THIRD & FINAL YEAR!

bring on the stress!

MSVC 206 - Media In Practice - Blog

Media In Practice - MSVC 206 – Blog.

This document is going to present my self-evaluation throughout my last academic year, highlighting my strengths and weaknesses and in conclusion ways to improve. Also explored in this document is my chosen field of employment the reasons behind wishing to pursue it and stated are the skills and qualifications I will need to gain before achieving my dream career. Included also is a interview with a current lecturer which helped gain a real understanding on my chosen future career. Finally this document ends with the insight into the media industry we have had the experience to witness through our media in practice module.

This section will self-evaluate my academic last year. Throughout the time studying Media studies and visual cultures I have especially enjoyed learning the theories, feminism in general, as I have enjoyed learning the history of the suffragettes and being educated on the fight women have had in order to try and gain equality to men, especially post-feminism where women are seen as equal. I have enjoyed experiencing myself improve academically. Learning to plan my essays from introduction to conclusion has been a massive help and made the word counts as well as content less daunting. Learning to write academically has also been a positive and enjoyable experience, which has reflected in my grades. Another positive matter throughout the course is the career I aim to achieve, before starting the course I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I am now aiming to become a teacher or a lecturer. It has given me an insight into the media industry and helped me decide on a career in which I want to pursue. There are many ways in which I’ve changed and improved during the last year. The most beneficial factor in how I’ve changed is welcoming and enjoying being more responsible and for the first time in my life, becoming organised which I now fully rely on in order to go about my day. Another big factor in how I’ve changed is my effort I have applied to my degree, the want to do well and taking pride in every task I complete academically, I really care about my grades and I want to do as well as possible, so throughout the last year I have gained so much ambition and am now very proud of myself and the work I am doing. A big way in which I’ve also changed is my attendance. This year and last term I hardly missed any lecturers, which reflects in my work, as well as my knowledge, which I think is a very big improvement. I think my strengths lie in organisation in regards to organising myself appropriately for lectures, for example having read the notes needed for the days lecture as well as having a general background knowledge on the topic being taught that day. This has been beneficial as it gives me a greater understanding on the subject. Another strength in relation to the course is in assignments that we innovate a title for. For example, in the Gender and Sexuality content analysis essay, I seem to have more strengths than in an essay with a specific question. I also have good strength in researching information, whether it is on theories or gaining information in preparation for my assignments. The core strength I have is the effort I give to any task, from constructing essays to researching relevant information, organising myself or the tasks we’re given in class. I always try the best to my ability. The ways in which I feel I have been restricted in achieving is due to with my lack of confidence, which is slowly beginning to improve. I feel it has hampered my learning due to being really shy when it comes to the classroom, which has effected my interaction in class topics. My lack of confidence in my ability has also been a negative aspect, due to spending time worrying on failure and my lack of ability instead of concentrating on my strengths. Another issue I feel has hampered my learning is the failure to answer the question properly. Instead of answering what the assignment title is asking me, I tend to write all I know on the subject instead of answering any question. A definite disadvantage I have, through no fault but my own, is the attendance at the start of the course, due to personal reasons, which has left me without the basic knowledge on approaching media studies and cultural studies. I have seen the error of my ways and completely changed yet I am still effected by the lack of attendance, especially in relation to analysing text, which I have always had a weakness in. There are many ways in which I can improve for next year, which would start with my self-belief. Hopefully the hard work I put into the last assignments will give me confidence academically so I continue to strive to be better and continue to work hard. I also think building my confidence will help me in every aspect of my life, especially academically. I think this could be achieved by interacting in class more, which will make presentations less daunting, also by reading further in academic books will help with my confidence, improve my vocabulary and improve my work as a whole. Spending more time in the library will hopefully reflect better grades and give a greater understanding. Practicing will be a big way in which I am going to improve. Practicing presentations will be beneficial in order to gain better grades as my work will be more coherent and hopefully my confidence will increase as I will have gone over my work and practiced it to an audience before presenting it in class. Also practicing analysing text will be very beneficial to me as it is a weakness I have and through practice I will gradually become better at it. I have had two jobs since starting my degree as well as voluntary work at a youth club. I did volunteer work at the Woodville youth club which gave me a good insight into working with youth and expanding my interest further as I learned what it involves, as well as expanding my interest in it, it made me feel good about myself and gave my life more substance, it is something I wish to do in the future and benefits me as it looks good on my CV.The first job I had since I moved to Cardiff was in the café in Roath Park, it helped build my CV, confidence and gave me an income, it also was a key factor in structuring my life. Last October I was employed by Soho coffee, I learned to use a coffee machine which will be very useful if I need to find another job, as it is a good skill to have living in a city which has various coffee houses, it was also another job on my CV and helped confidence building as well as being a regular income. It was a very strong base in structuring my life, despite finding it quite difficult to hold down a job as well as writing essays it was very useful to have a job over the Christmas holidays, not only as a sense of an income but also giving me something to do. This next section addresses my chosen future career. The area of media employment that I aim to have a career in is teaching. I am aiming to be lecturer in a college; either media or culture and once I have gained the appropriate qualifications I hope to teach in University. I am aiming to do a full time PGCE over one year after graduating, which stands for Postgraduate Certificate in Education which would develop my teaching skills, the qualifications needed for this are GCSE’s in maths and english language as well as a degree or qualifications to a similar standard. There are various reason why this area of employment interests me. The fact that I would then have a job which would allow me to travel which is a dominant theme in why I wish to pursue this career path. Despite the hard work, it seems like a fun job, I think the prospect of teaching would be enjoyable as I would be closely working with people so it would never be dull or boring. I would also be a factor in watching a young person realise their potential and achieve success, everyday I would be helping somebody conduct their own future which I think would be a really rewarding prospect as well as a fun experience to witness and have a helping hand in. I would also have the freedom and independence in regards to how I teach my students and give them the relevant information they need. In researching becoming a teacher or a lecture I have noticed the creativity in regards to lesson planning. I would have job security, in relation to other media jobs, teachers and lecturers are always needed. This gives me confidence in the career, as I don’t want to train for a job that I have no security in. After gaining some experience, I hope to travel and teach. I have researched the need for teacher’s abroad, especially Australia, under the age of 30 and worked as a teacher for 3 years would more than likely qualify and are in need. Yet before teaching the subject I have studied in I plan to travel the world teaching English as a second language. There are various skills needed within teaching. Planning would be significant within the job description, making sure the lectures have the right valid information the students need, also the information needs to be taught in the most beneficial way for them in order to learn. Housekeeping and recording tasks, for example keeping track of student’s attendance and recording students grades, good house keeping will reflect a good organised class room which will be beneficial in every aspect. Managing student conduct, so students are aware of the rules and disciplines. The consequences for not submitting work and for poor attendance would have to be very clear for the students. Presenting subject material, method of delivery is very important so the students are engaged and not only understand the subject but the subject is as enjoyable as possible in order for people to want to learn. Assessing student learning, whilst the subject is being taught the students would need to be aware in how it relates to their examination, the instruction would be built around assessments and finally meeting professional obligations, for example being at lecture and teacher meetings.

I decided to interview a lecturer in UWIC who’s currently lecturing Media studies and visual cultures, Catherine Davies. She is also a part-time graduate student at UWIC, researching Stardom and Iconic status. Her career did not stem from wanting to become a lecturer, she was interested in film and was working as a film critic, and her choice to go into the direction that she headed in was a choice so that she could nurture her interest in film into other people. Due to there being no direct media studies or film studies courses at that particular time, she opted for teaching so she had the opportunity to combine her love of film and the aspect of teaching a passion to other people in which she found rewarding. Her main link to her career was her love of film and found the one way she could pursue this was to teach. She started with a degree in English and Drama and throughout her degree became heavily interested in the academic prospects of the film and media subjects combined within her degree. After finishing her degree she studied evening classes in a-level media and film and then went on to do her PGCE in further and higher education as she knew the age range she wanted to be teaching, it took her two years to complete this as she was doing it part time whilst still being a film critique. She had work placement in Glan Hafren College, Cardiff, which was unpaid until she was given a paid job teaching a-level students. After teaching at Glan Hafren she then went on to do a post-grad diploma in media and education whilst continuing to teach at Glan Hafren, she taught there for ten years before coming to UWIC to become a lecturer, whilst teaching at UWIC she is also working on her PHD. She has taught for a total of 14 years. Despite her claim that it is not a 9 to 5 job and that your work does continue after hours, and due to popular culture always changing she is always having to update her case studies, she also stressed the hard work that goes into it, the dedication needed and the passion in order to pursue a good state of mind. She also noted it is not a career which brings in that much money. Her positive feedback on being a lecturer was her passion of her subject which still remains with her to this very day, she claimed her passion has been evident within her teaching encouraging students and hoping it will rub off, she has never lost belief in that what she is doing is worthwhile and throughout her career has managed to deepen her understanding on her subjects and feels that she is alive when she’s standing in front of her class teaching. The interview was very positive and beneficial, it deepened my ambition to become a lecturer. After interviewing Cath it made me think deeper into my chosen field, it embedded the hard work and the demanding hours, yet the positive points outweighed the negative and I still wish to continue with this career path. Interviewing Cath was a very positive factor; it gave me a real insight into teaching. This next section will state and explore in an objective manner, jobs within the media industry. Throughout media in practice we have had the opportunity to see into the media industry as we have had various guest lecturers giving us a talk on their career.
In the introductory lecturer the assessment was presented, as well as a briefing on how to produce a bibliography correctly and how to reference appropriately, this was very beneficial as referencing at times can be confusing. In the second lecture we were presented with how to conduct a CV in the correct manner, this was extremely beneficial as I had not included a ‘skills’ section which is vital in order for an employer to see my skills outside of my qualifications. As a class we also looked into the stereotypes that are related to certain jobs. Firstly was Tom Evans, who was from Leeds and managed to get a job in advertising, he presented to us working in advertising and brand communications. He works at the company ‘Ogilvy’ in advertising department. Throughout the talk Tom showcased many advertisements in which his team had made, including Levis and Dove. He also presented the importance of slogans in order to affirm brand loyalty. Hellmann’s and Ford are also clients of Ogilvy. He described his job as dynamic and creative. He had to do team working exercises in his job interview, which included being given a brief and him and his team had to come up with an appropriate advertisement which suited the brief, many people tried out yet he was lucky enough to get the job. Before he managed to get a place at Ogilvy he had taught in Japan as well as doing a degree in film and media.The skills he mentioned for the job would be creativity as well as imagination in order to attempt to create an original advertisement, he also mentioned people would have to be quite thick skinned in the sense of working really hard on an advertisement yet it does not necessarily mean that you would get the slot in order to showcase your advertisement for their product. We were also given the opportunity to see around Media Wales which is a media company belonging to Trinity Mirror. It is based in Cardiff and produces up to 15 newspapers including Wales on Sunday, South Wales Echo and the Western Mail. It also produces magazines including N.W, the women’s magazine. They also have an interactive website which is constantly bringing breaking news. Despite the shift in technology and there now being a website for people to read the news, newspapers still bring in most of the money. We got the opportunity to see throughout the building, from the conference rooms to the open plan rooms which where the different departments were working, from advertising to the editors.

To conclude, I feel I have improved dramatically throughout my degree not only academically but also personally, I feel I have a long way to go and improving my confidence is crucial to every aspect of my life that I intend to work on. I feel like my independence has grown dramatically and I thoroughly enjoy my course. Despite my weaknesses, I am very proud of everything I have achieved, focusing on my strengths and how much I have improved throughout my time studying Media and Culture. I am very happy and positive about the chosen career in which I hope to pursue, I am quietly confident that providing I put a lot of hard work into it I can become a very successful teacher, and I hope one day to go back to education and complete a PHD or definitely involve myself in more education as it has been a pleasant experience. Finally, seeing an insight into different jobs has been useful as I have been able to see into jobs I had never considered yet it only reinforced my existing ideas about the media industry being very competitive, something I am not comfortable with. Seeing other media jobs has also strengthened my ambition to be a teacher as I figure it will be a very suitable and rewarding job for me.



Bibliography

Employment and job opportunities for teachers: Australian migration associates Ltd, Available from: http://www.australiamigrate.co.uk/teachers.htm [accessed: 20/04/09]
Hesmondhalgh, D (2007) The Cultural Industries, London: Sage.
Postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) – postgraduate teacher training – TDA, Available from: http://www.tda.gov.uk/Recruit/thetrainingprocess/typesofcourse/postgraduate/pgce.aspx [accessed: 20/04/09]
‘Your career’ – module on blackboard.

AMSTERDAM 26th-29th march 09 (George's 21st Birthday)

Presentation: Resarch methods: Dissertation!

‘WITHOUT FEMINISM WE WOULDN’T HAVE VOGUE’
Intro
For the next ten minutes I am going to present my chosen topic for my dissertation, the reason why I’ve chosen it, the existing literature that relates to my question and the methodology I will use.
I will be applying the post-feminist theory to a range of female orientated magazines, the magazines I have chosen are Vogue and Heat.
The research will attempt to provide a definition of the post-feminist theory and apply it to two constrasting magazines focusing on the binary oppositional between high and low culture, in my research I will be notifying the differences and similarities between the two magazines.

Existing Literature
Sarah Gamble - Companion to feminism & post-feminism
Anthea Taylor - Popular culture & post-feminism
Budgeon S. & Currie D.H - From feminism to post-feminism - women’s liberation in fashion magazines
John Storey - Cultural theory & popular culture - an intro.
Anna gough-Yates - Understanding women’s magazines: publishing, markets & readerships.
Janet Helen Legge - Post-feminism in cosmo: a critical analysis.
Kate helburn - Media representations of women: conflicting definitions of femininity in cosmo/reveal.

Angela McRobbie - The aftermath of feminism - gender, culture and social change.
‘Which is that post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed, it is a spend force,’ (McRobbie, 2009: 12)
Throughout her book Angela talks about:
- Post-feminism in popular culture/Britain
- Post-feminism in cultural-politics
- Post-feminism in education
- Post-feminism in everyday life

‘The media has become the key side for defining codes of sexual conduct. It casts judgement and establishes the rules of play across these many channels of communication feminism is routinely disparaged,’ (McRobbie, 2009: 15-16)
Why?
My particular expertise lies in Visual Culture, especially gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality is where my interest lies, it is the favourite subject I’ve studied throughout my degree, the reason behind this is due to my interest in the way in which women are represented in the media, also the post-feminist theory is my favourite theory, simply because I’m a girl myself.
My reflection on the importance in carrying out this research is to see how women are represented, in a positive equal way as the post-feminist theory suggests.

Methodology
I will be conducting a theoretic dissertation, which means it will be library based involving analysing and engaging with existing literature. As it will also contain me analysing the texts myself, so it will be empirical research, which will also be qualitative.
Firstly I will be reviewing the existing literature around my subject, then I will be textually analysing my texts (Vogue & Heat) and finally applying the post-feminist theory to them.

diss

It's buy, buy to women. Now the girlies rule
9 March 2007
Becky Munford
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=208159&sectioncode=26




If Wags and conspicuous consumption are the epitome of post-feminist womanhood, we've not come a long way, baby, argues Becky Munford
According to self-identified "sexist" Mike Newell, the manager of Luton Football Club, women have no place in the world of football. The appointment of female officials was, he claimed, tantamount to "tokenism for politically correct idiots". In response to the media commotion surrounding his chauvinist invective against assistant referee Amy Rayner's decision over a penalty in a match last November, Newell later modified his position on "political correctness gone mad" to one of safeguarding "traditional values" - values such as "holding a door open for a woman, helping a mother with a pushchair off a train or up an escalator, worrying what time my daughter will be home and whether she is escorted, buying flowers and paying for dinner".
However, it would seem that today's women have a very definite place in the world of British football - one that is not inconsistent with Newell's recapitulation of "traditional" gender roles and stereotypes. If 2006 was the year that the England team went out of the World Cup on penalties, it was also the year of the Wags (wives and girlfriends of famous footballers) - a now established acronym in media parlance.
Alongside details of the England team's activities on the pitch, media coverage of the World Cup provided a gripping narrative about the Wags' off-pitch exploits in Baden-Baden. The regular manicures, tan treatments, girls' nights out, bitchy spats and, of course, scandalously extravagant shopping excursions were chronicled in painstaking detail. Journalists doggedly belaboured the stereotype, scrutinising the Wags' various expenditures and public conduct and pathologising their hyper-consumerism.
Through their display of conspicuous consumption, the Wags reaffirmed that women's agency in the commodified world of football was firmly located in their spending power, rather than their earning power.
Notwithstanding questions over the nature of this economic agency, the institutionalisation of Wag culture registers a shift in the popular status of shopping. No longer a domestic or a leisure activity, shopping has been relocated as a professional one. In the same week that Rayner spoke out about Newell's verbal attack, condemning the acceptability of sexism in football and advocating more professional opportunities for women in the Football League, ITV2 launched a new reality television series: WAGs Boutique . The show, a kind of Dragons' Den meets The Simple Life , follows two teams of Wags as they compete to set up and manage fashion boutiques in central London. (The A-list Wags - Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole and Coleen McLoughlin - are noticeably absent from the show's line-up).
On its website, WAGs Boutique promises that "Babes mean business!" as "two teams of Wags compete to turn their passion for fashion into a hot profit". Structuring its competitive rationale through a footballing analogy, the reality show invites the two teams of Wags to transform their "skills" in consumption into useful labour. This is, however, a form of labour safely situated in their babe status - one that does not militate too forcibly against the traditional value system of the gendered world of football.
Moreover, the constant referencing of the Wags' "proper" spousal identities - for example, "Nicola T (Miss Bobby Zamora, West Ham)" - points up the fragility of their professional status as businesswomen. Babes may well mean business, but it is a traditional version of heterosexual femininity (a love of handbags, shoes, bitching and rich boyfriends) and its consumer power that WAGs Boutique professionalises.
In The Feminine Mystique , her landmark investigation of the cultural construction of feminitypublished in 1963, Betty Friedan outlined an image of the "thing-buying" dehumanised housewife turning away from an individual identity to become an "anonymous biological robot in a docile mass". This has since been displaced by the figure of the shrewd individual shopper fashioning her public identity through various consumer choices. From Sex and the City 's newspaper columnist Carrie Bradshaw blowing an estimated $40,000 on designer shoes to Buffy the Vampire Slayer kicking ass in her "stylishly unaffordable boots", shopping is cast as a "fashionable" version of independence and public agency. Rather than a frivolous diversion to be mocked or denigrated, it is positioned as a lifestyle choice to be performed with pride.
It is as a lifestyle choice that shopping - and the pursuit of traditional femininity it legitimises - becomes the raison d'être of the post-feminist woman. A long-standing staple of glossy magazines, articles on shopping, fashion and beauty culture are increasingly filling the features sections and supplements of both tabloid and quality newspapers. The January issue of Observer Woman , for example, ran a cover story on "The truth about female stereotypes", which provided brief accounts of the diverse professional and personal circumstances of various women, including the fund manager Nicola Horlick. The same issue also ran a piece that tackled the differences between serum and moisturiser and designer versus high-street lip glosses, as well as a short article on the return of the scrunchie ("Everybody's talking about hair accessories").
In mainstream popular culture, the compatibility of professional mobility and traditional femininity is being sold to women as a new mode of "post-feminist" empowerment - that is, a mode of empowerment derived from a notion that the achievements of feminism have so permeated our social, economic and political structures that to continue to speak of "feminist" endeavour is extraneous to the concerns of modern women, not to mention rather old-fashioned and tiresome.
Moreover, this is a mode of empowerment that does not compromise the stranglehold of traditional gender stereotypes. If, for many second-wave feminists, the trappings of traditional femininity (such as bras, high heels and glossy magazines) were viewed as being at odds with women's liberation, then for the post-feminist woman they are repositioned as the bedrock of female agency. In its mainstream and highly commercialised media usage, post-feminism (like its various offshoots "raunch feminism", "babe feminism" and "do-me feminism") empties feminism of its political import and activity and repackages its vocabulary of freedom as a new, more fashionable brand of female autonomy.
The figurehead of this so-called post-feminist era is the sassy, sexy and stylish "girlie girl". From Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan to Coleen McLoughlin and Chantelle Houghton, the girlie girl embraces her lipsticked, high-heeled and G-stringed "girliness" as the very enactment of her empowerment. The girlie might offer an exaggerated display of femininity that represents a playful disruption of conventional gender identities and behaviours, but she also looks misleadingly like a lads' mag centrefold. Is this postmodern mockery or the reification of gender stereotypes? Either way, it is an individualist understanding of empowerment grounded in the rhetoric of choice and the realisation of traditional femininity through consumerism.
This hijacking of feminist values as a consumer strategy also drives the aggressive commodification of girl cultures. If, in the 1990s, "girl power" functioned in some way to raise the public profile of girls' and young women's activities and ambitions, in today's cultural climate it works predominantly as a synonym for consumer power. With teen magazines such as Cosmo Girl! and Sugar running numerous features on fashion "must-haves" and "miracle makeovers", the alarming rise of teenage cosmetic surgery (a 2004 survey by Bliss magazine revealed that a third of teenage girls wanted it), and the marketing of manicures and other "mini" beauty treatments, it would seem that girls are being trained in consumer competencies - and the pursuit of traditional femininity - from an increasingly early age.
The preponderance of pink imagery and artefacts in girl-powered popular culture further emphasises that gender stereotypes remain as firmly embedded as ever, even if the colour itself might have been reclaimed as the accepted hue of post-feminist agency in both its popular and academic varieties (an academic conference on "post-feminism" in 2004 publicised itself using a pink silhouette of a busty action heroine holding a gun in one hand and a handbag in the other).
This is not to suggest that girls and women are being routinely duped by the mainstream media. Rather, it is to recognise that the versions of agency enabled by the redeployment of traditional femininity are ambiguous, and that the marketing of traditional gender stereotypes as reinvigorated forms of consumer-driven empowerment risks disenfranchising women. Wags, girlies and babes, stand aside. Feminists have some unfinished business.
Rebecca Munford is lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University

dissertation!

walking a thin line; As the average runway sample dropped from a size 6 to a size 2 over the past decade, models were expected to shrink to fit.
Publication: Vogue
Publication Date: 01-APR-07Author: Johnson, Rebecca
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walking a thin line; As the average runway sample dropped from a size 6 to a size 2 over the past decade, models were expected to shrink to fit. -->
COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Byline: Rebecca Johnson





As job interviews go, the model casting call has to be the world's quickest. "Can I see you walk?" James Scully, a 20-year industry veteran, asked the tall, thin brunette standing in the foyer of designer Derek Lam's showroom. It was the week before the New York fall shows, and Scully needed to cast 26 models. The girl took a deep breath, dropped her shoulders, jutted her hips forward, and took off. After ten feet, she stopped, pivoted, and returned, eyes focused vacantly on the middle distance. "If you could stand against the wall." Scully pointed to a pink slash of tape six feet from the floor. He didn't say so, but if her head hit too far below that mark, she probably wouldn't get the job. This one cleared it by a good two inches. There was no scale, but you hardly needed it. Like the 20 or 30 girls who had come before her, she hadn't an inch of visible fat on her body. As the flash of the Polaroid went off, she looked into the camera's eye, struggling for an expression that would convey something. Anything. "How old are you?" Scully asked. "Sixteen," she answered in a thick Eastern European accent. After she left, Scully waved a developing Polaroid and shook his head (time elapsed: one minute, 57 seconds). "It's their ages," he said in response to the question of the day: Have runway models gotten too thin? "We're seeing girls as young as thirteen on the runway. When you're that age and that tall, you can be that thin naturally, but in two years, that girl's body is going to start changing. She's going to get hips, and then she's going to start hearing she's too big." It would be impossible for one person to change the vast and complex machine that is fashion but, in his own small way, Scully is trying. "This is the first year I am asking their ages," he said. "Both aesthetically and philosophically, I'd rather cast older girls. There have been times in the last year when I have felt like a high school math teacher. I don't even think girls begin to blossom until they're at least nineteen. You ask one of these girls to 'look sexy' and they don't know what that means. A lot of them have never had a boyfriend." More troubling for him is the thought of what will happen to that girl when the industry is done with her. "The turnover has gotten so quick. Girls are gone in one or two seasons. How do you tell a sixteen-year-old girl her career is over?" he asked. "They've spent the last two years living the lifestyle of a 35-year-old. It's hard for them to go back to where they came from." In the foyer outside, three new girls, all of whom looked more or less identical, had arrived. While Scully zoomed through the casting, I went outside to ask the girls what they thought about the weight issue, especially the health regulations issued by Spanish authorities requiring minimum BMIs (body-mass index) for models, and the Italian requirement for a medical certificate. The sameness of their replies was striking. "It's crazy," they all answered. "I eat!" On the table next to them were plates heaped with food-raspberries, chunks of pineapple, kiwis, croissants, bagels, brioche. Nothing had been touched. Later that day I sent an E-mail to Cynthia Bulik, Ph.D., past president of the Academy for Eating Disorders and currently director of the University of North Carolina eating-disorders program. When the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) issued its own guidelines last January to protect the health of the models, Bulik had applauded some measures-such as limiting the use of girls under sixteen-but in general she had been critical of the initiative, calling it "an anemic response" to a serious occupational concern. Dear Dr. Bulik, Today I attended a casting for a designer in which about 50 models came in and got quickly photographed. The agent doing the casting told me he believes he can tell in a second if a girl is sick. It's in "the skin, the eyes, the hands," he said. The girls who came in seemed very young, very tall, and very skinny, but they didn't seem sick. When I interviewed them, they all insisted they eat. They seemed so earnest, I can't believe they were lying. Was I missing something? I got a response within hours. You can't always tell just by looking! I am sure that agent had no data to actually check his/her observations with. . . . And there's not ONE question you can ask-especially if someone is afraid they might lose their job! Plus, they might indeed eat, but then vomit or use laxatives or other methods to try to get rid of the food. I took her point. An eating disorder is a complex, multifaceted disease mediated by both genetic and psychosocial factors. But the irony couldn't help escaping me: If you can't tell whether a person has an eating disorder by looking at her, why are lawmakers from Spain to Milan and, more recently, New York trying to mandate models' health based on the way they look? Some history. It's a fact: Clothes look better on a thin person. Models are therefore, by definition, thinner than the average person. Always have been. Always will be. Even the so-called Amazon supermodels of the eighties, curvy women recognizable by only one name, were a lot thinner than the average woman. Then, suddenly, around the early nineties, the models got thinner still. Nian Fish, the creative director of KCD, the company that produces fashion shows for designers such as Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, and Zac Posen, and one of the people most concerned about the trend, thinks she can pinpoint the precise moment it happened. "It was at a Calvin Klein go-see where I was working as a stylist," she remembers. "The big girls were there-Cindy, Nadja. And then Kate Moss walked in. She must have been fifteen or sixteen at the time. She put on this beige chiffon slip dress, and it just fell on her body. We put her in flat shoes, and when she walked, the fabric was like liquid flowing around her body. I got goose bumps. We all knew we were witnessing one of those fashion moments." (A former dancer who herself once struggled with an eating disorder, Fish was one of the guiding forces behind the CFDA's push to address the issue.) In the years that followed, as clothes became less structured and less formfitting, the "glamazons" suddenly found themselves out of work. Or, more precisely, out of high fashion. Because they had recognizable personae-"Those girls used to skip down the runway," says Fish-they were able to parlay their careers into even more lucrative perfume or makeup campaigns, options that don't exist nearly as much for the blank-faced girls walking today's runway. If you can name a runway model today, you probably work in the industry. "After Kate," says Tonne Goodman, fashion director of Vogue, "there have been schools of girls who have swum through like fish, but none of them have really stuck. Good models have to have sex appeal, but to feel sexy, you have to feel good about your body. At the magazine, we're looking for that. A few of the models are so thin I worry about them. I'm a mother; you feel for them." So does photographer Arthur Elgort. "When I see those skinny girls, I just hope they don't put a bathing suit on them," he says. Then, about two or three years ago, the average size of the models seemed to slip again, from a size 2 to a size 0. Until the local government in Madrid kicked up a fuss, nobody seemed to notice. But among the agents who represent the models and the models themselves, the shift has been devastating. "I went to a fitting the other day," says a top model who asked that her name not be used for fear of retribution, "and the stylist kept talking about how the show was supposed to be so 'sexy.' Then she handed me a pair of size 0 jeans, which did not fit. I said to her, 'What's sexy about a size 0?' The designers say models are naturally thin, but these are extreme sizes. I think half the girls walking the runway today have some kind of eating disorder." When the models themselves were famous, designers would gladly alter a dress to fit the girl. But when the models are generically interchangeable, it's easier to find a girl who fits the dress. Speaking out on the issue is what you might call a no-win situation for people in such a highly competitive business. In the days preceding New York Fashion Week, one very powerful agent sounded pretty sanguine on the topic once I finally got him on the phone. "These girls are naturally thin," he said dismissively. "They were the Olive Oyls in high school, the ones who got teased for being a beanpole. If there's a problem, we'll talk to the girl. Everyone wants her to be healthy. We work with trainers and nutritionists. Maybe it's just a matter of cutting down on carbohydrates." But a few days into Fashion Week, his tone changed. "I just got a call from a designer about a top girl they cut because the clothes don't fit," he said angrily one evening from his cell phone. "I asked them, 'Is she too large?' and all they said was 'The clothes don't fit.' I'm not talking about 25 pounds here, I'm talking about two or three pounds! This is the new era? I really thought things were going to change." Still, he did not want his name used. "This is a very competitive business," he explained. "I want my clients to have long and prosperous careers. Managed correctly, these women can continue to make good money into their 30s. If she has a problem, the last thing we would ever do is talk about it publicly." "It's the paradox of the model," said Natalia Vodianova, one of the few models who have been outspoken on the issue. "You're supposed to be projecting this image of fun and health. If you talk about having a problem, you know it's going to affect your career, so you don't say anything. The girls talk about dieting all the time, but they never talk about problems." If people don't talk, it's hard to know the true extent of the issue or where it begins and ends. "Why are the agents even sending these girls?" Donna Karan asked at the CFDA forum on the topic this past February. Answer: because those are the girls who are getting booked. "I know one of my girls has a problem," one anguished agent asked, "but every designer in town wants that girl in their show, so what am I supposed to tell her? If I tell her she can't work, she'll just go to someone else." It's not as if the fashion industry wants to create eating disorders in young women. "Contrary to what people believe, this industry does have a heart," said Robin Givhan, fashion editor of The Washington Post. "Look at all the work it has done on AIDS. I think what happened was our eyes changed slowly over time. It's like the frog in the water: If you slowly turn up the heat, it doesn't know it's being boiled to death. After a while, a size 0 starts to seem normal, not cadaverous." But eventually, said Givhan, the zombie-like quality of some superskinny models began to detract from the aesthetic appreciation of the clothes themselves. "Fashion is about fantasy and aspiration," she said. "Women look to it for inspiration. But somewhere along the way the industry went from long and lean to something you wouldn't want to aspire to. It became unattractive." The controversy might never have become the international story it did, had it not been for the deaths of two South American models due to complications from anorexia nervosa. Neither Luisel Ramos nor Ana Carolina Reston got anywhere close to the runways in New York or Paris. At five feet eight inches-and friends says that was stretching it-Reston's head would have hit far below Scully's pink slash on the wall, but fashion is a global business, and for several years she was able to support her middle-class family by modeling for catalogs and fashion shows in Brazil. Her dream, however, was to travel abroad, living the glamorous life of an international model. When she went to China, she was told she was too fat. To get work, she thought she only needed to get thinner. By 2006, when she entered the Brazilian hospital where she died at 88 pounds, she was allegedly living on a diet of apples and tomatoes. Reston's agents stopped booking her when she got seriously sick. In the weeks before her death, she was supporting herself by handing out fliers for nightclubs, but her death seemed to touch off a simmering anger against the fashion industry, as evidenced by this post on Live Journal, one of the most popular fashion blogs. I CANNOT *BELIEVE!!!* THE 'FASHION INDUSTRY' *STILL* DOESN'T THINK THERE IS A "PROBLEM." What the #$#??! I feel bad for the girl, but hopefully, this will help show (or even FORCE) this industry to see how badly they need to DO SOMETHING!!! [And this is coming from a model herself. If I had a penny for every time I heard my agent telling me or other models at the agency to "lose some inches in the hips," I could quit modeling and just be a millionaire. . . . ] Fellow Brazilian Gisele Bundchen made international headlines after Reston's death when she said parents are responsible for anorexia, not the fashion industry, but others were more empathetic. "I didn't know her personally," said Vodianova, "but when I read about her story, I could understand. At home, girls are the little princesses, but then you get this opportunity and you think, OK, this is my job now. This is what I am supposed to do. Nobody is nurturing them, and suddenly, everything becomes about the weight. If you do allow yourself to eat something, you become nervous because you think the clothes won't fit. It's not that people even say things to your face; it's more like a tension in the air during a fitting. Or you overhear something. In your off-time, you start to overeat because you are so hungry, so now your normal relationship with food is gone." It's no coincidence that many of the youngest, thinnest girls on the runway come from countries where economic opportunities for them are limited. Reston's family was initially middle class, but after her family's savings were stolen, she felt an added pressure to be a breadwinner. "My parents saw an opportunity for me to have a better life," Vodianova said, explaining why her parents let her leave home alone at seventeen. To make money in Russia, she used to sell fruit on the street next to engineers and professors, people with advanced degrees who needed cash to feed their families. The money she made from her first fashion show-$50-was equal to a month's salary for a teacher. "If I had stayed, finished school, and become a doctor, so what?" She shrugged. "I still would have been selling fruit on the street." After Reston's death, the CFDA decided to address the issue. But if models are hired for their tall and skinny genetic phenotype, fashion designers succeed through an equally rigorous process of Darwinian selection. Creative people with robust egos don't like being told what to do. Some were sympathetic to the idea of regulation, especially women with children. "We have a big responsibility with this disease," said Carolina Herrera. Another prominent designer called the idea "revolting." Some were simply flummoxed by the practicalities-how do you regulate a worldwide industry composed of freelance workers who steadfastly maintain, "It's crazy! I eat!" In Spain, they tried instituting minimum weights calculated by BMI. The measurement, which takes into consideration height and weight, was invented by a nineteenth-century Belgian scientist who believed that the human condition could be better understood through the use of statistics-he was among the first to quantify a correlation between age and gender in crime-but while BMI may be a useful tool for tracking the growing obesity epidemic in the developed world, it's not so useful for screening models. The Spanish chose a BMI of eighteen as the cutoff for a working model, which, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) growth charts, would mean that 17 percent of all sixteen-year-olds would be considered too thin to model. Not surprisingly, the regulation had little effect. England, Australia, and France all rejected mandatory minimums as discriminatory or inappropriate-as UK culture secretary Tessa Jowell said, "Government legislation is a very blunt instrument to address an issue this complex." Realistically, today's working models have BMIs closer to sixteen. When she was nineteen and weighed 117 pounds, five-foot-ten-inch Vodianova had a BMI of 16.8. (That was when several fashion houses complained about her weight.) When she weighed 106 pounds and her hair was beginning to fall out, she had a BMI of 15.2, which would put her off the CDC charts (they stop at the bottom 5 percent). Still, you can't definitively say someone with a low BMI has anorexia. "I would assume these models have a subclinical eating disorder," said Johannes Hebebrand, M.D., of the University of Essen, Germany, one of the world's leading experts on BMI, "but I wouldn't bet on it. There are a lot of very skinny people who can't gain weight. Nobody really knows why-maybe they have a higher body temperature, a faster metabolism; maybe they fidget more, or maybe they just don't eat." Some critics pushed for a mandatory annual doctor's examination, but anorexia is both a psychological and physical disease. The fact that Uruguyan model Luisel Ramos had a sister who died less than a year after her-allegedly from complications of anorexia-confirms what twins studies have shown: Anorexia has a strong genetic component. Hebebrand could one day imagine a blood test-he has found that anorexics have lowered levels of leptin, a hormone produced by fat that is instrumental in regulating the hypothalamus and pituitary glands-but that's a long way off. Eating-disorder experts like Bulik say the best way to screen is an exam, including a face-to-face interview with a clinician trained at cutting through the denial of "It's crazy! I eat!" "I usually start with a weight history," said Bulik. "Then I might ask, 'How would you feel if you gained five pounds?' At that point, you look in their face, and you can usually tell from the expression of horror." In the end, the best you can do is plant a seed and hope it grows. The eye may adjust, but the eye also grows restless and ready for change. "I've been thinking about it," Derek Lam said after his casting was over. "I travel the country for trunk shows and meet these successful women who have the means to really take care of themselves. They're working out, they look great. As designers, I think, we sometimes wait for technology to tell us what to do, but maybe the technology is there, in their bodies. Already I am giving my clothes more structure this year and making it less about something limp hanging on a rail."

dissertation!

walking a thin line; As the average runway sample dropped from a size 6 to a size 2 over the past decade, models were expected to shrink to fit.
Publication: Vogue
Publication Date: 01-APR-07Author: Johnson, Rebecca
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walking a thin line; As the average runway sample dropped from a size 6 to a size 2 over the past decade, models were expected to shrink to fit. -->
COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Byline: Rebecca Johnson





As job interviews go, the model casting call has to be the world's quickest. "Can I see you walk?" James Scully, a 20-year industry veteran, asked the tall, thin brunette standing in the foyer of designer Derek Lam's showroom. It was the week before the New York fall shows, and Scully needed to cast 26 models. The girl took a deep breath, dropped her shoulders, jutted her hips forward, and took off. After ten feet, she stopped, pivoted, and returned, eyes focused vacantly on the middle distance. "If you could stand against the wall." Scully pointed to a pink slash of tape six feet from the floor. He didn't say so, but if her head hit too far below that mark, she probably wouldn't get the job. This one cleared it by a good two inches. There was no scale, but you hardly needed it. Like the 20 or 30 girls who had come before her, she hadn't an inch of visible fat on her body. As the flash of the Polaroid went off, she looked into the camera's eye, struggling for an expression that would convey something. Anything. "How old are you?" Scully asked. "Sixteen," she answered in a thick Eastern European accent. After she left, Scully waved a developing Polaroid and shook his head (time elapsed: one minute, 57 seconds). "It's their ages," he said in response to the question of the day: Have runway models gotten too thin? "We're seeing girls as young as thirteen on the runway. When you're that age and that tall, you can be that thin naturally, but in two years, that girl's body is going to start changing. She's going to get hips, and then she's going to start hearing she's too big." It would be impossible for one person to change the vast and complex machine that is fashion but, in his own small way, Scully is trying. "This is the first year I am asking their ages," he said. "Both aesthetically and philosophically, I'd rather cast older girls. There have been times in the last year when I have felt like a high school math teacher. I don't even think girls begin to blossom until they're at least nineteen. You ask one of these girls to 'look sexy' and they don't know what that means. A lot of them have never had a boyfriend." More troubling for him is the thought of what will happen to that girl when the industry is done with her. "The turnover has gotten so quick. Girls are gone in one or two seasons. How do you tell a sixteen-year-old girl her career is over?" he asked. "They've spent the last two years living the lifestyle of a 35-year-old. It's hard for them to go back to where they came from." In the foyer outside, three new girls, all of whom looked more or less identical, had arrived. While Scully zoomed through the casting, I went outside to ask the girls what they thought about the weight issue, especially the health regulations issued by Spanish authorities requiring minimum BMIs (body-mass index) for models, and the Italian requirement for a medical certificate. The sameness of their replies was striking. "It's crazy," they all answered. "I eat!" On the table next to them were plates heaped with food-raspberries, chunks of pineapple, kiwis, croissants, bagels, brioche. Nothing had been touched. Later that day I sent an E-mail to Cynthia Bulik, Ph.D., past president of the Academy for Eating Disorders and currently director of the University of North Carolina eating-disorders program. When the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) issued its own guidelines last January to protect the health of the models, Bulik had applauded some measures-such as limiting the use of girls under sixteen-but in general she had been critical of the initiative, calling it "an anemic response" to a serious occupational concern. Dear Dr. Bulik, Today I attended a casting for a designer in which about 50 models came in and got quickly photographed. The agent doing the casting told me he believes he can tell in a second if a girl is sick. It's in "the skin, the eyes, the hands," he said. The girls who came in seemed very young, very tall, and very skinny, but they didn't seem sick. When I interviewed them, they all insisted they eat. They seemed so earnest, I can't believe they were lying. Was I missing something? I got a response within hours. You can't always tell just by looking! I am sure that agent had no data to actually check his/her observations with. . . . And there's not ONE question you can ask-especially if someone is afraid they might lose their job! Plus, they might indeed eat, but then vomit or use laxatives or other methods to try to get rid of the food. I took her point. An eating disorder is a complex, multifaceted disease mediated by both genetic and psychosocial factors. But the irony couldn't help escaping me: If you can't tell whether a person has an eating disorder by looking at her, why are lawmakers from Spain to Milan and, more recently, New York trying to mandate models' health based on the way they look? Some history. It's a fact: Clothes look better on a thin person. Models are therefore, by definition, thinner than the average person. Always have been. Always will be. Even the so-called Amazon supermodels of the eighties, curvy women recognizable by only one name, were a lot thinner than the average woman. Then, suddenly, around the early nineties, the models got thinner still. Nian Fish, the creative director of KCD, the company that produces fashion shows for designers such as Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, and Zac Posen, and one of the people most concerned about the trend, thinks she can pinpoint the precise moment it happened. "It was at a Calvin Klein go-see where I was working as a stylist," she remembers. "The big girls were there-Cindy, Nadja. And then Kate Moss walked in. She must have been fifteen or sixteen at the time. She put on this beige chiffon slip dress, and it just fell on her body. We put her in flat shoes, and when she walked, the fabric was like liquid flowing around her body. I got goose bumps. We all knew we were witnessing one of those fashion moments." (A former dancer who herself once struggled with an eating disorder, Fish was one of the guiding forces behind the CFDA's push to address the issue.) In the years that followed, as clothes became less structured and less formfitting, the "glamazons" suddenly found themselves out of work. Or, more precisely, out of high fashion. Because they had recognizable personae-"Those girls used to skip down the runway," says Fish-they were able to parlay their careers into even more lucrative perfume or makeup campaigns, options that don't exist nearly as much for the blank-faced girls walking today's runway. If you can name a runway model today, you probably work in the industry. "After Kate," says Tonne Goodman, fashion director of Vogue, "there have been schools of girls who have swum through like fish, but none of them have really stuck. Good models have to have sex appeal, but to feel sexy, you have to feel good about your body. At the magazine, we're looking for that. A few of the models are so thin I worry about them. I'm a mother; you feel for them." So does photographer Arthur Elgort. "When I see those skinny girls, I just hope they don't put a bathing suit on them," he says. Then, about two or three years ago, the average size of the models seemed to slip again, from a size 2 to a size 0. Until the local government in Madrid kicked up a fuss, nobody seemed to notice. But among the agents who represent the models and the models themselves, the shift has been devastating. "I went to a fitting the other day," says a top model who asked that her name not be used for fear of retribution, "and the stylist kept talking about how the show was supposed to be so 'sexy.' Then she handed me a pair of size 0 jeans, which did not fit. I said to her, 'What's sexy about a size 0?' The designers say models are naturally thin, but these are extreme sizes. I think half the girls walking the runway today have some kind of eating disorder." When the models themselves were famous, designers would gladly alter a dress to fit the girl. But when the models are generically interchangeable, it's easier to find a girl who fits the dress. Speaking out on the issue is what you might call a no-win situation for people in such a highly competitive business. In the days preceding New York Fashion Week, one very powerful agent sounded pretty sanguine on the topic once I finally got him on the phone. "These girls are naturally thin," he said dismissively. "They were the Olive Oyls in high school, the ones who got teased for being a beanpole. If there's a problem, we'll talk to the girl. Everyone wants her to be healthy. We work with trainers and nutritionists. Maybe it's just a matter of cutting down on carbohydrates." But a few days into Fashion Week, his tone changed. "I just got a call from a designer about a top girl they cut because the clothes don't fit," he said angrily one evening from his cell phone. "I asked them, 'Is she too large?' and all they said was 'The clothes don't fit.' I'm not talking about 25 pounds here, I'm talking about two or three pounds! This is the new era? I really thought things were going to change." Still, he did not want his name used. "This is a very competitive business," he explained. "I want my clients to have long and prosperous careers. Managed correctly, these women can continue to make good money into their 30s. If she has a problem, the last thing we would ever do is talk about it publicly." "It's the paradox of the model," said Natalia Vodianova, one of the few models who have been outspoken on the issue. "You're supposed to be projecting this image of fun and health. If you talk about having a problem, you know it's going to affect your career, so you don't say anything. The girls talk about dieting all the time, but they never talk about problems." If people don't talk, it's hard to know the true extent of the issue or where it begins and ends. "Why are the agents even sending these girls?" Donna Karan asked at the CFDA forum on the topic this past February. Answer: because those are the girls who are getting booked. "I know one of my girls has a problem," one anguished agent asked, "but every designer in town wants that girl in their show, so what am I supposed to tell her? If I tell her she can't work, she'll just go to someone else." It's not as if the fashion industry wants to create eating disorders in young women. "Contrary to what people believe, this industry does have a heart," said Robin Givhan, fashion editor of The Washington Post. "Look at all the work it has done on AIDS. I think what happened was our eyes changed slowly over time. It's like the frog in the water: If you slowly turn up the heat, it doesn't know it's being boiled to death. After a while, a size 0 starts to seem normal, not cadaverous." But eventually, said Givhan, the zombie-like quality of some superskinny models began to detract from the aesthetic appreciation of the clothes themselves. "Fashion is about fantasy and aspiration," she said. "Women look to it for inspiration. But somewhere along the way the industry went from long and lean to something you wouldn't want to aspire to. It became unattractive." The controversy might never have become the international story it did, had it not been for the deaths of two South American models due to complications from anorexia nervosa. Neither Luisel Ramos nor Ana Carolina Reston got anywhere close to the runways in New York or Paris. At five feet eight inches-and friends says that was stretching it-Reston's head would have hit far below Scully's pink slash on the wall, but fashion is a global business, and for several years she was able to support her middle-class family by modeling for catalogs and fashion shows in Brazil. Her dream, however, was to travel abroad, living the glamorous life of an international model. When she went to China, she was told she was too fat. To get work, she thought she only needed to get thinner. By 2006, when she entered the Brazilian hospital where she died at 88 pounds, she was allegedly living on a diet of apples and tomatoes. Reston's agents stopped booking her when she got seriously sick. In the weeks before her death, she was supporting herself by handing out fliers for nightclubs, but her death seemed to touch off a simmering anger against the fashion industry, as evidenced by this post on Live Journal, one of the most popular fashion blogs. I CANNOT *BELIEVE!!!* THE 'FASHION INDUSTRY' *STILL* DOESN'T THINK THERE IS A "PROBLEM." What the #$#??! I feel bad for the girl, but hopefully, this will help show (or even FORCE) this industry to see how badly they need to DO SOMETHING!!! [And this is coming from a model herself. If I had a penny for every time I heard my agent telling me or other models at the agency to "lose some inches in the hips," I could quit modeling and just be a millionaire. . . . ] Fellow Brazilian Gisele Bundchen made international headlines after Reston's death when she said parents are responsible for anorexia, not the fashion industry, but others were more empathetic. "I didn't know her personally," said Vodianova, "but when I read about her story, I could understand. At home, girls are the little princesses, but then you get this opportunity and you think, OK, this is my job now. This is what I am supposed to do. Nobody is nurturing them, and suddenly, everything becomes about the weight. If you do allow yourself to eat something, you become nervous because you think the clothes won't fit. It's not that people even say things to your face; it's more like a tension in the air during a fitting. Or you overhear something. In your off-time, you start to overeat because you are so hungry, so now your normal relationship with food is gone." It's no coincidence that many of the youngest, thinnest girls on the runway come from countries where economic opportunities for them are limited. Reston's family was initially middle class, but after her family's savings were stolen, she felt an added pressure to be a breadwinner. "My parents saw an opportunity for me to have a better life," Vodianova said, explaining why her parents let her leave home alone at seventeen. To make money in Russia, she used to sell fruit on the street next to engineers and professors, people with advanced degrees who needed cash to feed their families. The money she made from her first fashion show-$50-was equal to a month's salary for a teacher. "If I had stayed, finished school, and become a doctor, so what?" She shrugged. "I still would have been selling fruit on the street." After Reston's death, the CFDA decided to address the issue. But if models are hired for their tall and skinny genetic phenotype, fashion designers succeed through an equally rigorous process of Darwinian selection. Creative people with robust egos don't like being told what to do. Some were sympathetic to the idea of regulation, especially women with children. "We have a big responsibility with this disease," said Carolina Herrera. Another prominent designer called the idea "revolting." Some were simply flummoxed by the practicalities-how do you regulate a worldwide industry composed of freelance workers who steadfastly maintain, "It's crazy! I eat!" In Spain, they tried instituting minimum weights calculated by BMI. The measurement, which takes into consideration height and weight, was invented by a nineteenth-century Belgian scientist who believed that the human condition could be better understood through the use of statistics-he was among the first to quantify a correlation between age and gender in crime-but while BMI may be a useful tool for tracking the growing obesity epidemic in the developed world, it's not so useful for screening models. The Spanish chose a BMI of eighteen as the cutoff for a working model, which, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) growth charts, would mean that 17 percent of all sixteen-year-olds would be considered too thin to model. Not surprisingly, the regulation had little effect. England, Australia, and France all rejected mandatory minimums as discriminatory or inappropriate-as UK culture secretary Tessa Jowell said, "Government legislation is a very blunt instrument to address an issue this complex." Realistically, today's working models have BMIs closer to sixteen. When she was nineteen and weighed 117 pounds, five-foot-ten-inch Vodianova had a BMI of 16.8. (That was when several fashion houses complained about her weight.) When she weighed 106 pounds and her hair was beginning to fall out, she had a BMI of 15.2, which would put her off the CDC charts (they stop at the bottom 5 percent). Still, you can't definitively say someone with a low BMI has anorexia. "I would assume these models have a subclinical eating disorder," said Johannes Hebebrand, M.D., of the University of Essen, Germany, one of the world's leading experts on BMI, "but I wouldn't bet on it. There are a lot of very skinny people who can't gain weight. Nobody really knows why-maybe they have a higher body temperature, a faster metabolism; maybe they fidget more, or maybe they just don't eat." Some critics pushed for a mandatory annual doctor's examination, but anorexia is both a psychological and physical disease. The fact that Uruguyan model Luisel Ramos had a sister who died less than a year after her-allegedly from complications of anorexia-confirms what twins studies have shown: Anorexia has a strong genetic component. Hebebrand could one day imagine a blood test-he has found that anorexics have lowered levels of leptin, a hormone produced by fat that is instrumental in regulating the hypothalamus and pituitary glands-but that's a long way off. Eating-disorder experts like Bulik say the best way to screen is an exam, including a face-to-face interview with a clinician trained at cutting through the denial of "It's crazy! I eat!" "I usually start with a weight history," said Bulik. "Then I might ask, 'How would you feel if you gained five pounds?' At that point, you look in their face, and you can usually tell from the expression of horror." In the end, the best you can do is plant a seed and hope it grows. The eye may adjust, but the eye also grows restless and ready for change. "I've been thinking about it," Derek Lam said after his casting was over. "I travel the country for trunk shows and meet these successful women who have the means to really take care of themselves. They're working out, they look great. As designers, I think, we sometimes wait for technology to tell us what to do, but maybe the technology is there, in their bodies. Already I am giving my clothes more structure this year and making it less about something limp hanging on a rail."