Yesterday I watched video one of really famous american YouTuber . She was talking about the lack of healthy models in fashion industry. She also told her a story about getting her first job as a plus size model. While she was on the lower end of healthy BMI. She felt incredibly intimidated and indignant and to be honest I don’t blame her. I felt the same way during watching this short video and that made me think fashion industries considers plus-sizes as something that is completely healthy.
I read some statistics and they showed that 94% of all fashion models that we can see in the runways, magazines, pictures etc are under weight. That perfectly show us the type of female body that the fashion industry approves and that is an under weight female body. For me it would make more sense if fashion industries used healthy, "normal" BMI models with the exceptions of under and overweight models. To somehow represent these type of woman. Overwhelming majority of models being used are extremely skinny and they are used to represent all women. As a young impressionable teenager i also get affected by the images, movies and all the media that I see on daily bases . I am also willing to judge myself more of how many imperfections my body has comparing to this " TV models". It can shape our opinions and I think that’s why our expectations are so high. Moreover I reckon that it has cost so many people ending up with eating disorders. It is such a toxic mental illness and I am personally a huge believer that the majority of eating disorders are caused by our unhealthy society. The way that woman are presented in media it’s not the models fault at all. Fashion brands and designers are the ones that are requesting for modeling agencies to give them underweight models. They do not accept a female body that has few extra pounds. It has to be noted that fashion industries have just 2 types of models bodies. The emaciated ones and plus sizes ones. It is worth mentioning that a lot of models are from low-income families from rural areas. They are just looking for the opportunity to get out of poverty and if they’re gonna have to starve to do that, they will. I am not surprised at all because whenever designers or fashion brands hire an underweight fashion models they create some kind of demand for the body type.
It’s important to point it out and verbalize it to make more people see how abnormal this whole fashion industry is and how much improvement has to be done.
