The-F-Word.org

While researching for a story, I ran across this article, The Unbearable Thinness of Being a Model.

Writer Emily Nussbaum presents an interesting causation as the transformation from the eighties’ Amazon supermodels to the emaciated bags-of-bones strutting across the runway today.

Models have dwindled in size, Nussbaum writes, because they’ve dwindled in stature – from bodacious superstars to nameless, faceless manual laborers with short shelf lives.

Models like Christy, Naomi, Cindy and Linda took up space, Nussbaum writes. They were stars. They made demands. And their faces were everywhere.

But today, many models are high-school dropouts, teenagers from poor countries, whose careers last a very short time. They are infinitely replaceable. Although top girls can make up to $100,000 in a week of shows, the vast majority get nowhere near that; some of the more prominent designers pay the girls only in clothes, says Nussbaum.

Just as Naomi Wolf has shown, there are forces in culture to punish women who seek more control over their lives and their environment. She speaks of a cultural backlash that uses images of female beauty to keep women “in their place.” Models today have gone from having all the power, to having relatively little. It’s no surprise as their autonomy has diminished, so too has their physical stature.

“One of the interesting things about these models today is that they get used and spit out so quickly,” says Magali Amadei, a model who has been open about her recovery from bulimia. “The era of the supermodel is over, so girls working today don’t have the earning power. These girls come into the business young, and they are disposable. On top of that, people often talk about your appearance in front of you, as if you can’t hear them.”

And it’s because models are working at such younger ages that the body aesthetic is so irreparably skewed: they’re displaying the bodies of children, not women. But a model who is effortlessly flat-chested and hipless at 14 will start to struggle as she hits her late teens, writes Nussbaum. If she’s already rising in the industry, she may find that she needs to take more- extreme measures to continue to fit the bony aesthetic.

Model Sabrina Hunter, now 27, says the pressure was so intense in the modeling world it literally required her to eat in a disordered way. At five-ten, Hunter was expected to be “115 or lower, preferably.” After she signed with an American agency, she was given a choice: Lose weight or gain and be a plus-size model. After trying to gain unsuccessfully, she went the opposite direction, eating 600 calories and jogging five miles a day.

Still Nussbaum asks, “Why are designers casting bodies that are, if not actively anorexic, practically indistinguishable from the girls at Renfrew?”

She presents two theories.

First, fashion in aspirational. And being thin means control and, symbolically, that you are rich, that you are young, that you are beautiful, that you are powerful.

Second, girls need to be skinny because they need to be invisible. The better the clothes, the more extreme the thinness.

“Models are quote-unquote hangers,” points out Kate Armenta, the booker for Vogue.

And just like eating disorders themselves, the controversy on overly-thin models isn’t about the food at all, concludes Nussbaum:

“It’s about the discomfort everyone feels when the girls in the gowns become visible, exposing not just their ribs but the strange vulnerability of their lives.”

Cross-posted on Disordered Times