Models' threat to sue blocked size zero ban-RESEARCH

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/feb/11/deniscampbell.vanessathorpe 

Attempts to ban size-zero models from catwalks could lead to ultra-skinny models taking legal action for discrimination, leading fashion industry figures have warned. Pressure is building on designers and model agencies to use larger women at shows and photographic shoots amid claims that images of the very slim are contributing to eating disorders. New moves to restrict the use of very thin models, and to limit the production of clothes which are designed to fit only women of that shape, will be discussed by a task force which the industry is setting up in response to growing criticism.
However, Alexandra Shulman, the editor of Vogue and a member of the London Fashion Council, said: 'We would not be allowed to discriminate in that way. It would be like saying you can't have black or white models. By imposing new rules on models' size, you would be trying to prove whether someone was ill or well.'
Shulman argued that the fashion industry should not be singled out when other professions which have skinny women in prominent roles, such as broadcasting and acting, are also influential. 'No reputable agency uses models who are not well and starvation is just one of the problems. Drugs is a big one. And their psychological health is important too', she said.
Melissa Richardson, a director of Take Two model agency, which represents supermodels Jasmine Guinness and Sophie Dahl, said industry leaders had warned the government that a ban on size-zero models would be unworkable. 'It was one of the points we made. You can't say to models, "you can't work because you are black or because you are blind", so why should you be able to say "you are too thin to work"?.
'Although being thin is a prerequisite for this kind of work, it's also important that you eat well. Lots of models eat a lot and stay thin. They do not deserve to be pilloried. They have got more litigious,' said Richardson, who has worked in the industry for 25 years.
Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, a prominent critic of size-zero models, yesterday recommended that models on display at London Fashion Week, which starts today, should undergo medical checks before appearing in designer shows. The British Fashion Council, which runs the event, has already refused to bow to calls to follow the lead of its counterparts in Milan, Madrid and New York by banning 'unhealthy' models whose body mass index is less than 18.5.
Susan Ringwood, chief executive of the Beating Eating Disorders campaign group, said the situation was far more complicated. Some women with a BMI of under 18.5 can still be healthy while others whose BMI is above 18.5 may still suffer from a condition such as bulimia, said Ringwood. Size zero equates to a size four in British women's clothing.
Meanwhile, fashion industry personnel will be trained how to spot signs that models have eating disorders under plans intended to banish criticism that the trade is damaging young women's health. Bookers and other model agency staff would learn to detect physical and emotional symptoms of anorexia and bulimia such as a model becoming very secretive about what she eats, undergoing fluctuations in her weight, seeing her hair or skin turn lifeless and knowing the calorie content of foods but eating little.
Discreet wallet-sized advice cards would also be available at model agencies and fashion shows as a way of encouraging women to seek help.

Dove Campaign-RESEARCH

Dove: a clean campaign?

Unilever's toiletry brand Dove has become a household name thanks to its 'Campaign for Real Beauty' which uses real women in ads to challenge the notions of stick-thin, air-brushed beauty pushed by the media. But is Dove's campaign as clean as it seems?

The campaign kicked off in 2003 with ads featuring six ordinary women in their underwear, and it obviously struck a chord - sales of Dove's skin-firming lotion increased by 700%.

And last year consumers were asked to make judgment about a series of photos of women who didn't fit the glossy mag mould. Was a plus-sized woman oversized or outstanding? Was a woman with small breast half empty or half full?

Now Dove has launched its next campaign aimed squarely at young girls and teenagers. According to Dove's research six out of 10 teenage girls think they would be happier if they were thinner and while 30% of eight- to 12-year-old girls want to be slimmer.

Rather than promoting a product, Dove's new campaign promotes a fund set up to donate money to charities that promote wellbeing and raise self-esteem. It has also produced a schools teaching resource which aims to help pupils understand and cope with how they feel about their physical appearance.

All well and good. But is it? Are the methods Dove is using to sell soap, lotions and potions less insidious than those used by brands that perpetuate the myth of female physical perfection and persist in peddling the sexualisation of women?

Dove can surely be commended for making an effort to change perceptions of beauty in advertising, however we shouldn't get carried away.

Take the first campaign, the six real women in white underwear. The unusualness use of women in the ad glosses over the fact that the product it is pushing is a skin firming lotion. If the women shown were that happy with your bodies they wouldn't need a skin-firming lotion. L'Oreal was criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority for making "misleading" claims about a similar kind of cellulite cream.

The new campaign, says Dove, aims to encourage adult women to help girls and teenagers feel better about themselves. But if girls as young as eight are concerned about their appearance, they are also ideal targets as the new generation of beauty product consumers, ripe to get hooked on a particular brand. Dove, say.

And what of the BodyTalk educational packs produced by Dove to tie-in with its new campaign? Is it admirable that a brand has produced glossy packs with free DVDs for schools? Or is it just one more example of the invidious way brands are infiltrating our classrooms and marketing to children by stealth, playing on under-funded and time-poor teachers.

Meanwhile let us not forget that Dove is made by Unilever, one of the world's largest consumer good companies, which also produces Lynx, Lux, Sunsilk and Timotei.

The entire advertising proposition for Lynx, one of the most successful grooming products for young men, relies on the sexualisation of women. What Dove gives with one hand, Unilever's other brands take away with the other

Moral Panics in the Fashion industry-RESEARCH

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 fashion Week 2008; size zero models were still seen on the catwalks. All hell broke loose again; what was Britain thinking? It was showing that the fashion industry is not to blame

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?

Print Advertising-RESEARCH

Skinny model is airbrushed to make her look FATTER on front cover of health magazine

Holland & Barrett has been plunged into a row over size-zero models after airbrushing a shockingly thin girl to make her appear curvier and healthier.
The health food giant altered the body of Polish model Kamilla Wladyka in an attempt to conceal how thin she was when she appeared on the April cover of its customer magazine - called Healthy.
Jane Druker, editor of the magazine that promotes 'health and wellbeing', told a debate on digital modifying or 'retouching': 'We had to put on about half a stone.'

Too thin: Kamilla Wladyka was so skinny in real life that her image was airbrushed to make her fuller-figured on the front cover of Healthy magazineMiss Druker claimed Miss Wladyka had appeared healthy during casting, but looked too thin to feature on the magazine's cover on the day of the photo shoot a week later.
'There were plenty of clothes that we couldn't put on her because her bones stuck out too much,' Miss Druker said.

'She looked beautiful in the face, but really thin and unwell. That's not a reflection of what we do in our magazine, which is about good health.'
The airbrushing comes after years of controversy that has often seen pictures of models altered to make them look thinner.
And it will fuel concerns about the size zero culture, where increasingly slender models continue to be hired.
Critics say this puts pressure on young women to follow suit and leads to eating disorders.
The details on Miss Wladyka's modelling card, provided by her agency, claim that she is a size 6, with a 24 inch waist.However Gerard-Chevalier, a psychotherapist and former fashion photographer who took part in the debate organised by Leni's Model Management, said Miss Druker had told him the image was enhanced to make the model appear two to three stone heavier.
Eleni Renton, of Leni's Model Management, said: 'When magazines start changing body shape, it becomes unhealthy.
'That girl probably should have been sent home from the shoot.'
Holland & Barrett, which has nearly 550 stores in Britain, was unavailable for comment last night.

Girl bands more damaging than size zero models-RESEARCH

The Pussycat Dolls, Girls Aloud and the Sugababes... Apparently watching them could be bad for your health. That is, according to new research from Sussex University who found that music videos produced by girl bands are adversely affecting teenagers more so than size zero models. "The imagery is far more potent and the risk factors are so much more powerful," Dr Johnson, chief executive of the Eating Disorders Foundation, told Sydney's The Sunday Telegraph.

In a recent study of 90 participants from an all-girls college, aged 16 to 18, the results showed that watching music videos by girl groups had greater potential to produce negative body image than watching video of thin models. The fact that teenagers have more access to music videos than catwalk shows is also being used as a reason.

"Additionally, the findings showed that girls with both high and low self-esteem were equally vulnerable to the negative impact of music videos on their body image," said researcher Dr Helga Dittmar.

Outspoken singer for The Gossip, Beth Ditto has been used as an alternative to the ultra-thin look. Her continuous criticism of super skinny models and celebrities including Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham plus her recent cover for NME magazine where she appears nude has helped earn her her own pin-up status.

Postmodernism in Fashion-RESEARCH

Postmodernism in fashion has developed over the past twenty years with designers such as, Comme des Garçons, Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood demonstrating its key elements. So how is Postmodernism still relevant in fashion today?

Postmodernism has been widely used over the past two decades, but trying to pinpoint one definitive meaning for the term is very difficult indeed. Taken literally Postmodernism means “after the modernist movement”, but there is more to Postmodernism than that. One thing that is certain is Postmodernism is a flexible term that can cover a wide range of art forms. Critical theorists use Postmodernism to refer to a point of deviation for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema and design.

Originally, Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Malcolm Barnard explains “where modernity conceived of the object in terms of production, Post modernity conceives of it in terms of consumption”. This means that all forms of art are made with the sole purpose of being ‘consumed’ and with a main target of postmodernism being to appeal to a wider audience the two go hand in hand. Postmodernism can also be used to describe the society in which we live in today:

So how does Postmodernism relates to Fashion? As mentioned above, postmodernism embraces all Art forms, one of the Art forms embraced by Postmodernism has been Fashion. Not always seen as “Art” and still frowned upon in this context by many traditional Art lovers, Fashion embodies many of the key elements of postmodernism, evidence of this can be seen on the international catwalks of the veteran and latest fashion designers.
Besides the established designers and representatives of postmodernism such as Maison Martin Margiela, Vivienna Westwood, Comme des Garçons and Hussein Chalayan, more recently, also new designers are using the influence of postmodernism in their collections. Constantly looking forward to the future of fashion but drawing from it’s past.Nothing seems to be too controversial for us anymore; we have seen and done it all. So, seeing a model walking down the catwalk in a see-through dress with nothing but her knickers on doesn’t cause the controversy it would thirty years ago. It doesn’t seem sexual or provocative in the slightest, women’s bodies aren’t just objects of desire anymore. We have the same status as men in many aspects, to me, this image shows women’s empowerment. Although, some feminists would disagree, Elizabeth Wilson points out,

“Now, feminists have begun to explore the meanings of fashionable and other kinds of dress. This exploration has gone against the grain of traditional feminist suspicion of fashionable dress: many feminists reject fashion because of the way in which it reinforces the sexual objectification of women; for it’s association with conspicuous consumption and the positioning of women as economic chattels, as property, and because it is held to be uncomfortable and to render women helpless (high heels and pinched-in waists, for example, can impede movement).”

“Postmodernism gestures towards all this in a word. The terms ‘post-modernism’ and ‘postmodern’ have seeped into semi-popular language as short-hand for a vague, general ‘zeitgeist’ (spirit of the times).”

RESEARCH

Fashion, especially catwalk shows, has always been considered a bit bonkers. The truth is anything postmodern can be considered a bit out of the box because it defies its traditional conventions and creates its own style. Postmodernism in fashion and design has developed mainly over the last 20 years with designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen demonstrating its key elements. For example, the relationships between art and popular culture have been revised, as art is no longer a just painting on a wall, but an abstract garment that is available for the public to wear. Fashion designs which were previously only available for the very elite with cash to splash are now being brought into popular culture for example contestants on the X factor are often seen wearing high fashion labels such as Valentino. The collections are constructed products and designers are influenced by the postmodern element of bricolage, of using a mix of the old designs and conventions with new ideas and create an entirely new design, for example a 60’s hippy influence mixed with 80’s grunge. It’s the most obvious example of style over substance for example the intensely ripped jeans from a collection from Maison Martin Margiela. Celebrities can be seen sporting similar styles, which aren’t at all practical for everyday life yet people buy into this celeb-obsessed culture, even though there isn’t actually a lot of clothing for the money you may pay. But“that’s fashion”.

In reference to the decline of the meta narrative according to Strinati’s criteria, there is now no ‘one style’ people must adhere to to be accepted in society. Due to the fashion crazes, walking down the high street, you can see how fashion has shaken up the traditional styles. Genders have been merged for example through ‘geek chic’, women’s trouser suits and loafers, in fact menswear inspired style was a major fashion trend last season.There is no ignoring the fact that fashion is a postmodern way to express one's individuality. Examples can be seen all over the high street, with branding and trends being the ulimate selling point. It's constantly changing and this is why fashion is my favourite example of post-modernity.