Fashion: The Model of Thin
Last week, designer Giorgio Armani took aim at the media and fashion stylists. These two groups, he maintained, were responsible for the ultra-thin models now collapsing on runways around the world. My mother always told me to make sure I had on a pair of clean underpants in case I got run over by a taxi.
At least when these girls pass out (as one model recently did) from their diets of lettuce leaves and Diet Cokes, they will be dressed very elegantly. Is this really the fault of the media and the fashionista stylists? If only . . .
The fact is that there’s enough blame to go around for everyone to have a piece — the media for continuing to obsess about celebrities and their weight, the designers for designing size 00 clothes (hello?), and even parents (particularly mothers) for constantly obsessing about diets themselves (yes, that’s me). Media acts as a super-peer for our kids. We are our children’s role models. Fashionistas? They set out the standards of what constitutes glamour.
What’s really at issue here is not who’s to blame, but who is being hurt. And it’s our children. The number-one wish for girls ages 12-17 in this country is to be thinner. By the time a girl is 17, she will have received more than 250,000 messages about her appearance. As many as 10 million females and 1 million males are currently struggling with an eating disorder, and 40 percent of newly identified cases of anorexia occur in girls aged 15 to 19. And boys are affected, too. A sharp increase of eating disorders in young boys equals an alarming steroid use trend, as boys strive to have the washboard abs they see on the models in the Abercrombie and Fitch ads. (You know, those ads that don’t feature any clothes but are still selling them? Go figure.)
As a society, we have to break the equation of celebrity and boniness. We have to expose the Nicole Ritchies, the Kate Bosworths, the Mary Kate Olsens for who they are — emaciated young women who have caved under the culture’s pressure to be thin. This isn’t beauty, this is nuts. And the media, the fashion world, and parents must work together — not blame each other — to model and support common sense — and healthy models of beauty.
