As someone who is doing her best to foster a career in the fashion business, I feel very strongly about how the fashion industry fetishises the super-tall, super-skinny teenager body type, and knowingly bullies young, impressionable girls (and boys) into losing weight they really shouldn’t be losing. I think it’s pretty obvious to most of us that there is a dark, abusive side to the fashion industry. It is completely immoral to systematically destroy the self esteem of struggling young models and, consequently, the “ordinary” folk who buy the magazines, in order to sell clothes and make money. Glamourising an unattainable ideal of beauty (unattainable for most people without serious consequences to their health) has dangerous implications for the mental and physical wellbeing of those within the industry, and those who follow it from the outside. Healthy-looking people are beautiful. Sickly, exhausted-looking people are not. No matter what height and weight they are.
Coco Rocha wrote this excellent piece about all this. Here it is:
http://oh-so-coco.tumblr.com/post/1480452881/my-uncensored-point-of-view
Fashion photographer Melissa Rodwell has also discussed it:
http://www.fashionphotographyblog.com/2008/12/taking-responsibility-in-the-fashion-industry/
