I’ve been railing for years against trend-setting, skeletal models strutting their dry bones on runways across the fashion world. This is why I was so heartened earlier this month when France enacted legislation to ban them from runways in Paris.
Here is a little of my abiding lament:
By today’s standards, former supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Tyra Banks – even at their most starved and bulimic (runway) weight – would be relegated to the Lane Bryant prêt-à-porter show. Because that’s where plus-size models strut their stuff for women who, from the haughty perspective of most NYC fashionistas, lack the ambition and discipline it takes to be thin, and therefore beautiful.
(“Skinny Models (Still) Reign at New York’s Fashion Week,” The iPINIONS Journal, February 6, 2007)
Here is how France intends to impose more salutary standards:
France will ban excessively thin fashion models and expose modeling agents and the fashion houses that hire them to possible fines and even jail, under a new law.
(Reuters, April 3, 2015)
Now if only the United States, Italy, and other countries would follow fashion. Especially considering that Israel had sufficient concern for the welfare not just of the models walking the runways, but of the young girls trying desperately to emulate them to enact similar legislation years ago. This, as opposed to merely encouraging fashion houses to adhere to “voluntary codes of conduct.”
But France is hardly without sin in this respect. After all:
We don’t know if we should be happy or sad to share that Liya Kebede has landed the May 2015 cover of Vogue Paris, because it marks the first time in five years that a Black model has graced the cover of the glossy.
(Huffington Post, April 15, 2015)
This constrains me to reprise this note:
I’m not too focused on how bone thin these bitches are to notice how bone white they are also!
(“Fashion Model Fired for Being Too Skinny?! Hallelujah! The iPINIONS Journal, September 12, 2007)
Meanwhile, increasingly influential stars like Emily Ratajkowski (23) are blithely blurring lines, with Instagram images, between women who like showing off their thin bodies and those who like looking like adolescent girls.
For some inexplicable reason it seems Emily thought she looked fat in the Robin Thicke/Pharrell Williams video that made her an overnight sex symbol. But frankly, it’s disturbing to see this grown woman looking like a prepubescent girl with lips pouted with collagen and boobs inflated with silicone.
In virtually all of her pictures, she seems to be channeling Nabokov’s Lolita — posing wantonly for men who get off on kiddie porn. Sadly, there’s nothing any government can do to counter this viral trend.
Thank God for the Rubenesque, selfie-obsessed Kim Kardashian…? Go figure.
Related commentaries:
Skinny models…
Model fired…