Modelling healthy body-types

“We are to be a pretty shape this Spring and for many seasons to come it seems. No more top-heavy shoulders balanced perilously by narrow hips and stilt heels, but the true shape of a woman, curving in at the waist from rounded bosom and hips. A shape, at last, with balance.”

Glamor. The Magazine for Young Women. September, 1947 p. 33

Looking at photos of the models on the runways of the recent Sydney Fashion Week and Melbourne Fashion Festivals I was struck by how impossibly thin they all seemed. At an average of somewhere between 5’9” and 6’ in height and a dress-size of 6 to 8 (Australian , which converts to UK 4-6, US 2-4) the models represent a body type seen on only a tiny percentage of the wider population.

As the mother of daughters, I worry about the representation in today’s media of this waiflike body-type as an ideal.

It is a concern shared by some of the world’s fashion shows. In 2006, the Madrid Fashion Week organisers put a BMI (Body Mass Index) limitation on models taking part. As a result, five models were turned away.[1] Fashion shows in other parts of the world haven’t been so keen to act, mostly adopting voluntary guidelines.

Fashion models haven’t always been so thin. Before our time, in the 1930s and 1940s they were even what we would now describe as voluptuous.

The 1960s was one of the major turning points in the idealisation of being thin particularly following the rise in the career of Twiggy, a waifish fashion model who weighed just 90lbs (41kg)[2]. Studies of the way women are portrayed in the media have shown that models became taller and thinner between the 1960s and the 1980s.[3]

In the 1990s the ‘heroin chic’ aesthetic was adopted. Models looked thin, miserable and exhausted.

Nowadays, models are thin and sullen. Heaven help the catwalk model who cracks a smile.

Is it any wonder that teenage girls struggle with body image issues when the media surrounds them with images that are almost impossible to replicate (and that’s without even starting on the issue of the digital retouching of photos).

How do you think we could bring the happy, healthy body-type back into the mainstream media and the fashion industries?

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/09/13/spain.models/index.html
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,21232157-5001021,00.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twiggy

[3] Body image: understanding body dissatisfaction in men, women, and children By Sarah Grogan. Published by Routledge, 1999
Accessed via: http://books.google.com/

(photos of Glamor magazine, September 1947)