Feel Good Friday: Sending a message to the message-makers

5th March 2010

Feel Good Friday: Sending a message to the message-makers

posted in Body Image, Eating Disorders, Fashion, Fat Bias, Rachel |

It’s Friday, the sky is blue, the sun is shining and I’m much too buoyant to dwell on frustrating and depressing news, so instead I’ll share some fuck-yeah! good news from the north. Canada’s National Eating Disorder Information Centre has teamed up with Toronto-based advertising agency Zulu Alpha Kilo to creatively combat unhealthy body images promoted by the fashion industry. The small-budget guerrilla-style advertising campaign involved sending fashion editors and brand marketing directors across the country a Hallmark-style greeting card which reads, “Thanks for helping to make me such a successful anorexic.” They also sent out T-shirts with an absurdly small waist featuring the message, “Please try this on to experience how your ads make us feel.” And an interactive transit shelter with a poster reading “Shed your weight problem here” currently functions as a garbage bin for fashion magazines, complete with a slot at the front which allows consumers to add their glossies to a growing stack of Glamour, Vogue, and Fashion magazines. The campaign’s broader goal asks marketers and fashion leaders to “cast responsibly and retouch minimally.”

More than half of all Canadian women diet, according to NEDIC, and one in four teenage girls engage in eating disordered behavior (in the U.S., it’s estimated that three out of four women have disordered eating and as many as 10 percent may have a full-blown eating disorder). The fashion industry often bears the brunt for instilling unhealthy body images in girls and women and while NEDIC director Merryl Bear acknowledges that “a range of factors” are at play when it comes to eating disorders, the organization’s goal, she said, was to “focus on different audiences at different times to look at a broad range of some of the influences on body image and disordered eating. We wanted to show that both the public and some fashion thinkers are ready for change. It may look provocative and edgy, but it is a very substantive campaign.”

NEDIC is collecting digital signatures for its petition, which asks fashion leaders and marketers to “broaden their definition of beauty and inspire us with looks that are beautiful and attainable.” Watch highlights from the campaign below (beware: the video contains potentially triggering images of emaciated models).

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Body Image, Eating Disorders, Fashion, Fat Bias, Rachel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On March 5th, 2010, Twistie said:

I’m on board! what’s more, I’ll be passing this information on to others.

posted on March 5th, 2010 at 6:09 pm

2 On March 5th, 2010, drummergrrrl said:

I understand where they’re coming from with this, but I don’t believe that EDs are necessarily tied to the fashion industry … I really didn’t develop bulimia because I wanted to look like a girl in a magazine, I did it to regain control of situations in my life.

In essence, doesn’t someone else kind of think this is a cop-out? I mean, body image is important, but we’re not tackling the substantive problems behind eating disorders (abuse, perfectionism, compulsions) when we focus on such a superficial issue. They’re taking the easy route, just like pinning a pink ribbon on any old thing now makes you a breast cancer advocate.

I think body image campaigns are great, but you should identify them as such, not correlate them to eating disorders. I’d like to see a campaign that delved a little deeper, examining more than just this obvious factor that is so often associated with EDs.

posted on March 5th, 2010 at 10:22 pm

3 On March 6th, 2010, Shinobu said:

I can say that fashion, magazines, and models have nothing to do with my disordered eating. It all came from having no control over my life and only really owning my body. It was only after I had been starving myself several months that I started to look at those magazines and using them to try to convince myself I wasn’t good enough.

It would be better if they just ran it as a body image campaign. Saying it has anything to do with fashion or the media just makes me feel worse about myself, like I only have problems because I’m shallow.

posted on March 6th, 2010 at 12:20 am

4 On March 6th, 2010, Rachel said:

I think we all agree that fashion itself doesn’t cause eating disorders, but I do believe that the images promoted by fashion leaders and marketers create a culture and environment in which thinness is not only a socially acceptable “goal” to aspire towards, but may also consciously and subconsciously predispose us to using food — instead of, say, alcohol or drugs — as a means of dealing with the larger emotional and biological issues influencing eating disorder development. You don’t have to follow fashion mags and trends to be affected by the messages it promotes.

posted on March 6th, 2010 at 2:10 am

5 On March 6th, 2010, Susan said:

I totally agree with Drummergirl. I had bulimia in my early 20s and it had absolutely nothing to do with wanting to look like media images, and everything to do with regaining control and dealing with anxiety.

While, as Rachel points out ‘the images promoted by fashion leaders and marketers create a culture and environment in which thinness is a socially acceptable “goal” to aspire towards’, I feel that this campaign in trivializing and over-simplifying the issues.

Also, the image which appears in the advert of an emaciated model lying on the floor has obviously been Photoshopped – I find it extremely difficult to believe that this image was used in a publication or advert. Using fake photos like this undermines the credibility of the campaign.

posted on March 6th, 2010 at 10:04 pm

6 On March 8th, 2010, Rachel said:

@Susan: You have to start somewhere, wouldn’t you agree? Frankly, I feel that given the current British invection against Photoshopping and other related events, the time is ripe for a PSA against marketers and fashion leaders.

posted on March 8th, 2010 at 12:33 pm

7 On March 8th, 2010, Twistie said:

I do agree that EDs are about control, rather than a desire to follow fashion. However, I would argue that the fashion industry and related industries present weight as completely within individual control and also normalize the concept of eating far too little food or ridding the body of food as either neutral or actively positive acts. These industries do not in and of themselves CAUSE eating disorders, but they do contribute hugely to a world where EDs can easily go unnoticed far too long, raising the danger of severe health complications and even death.

Will this campaign stop EDs? Of course not. It would be painfully naive to think so. On the other hand, if the fashion industry stopped encouraging women to be thinner, ever thinner to prove their worth and their self-control (there’s that concept again!), perhaps more sufferers would get help faster because trying to survive on air and determination or purging would be more readily recognized as the unhealthy symptoms they are.

As for the extreme photoshopping, campaign after campaign includes just such extreme photoshopping. See the recent flap over Ralph Lauren’s use of images of women photoshopped to the point where their heads are bigger than their hips, as if they were very tall Bratz dolls. I may not be able to comment specifically on the image included in this post, but I can absolutely point to plenty of equally extreme images that have definitely been used in actual campaigns.

posted on March 8th, 2010 at 2:17 pm

8 On March 9th, 2010, Amy (No More Thinspo) said:

I dream of doing something like this. ^0^

posted on March 9th, 2010 at 7:42 pm

9 On March 11th, 2010, Jackie said:

You won’t believe this. Alright, someone posted on a board about having a muffin top. So I gave them my usual, don’t worry about it join fat acceptance. After awhile of explaining how ridiculous fat prejudice has become, the thread turned into a thin prejudice thread. I’m serious, these people were saying how nobody understands how terrible it is to have people assume you have an eating disorder because you’re thin. While I’m sure that sucks, it doesn’t mean they have to pay twice the price of another person to ride an airplane.

I mean, really, I just don’t understand people. They’re all trying to convince me that there’s supposedly so much support out there for fat people, and nobody cares about the plight of thin people. How can people be that narccistic, or that ignorant of the world around them?

posted on March 11th, 2010 at 4:36 am