There’s a scene in last year’s The Devil Wears Prada, the comedy about life as an underling at a high-fashion magazine helmed by the devilish Meryl Streep, in which new girl Anne Hathaway tries to choke down lunch before she’s due back at her desk.
“So none of the girls here eat anything?” she asks a more seasoned employee.
“Not since 2 became the new 4 and 0 became the new 2,” he says.”Well, I’m a 6,” Anne replies.
“Which is the new 14.”
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.
Always thin, models have become a breed of Incredible Shrinking Women.
Last August at a fashion show in Uruguay, Luisel Ramos, 22, suffered a heart attack, believed to be the result of anorexia.
Last September at the New York shows, the gaunt figures of the girls disturbed many observers. At the time, Allure magazine editor Linda Wells told The New York Times she could hear fellow audience members gasp at the sight of the frail models. “What becomes alarming is when you see bones and start counting ribs,” she said.
Later that month, Madrid Fashion Week banned underweight models, and by year’s end Italian designers began requiring that models submit proof that they don’t suffer from eating disorders.
And in November, a model named Ana Carolina Reston, 21, died of complications because of anorexia nervosa and bulimia. The 5-foot-7 Brazilian weighed 88 pounds.
In January, Spanish clothing chains Mango and Zara announced that over the next few years they would replace their skinny window mannequins with dummies more reflective of the average woman’s size.
Some naturally skinny
By the time New York Fashion Week rolled around in early February, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) had formed a health committee whose members include experts on nutrition, fitness and eating disorders. And one morning during Fashion Week, they held a panel discussion about their new recommendations, which include:
• Educating the industry about the early warning signs of eating disorders.
• Not hiring models under the age of 16 for runway shows and not allowing models under 18 to work past midnight at fittings and photo shoots.
• Supplying healthy snacks backstage and at shoots, and providing nutrition and fitness education.
If only industry-wide change were as easy as slipping a model out of one halter gown and into another.
The day of the panel discussion, Women’s Wear Daily ran a story about modeling’s newest faces — one of the featured girls was 15 years old.
And there was the unfortunate inclusion of diet pills in Fashion Week giveaway bags.
And the girls on the runway this season? Skinny as ever.
That probably didn’t surprise designer Michael Kors, who visited Palm Beach before Fashion Week and said he didn’t expect a sea change in the super-thin aesthetic.
“I don’t think we’re going to suddenly see the bodacious, curvy model reappear on the runway, and I don’t think she’s ever really been part of a runway season,” he said. “But I do think we’ll hopefully not see a lot of unhealthy girls out there.”
The thing is, Kors said, many models come by their extreme skinniness naturally.
“I think the public is perhaps not aware of how young some of these models are,” he said. “The reality is, when I was 16 years old I was super-skinny with not much effort. And a lot of these models are 16 and 15 years old. I think the problem is, if there’s no one around who’s responsible for them and they kind of step over the line and stop taking care of themselves…
“Let’s be honest. At 16, how many people are aware of what to eat and how to take care of themselves?” he said, noting that a lot of models come from poorer countries, like the Ukraine. “We have very few American models on the runway. In our entire casting of almost 35 women, we had two.”
At the CFDA’s panel discussion, Calvin Klein model Natalia Vodianova, 24, talked about how her poor childhood in Russia did not prepare her for the pressures of modeling.
When she moved to Paris to pursue modeling at the age of 17, she began comparing herself with other models and becoming consumed with thoughts about diet and exercise. As her weight plummeted, her hair fell out, and she said she was unusually edgy. “It was happening to me before I even realized it.”
And yet, her career took off.
But when the 5-foot-9 model got married and got back up to 115 pounds, some fashion houses called her agency and questioned her weight gain.
“You arrive (in the modeling business) as a healthy person,” Vodianova said. “I wasn’t aware that anything was wrong with me. I thought it was normal.”
Also at the CFDA breakfast, designer Donna Karan said most of the responsibility lies with a model’s family and agent: “The agency is the mother of the model or the father of the model.”
‘Supermodel’ size better
But it’s not up to agents, says Olympia Devine, a former model who has owned three modeling agencies and now produces Palm Beach Fashion Week.
“It’s easy enough for a designer to say that, but the industry itself dictates size. You have the designers producing sample collections that are one standard size,” she says. “Those sample collections are arriving like that from Europe and New York, and the sizing then becomes the agency’s responsibility to fill with the right models. It’s not the other way around.
“It’s almost a biological challenge to find that many girls that skinny, that height.”
At Bill Blass, creative director Michael Vollbracht fits on a model who’s a size 6 — “and a size 6 is not a regular woman, I’m sorry” — but scales down to a size 2 for the models who walk the Blass runway.
When he visited Palm Beach last month, he had already cast his show for New York Fashion Week. “And I said to my casting director, ‘Make sure this one has a hamburger before she comes,’ because we didn’t use certain girls last season because of their weight.”
Vollbracht, whose muses have included va-va-voomy Brigitte Bardot and petite but not painfully thin Jane Fonda, says he’d like to see “girls with a little more weight on them.”
He misses the glory days of the supermodels — “Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer and Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington, who were a little bit bigger girls, and they were wonderful.”
Why thin is in: Follow the money
Thin has always been in, designers say.
Well, not exactly.
Before the proliferation of highly processed foods and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, it was prestigious to be plump, explains Nancy Etcoff in Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty.
But when poor women began piling on the pounds because eating junk food is cheaper in the short run than eating whole foods, it became a sign of status to be thin.
“Extreme thinness is a fashion, a fashion set by the highest social classes, as most fashions are,” Etcoff writes.
Models in the latter half of the 20th century “have always been skinny — don’t forget Twiggy and don’t forget Kate Moss,” says designer Carolina Herrera. “If you show the clothes on skinny girls that look very good, everything looks good. There is a fantasy for women sitting in the audience dreaming that she’s going to look like them if she wears the clothes.”
Even though more than half of American women wear a size 14 or larger.
“We do live in a society where 60 percent of our society is obese,” says Johanna Kandel, founder and executive director of the West Palm Beach-based Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness. “It’s about getting rid of the extremes and living in the normal range.”
Kandel applauds fashion for addressing the issue.
“We shouldn’t only be pointing the finger at fashion. It’s pretty much our society that perpetuates this unrealistic standard of beauty….
“There’s a lot of adolescent females that look at these runway shows and the magazines. For me it’s just great that we’re starting with one specific aspect and hopefully it’ll continue.”
The central issue is one of health, Kors says.
“I don’t want to look at someone who’s big and unhealthy, and I don’t want to look at anyone who’s skinny and unhealthy. That’s the most important thing to kind of get out of this whole thing.”
And pressure to be thin doesn’t entirely emanate from Seventh Avenue, Kors says. “Listen, I think we have Hollywood, we have the New York social world… the front row is sometimes thinner than the runway.”
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