Anna Wintour quite surprisingly spoke out against extreme model thinness recently, while appearing on a panel about model health and eating disorders in Boston. Wintour spoke of the “tyranny of [sample] clothes that just barely fit a 13-year-old on the edge of puberty.”
It’s also simply bad for girls in the fashion business. She thinks the practice is what has lead to the lack of supermodels on the fashion scene in the last decade:
“Most [models] work only when they have the uberslim physique of the very young, stop getting jobs when they fill out and hence don’t last long enough to develop public personalities, like the Nineties supermodels did. As a result, more magazine covers and lucrative beauty contracts have gone to singers and actresses.”
Bottom line: skinny models are practically FORCING Wintour to put Miley Cyrus on the cover! HO NO.
Still, it’s a shame nobody at the event asked her about the recent catty rumors that Precious actress Gabourey Sidibe was “banned” from appearing in Vogue.
Wintour’s words conicide with other ripples in the fashion world. Elle France recently featured 32 pages to plus size fashion and Italian Vogue has a section of its online content dedicated to this topic. Wintour currently does not stock the pages of her publication with plus size models. New York Mag points out that Vogue’s April ‘Shape’ issue does have a few pictures of plus size model Kate Dillon in one of the stories, but the rest of the spreads feature only the usual leggy beanpoles.
But it still makes one wonder, are these signs the industry is melting a bit on this body image front or is it just a trend – or a cop out? It’s easy to say a few things here and there and continue with business as usual on those glossy pages.
Photo via Vogue
