Editor of British Vogue Blasts Designers For Promoting Anorexia
The editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, has launched a war on the fashion houses that keep sending her size 0 samples that are so small that even most of the models can't fit into them. Shulman wrote a blistering private letter to many of the major fashion houses accusing them of promoting teenage anorexia by pushing ever-shrinking clothing sizes.
Alexandra Shulman, one of the most important figures in the multi-billion-pound fashion industry, has taken on all the largest fashion houses in a strongly worded letter sent to scores of designers in Europe and America. In a letter not intended for publication but seen by The Times, Shulman accuses designers of making magazines hire models with “jutting bones and no breasts or hips” by supplying them with "minuscule" garments for their photoshoots. Vogue is now frequently "retouching" photographs to make models look larger, she said.
*****
Shulman claims that the clothes created by designers for catwalk shows and subsequently sent to magazines for use in their photoshoots have become "substantially smaller".
The garments are typically sent to magazines six months before they appear in the shops and editors have no choice but to hire models that fit the clothes or fail to cover the latest collections from the leading designers.
"We have now reached the point where many of the sample sizes don't comfortably fit even the established star models," Shulman writes, in a letter sent to Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano and fellow designers at Prada, Versace, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga and other top fashion houses. The supermodel Erin O’Connor described the stand by the editor of Britain's most prominent fashion magazine as "a huge breakthrough".
"The fact that Alexandra Shulman with her enormous influence has opened this conversation means that it will have a huge impact," she said. "It has... made it compulsorily relevant that we address this now."
Baroness Kingsmill, who chaired the 2007 Model Health Inquiry at the behest of the British Fashion Council, praised Shulman for her stance on the issue, as did the head of BEAT, Britain's leading eating disorder charity which says that 1.1 million people in Great Britain are affected by anorexia or bulimia.
We say: kudos to Ms. Shulman for her brave stance. It's time for fashion designers to get real. When sample sizes are too small for top models, then it's time for a change.
You can see a fascinating look at how Vogue has been making anorexic models look more healthy by using Photoshop to add pounds to their figures here (it's a .pdf file).
