Fashion advertising: What is it really doing to us?
Advertising is all around us. You can’t step outside your front door without a company shoving their product in your face; in fact, you don’t even need to step outside. Years ago, advertising consisted of a few adverts on the television and in the newspaper. Nowadays, they’re on the television, on the radio, in the newspaper, cities are filled with billboards of companies advertising their products, and even social networks have started advertising other companies. We can’t escape advertising. One area of advertising that has affected the minds of women, men and young children all over the world is that of fashion. The media places so much more coverage on fashion these days that it’s hard for anyone to ignore it. Fashion is, and always has been, a big influence on people’s lives, so much, that sometimes it has a bad effect and causes problems such as, moral panics. 
One of the more recent moral panics that had arisen was the issue of size zero. The fashion industry was instantly blamed, but was it entirely their fault? As more size zero models appeared on the catwalk and designers started manufacturing their clothes in size zero, there was an increase in the number of stories about anorexia and bulimia. Who’s fault? The fashion industry’s. I can’t say I agree – I’m not saying I agree with size zero models or clothing either, because I don’t – but the media seemed very keen to publish stories about people, models and girls in particular, that had an eating disorder. Fair enough young children and adults want to look like the models in magazines and choose to change their appearance in order for this to happen. But, eating disorders were a part of our society a long time before size zero came along. As the fashion industry started getting bad publicity they began to put things right. The majority of countries banned size zero models from the catwalk; Britain was one of the last countries to do so – London Britain
Advertising is all around us. You can’t step outside your front door without a company shoving their product in your face; in fact, you don’t even need to step outside. Years ago, advertising consisted of a few adverts on the television and in the newspaper. Nowadays, they’re on the television, on the radio, in the newspaper, cities are filled with billboards of companies advertising their products, and even social networks have started advertising other companies. We can’t escape advertising. One area of advertising that has affected the minds of women, men and young children all over the world is that of fashion. The media places so much more coverage on fashion these days that it’s hard for anyone to ignore it. Fashion is, and always has been, a big influence on people’s lives, so much, that sometimes it has a bad effect and causes problems such as, moral panics.
As the fashion industry started getting bad publicity they began to put things right. The majority of countries banned size zero models from the catwalk; Britain was one of the last countries to do so – London Britain
All this said the size zero panic was over almost as soon as it started. Now the media and fashion industry have a new approach – “real” women. The idea of using women of all shapes and sizes on the catwalk, in magazines and to emphasis the fact that everyone is beautiful. This hasn’t caught on everywhere though, some modeling companies still refuse to use models bigger than size 8, claiming that they are “too large”. Dove has created a campaign – Campaign for Real Beauty – it shows women off all ages, all shapes and women with “imperfections”; they aim to free us and the next generation from beauty stereotypes. Already a large number of people have taken part in the campaign, but will it work, or will the idea of “real beauty” be dismissed by a new image craze?
The constant approval, by others, for us to be thin and look ideal is a great pressure, and it is destroying lives. Yes, the majority of models and thin, but do we all want to see a larger women in the designer’s clothes, or do we want to hold onto the idea that some of us can look that good?
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