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."