauty onto the models. The models become stick thin and are deemed attractive by the industry, which then trickles down to celebrities who go to the fashion shows. They too become affected by the industry standards. The fans then see those standards taking effect on the celebrities, and they too are affected by the industry’s notion of what beauty is: too young and too skinny. This creates eating disorders among teenagers and young adults, and can even promote teasing and bullying for those who don’t fit the image of industry perfection. At the end of the day, the models are not the only people struggling; women of the world are struggling with them. If a change isn’t made, all women will continue to struggle with their bodies, promoting an unhealthy conscience for generations of girls to come.
Jessica Keesee can be reached at jessica.keesee@gmail.com