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ventaI don't get cross very often. The other day, however, I got really quite cross.
I'd been glancing through one of the BBC's webpage "Have Your Say" outbursts - in which the great unwashed is invited to post its opinions on a particular story. This HYS related to the news that Madrid Fashion Week is banning from its catwalks models with a BMI of less than 18[*], in attempt to fend off allegations that they're promoting poor body image/forcing models to be unnaturally thin/generally being a Bad Thing.
The news didn't make me cross. I'm aware that BMI isn't a particularly sound measure of under- or overweightedness since it doesn't distinguish between fat and muscle mass. On the BBC, the example of Maria Sharapova was much bandied about as a healthy person who has a BMI of 16 (I have no idea why so many people knew this). However, some measure towards preventing the fashion industry exerting pressure on its employees to become ever more emaciated seems like a step in the right direction.
The array of bigoted and arrogant comments didn't even make me cross. "Nobody wants to look at a fat chick in skimpy gear", "anything over a size 12 is overweight anyway", "girls, stay on a diet, please, or stay at home". I fully appreciate that these people have the right to these opinions (even if I also reserve the right to think they're twats).
The assumption that huge numbers of people leapt to - that banning underweight models would mean that the catwalks would be full of obese models - didn't so much make me cross as confuse me utterly.
What, in the end, made me stop reading in a fit of bilious frothing was the quite commonly-held belief that, given our world's rising obesity levels, women need underweight catwalkers as role-models. People who sounded like otherwise quite rational beings were citing the health problems caused by exccess weight, the dangers of pregnancy when overweight and so on and arguing that the last thing Madrid Fashion Week should be doing was "sending the message that it's OK to be fat". The very people who ought to have been applauding a move towards glamourising a healthy weight were criticising it.
Mind you, it does mean that I might take more interest in Madrid Fashion Week than I usually do, which may have been the idea all along. I'm quite curious as to which models will make it down the runway.
[*] Just in case: Body Mass Index is a means of sorting people into rough bands of "underweight", "normal", "overweight", etc. You calculate it by diving your weight (in kilos) by the square of your height (in metres). From memory, 18.5/19 is generally recognised to be about the minimum BMI you can reach before being classified as underweight. Incidentally, if you work in real money, it turns out you can use your weight in pounds and height in inches, and multiply the whole bunch by 705 and come out with about the right answer.
I'd been glancing through one of the BBC's webpage "Have Your Say" outbursts - in which the great unwashed is invited to post its opinions on a particular story. This HYS related to the news that Madrid Fashion Week is banning from its catwalks models with a BMI of less than 18[*], in attempt to fend off allegations that they're promoting poor body image/forcing models to be unnaturally thin/generally being a Bad Thing.
The news didn't make me cross. I'm aware that BMI isn't a particularly sound measure of under- or overweightedness since it doesn't distinguish between fat and muscle mass. On the BBC, the example of Maria Sharapova was much bandied about as a healthy person who has a BMI of 16 (I have no idea why so many people knew this). However, some measure towards preventing the fashion industry exerting pressure on its employees to become ever more emaciated seems like a step in the right direction.
The array of bigoted and arrogant comments didn't even make me cross. "Nobody wants to look at a fat chick in skimpy gear", "anything over a size 12 is overweight anyway", "girls, stay on a diet, please, or stay at home". I fully appreciate that these people have the right to these opinions (even if I also reserve the right to think they're twats).
The assumption that huge numbers of people leapt to - that banning underweight models would mean that the catwalks would be full of obese models - didn't so much make me cross as confuse me utterly.
What, in the end, made me stop reading in a fit of bilious frothing was the quite commonly-held belief that, given our world's rising obesity levels, women need underweight catwalkers as role-models. People who sounded like otherwise quite rational beings were citing the health problems caused by exccess weight, the dangers of pregnancy when overweight and so on and arguing that the last thing Madrid Fashion Week should be doing was "sending the message that it's OK to be fat". The very people who ought to have been applauding a move towards glamourising a healthy weight were criticising it.
Mind you, it does mean that I might take more interest in Madrid Fashion Week than I usually do, which may have been the idea all along. I'm quite curious as to which models will make it down the runway.
[*] Just in case: Body Mass Index is a means of sorting people into rough bands of "underweight", "normal", "overweight", etc. You calculate it by diving your weight (in kilos) by the square of your height (in metres). From memory, 18.5/19 is generally recognised to be about the minimum BMI you can reach before being classified as underweight. Incidentally, if you work in real money, it turns out you can use your weight in pounds and height in inches, and multiply the whole bunch by 705 and come out with about the right answer.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 01:17 pm (UTC)Got to agree with
I still own a number of rather expensive dresses that I bought on the basis of how they looked on normal-sized models. If I wear them, I look like a refugee from the nearest camping shop.
On the bright side, this results in me spending a lot less money on clothes.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 01:54 pm (UTC)I completely agree. But I never said fashion photography was about making clothes look good on *you* (you in the sense of the general population, rather than you, lanfykins). It's really, really not. It's about making them look good *in the photo*, so that you want them, regardless of how they would look on your actual body.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 01:59 pm (UTC)But they can make the clothes look good and me want them all they want - at the bottom line, if I don't know how they'd look on me, I won't buy them.
The question is how much they're hurting their bottom line - profit - with their stance.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:30 pm (UTC)I don't think everyone's so sensible, though. Many people have no idea what suits them, so it's easy to get swept up in the aspiration thing. And you don't have to be dim to fall prey to this. My mental image of my body is quite different from reality, I think, as I'm always shocked when I catch a glimpse of myself in the wall-length mirror mid dance class. I'm distinctly shorter and hippier than I think I am!
no subject
Date: 2006-09-17 07:40 pm (UTC)You maybe wouldn't now, but the number of expensive dresses you claimed to own, unworn, suggests you used to.
If everyone buys half a dozen posh frocks before they learn, the designers are still quids in :)
no subject
Date: 2006-09-17 07:38 pm (UTC)On the other hand, a friend of mine naturally has a freakishly small waist, and is approximately the dimensions of a shop mannequin (only with better conversation). Thus she can't find any clothes to fit her, because whatever something looks like she'd have to pin up six inches of useless fabric at the back...
It's all very, very silly.
[*] by some arbitrary metric.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-18 12:29 pm (UTC)This similarly reminds me of men's clothes shops. Where we are there is a shop which sells an awful lot of Hugo Boss gear. Recently (again) the window was full of corduroy suits. Naturally these look good on a) the models (because they're models, innit?) b) the mannequins, because in Germany, to sell suits you have to undertake a long course of training concerning everything involving the selkling and merchandising of suits. When you look in the window from behind, the poor mannequins look very tortured with, as you say, swathes of fabric clipped, pinned and gathered together elaborately.
Of course one may pay to have said suit adjusted so that one does not have to wander around clipped and pinned together. In the meantime, there are a dreadful number of men in town who, despite professional adjustment to their apparel, look like geography teachers in corduroy suits originally designed for people who are an entirely different shape...