HW- 3 articles regarding critical investigation

The incredible shrinking model

As New York fashion week kicks off the latest catwalk shows, the guidelines on model weight are debated more furiously than ever. Emily Nussbaum goes backstage and begins to suspect the skinny issue might be more loaded than we know. The celebrity supermodel has been replaced by the anonymous minimodel - nameless, voiceless, size zero and shrinking. Is her dwindling weight a reflection of her dwindling power, wealth and status?
Emily Nussbaum

Backstage at the Carlos Miele show at New York Fashion Week, all the accents are Russian. The models are rubbing off make-up, having been transformed from Miele's glamorous jet-setters back into harried teenagers. They look skinny but not cadaverous. Yet after a week in the catwalk tents at Bryant Park, I realise I can't trust my own judgment: It's already become impossible to see the difference between thin and thin.
I walk up to Nataliya Gotsii, who grimaces when I ask her about new industry guidelines on eating disorders. Everyone at Fashion Week makes this face when I raise the subject: After a year of media coverage criticising the size-zero model, fashion has got tired of explaining itself. But Gotsii has particular reason to worry. She was one of the models whose photos have been used to illustrate the controversy - a shot of her ribs was flashed on CNN in order to elicit shocked reactions from celebrities.
'It's all about the Ukrainian models,' she tells me with frustration. 'After last Fashion Week, I hear a lot about myself, in the news! I didn't come back here for two months because clients refused to work with me. Me and Snejana and the other Ukrainian models.' All of the runway models are thin, she points out, and she wonders why she was singled out. 'Maybe, some of the girls, they skinny, but they look natural? Some of the girls, they don't look healthy?'
Her mother cried when she saw those pictures, says Gotsii. But her body was digitally distorted, she claims. Those circles under her eyes (and I can see them: pale-brown half-moons) are genetic - her brother has them, too. 'Nobody cares, they just take a name and put a lot of shit. We're going out, we're having dinners, everybody's eating, there's no anorexia in this business!'
It's not true, of course. A week after our conversation, a perilously thin teenage model, Eliana Ramos, died in Uruguay, apparently of a heart attack, making it three model deaths in the past seven months. In August 2006, Ramos's older sister Luisel died after restricting herself to a diet of lettuce leaves and Diet Coke. In November 2006, Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston died weighing just 88 pounds.
But Gotsii resents being dragged into the debate. In those notorious pictures from last season, she had worn a white halter top dangling from chains; you could count her vertebrae. In a taupe bikini she stood, hands on hips, staring into the camera, a tanned skeleton.
If she looked so terrible, if she looked run-down, it had nothing to do with food, she argues. Already today Gotsii has appeared in two shows, and she has another one scheduled for tonight. Her first fitting had begun at 6:30am. Next week, she's off to Paris, then Milan. 'You live for almost one month just about fashion. Fashion, fashion, fashion - it makes you tired in the head. In two weeks, maybe I will look tired again.'
I look at her and try to remember the pictures I've seen. Does she look too thin? She's not wearing a bikini right now, so I can't tell. She looks fine, if a little tired.
And then she looks me in the eye and asks, 'I'm not so scary, am I?'
Raise the issue of eating disorders during Fashion Week, and someone will inevitably bring up that lost, glorious era of the supermodel: Christy, Naomi, Cindy, Linda, the four-headed stompy-legged beast with big shiny hair, the one that wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000. Those were the days when models took up space. They were stars. They made demands. And their faces were everywhere. To paraphrase from Sunset Boulevard, sometimes it feels like it's not the clothes that have got small, it's the models. (Although, of course, the clothes have shrunk, too, sample sizes dwindling from a size 6 to a 4 to a 2 and below.)
These days, fashion people do not talk about models with awe. Instead, they speak of them with condescending affection, as if they were lovable circus folk. Again and again, I hear that they are 'beautiful freaks', 'genetic anomalies' - girls born to be bone-thin, with giraffe-like necks and the wide, pretty doll faces that are the latest visual sensation. But there is also pity for the models, who are, many people pointed out to me, basically high-school dropouts, teenagers from poor countries, whose careers last a very short time. They are infinitely replaceable. Although top girls can make up to $100,000 in a week of shows, the vast majority get nowhere near that; some of the more prominent designers pay the girls only in clothes.
In the great anorexia debate, models are talked about but rarely heard. Which is why it was so startling when Natalia Vodianova, one of those great and silent beautiful ones, the Cinderella from Russia, rose to speak at the Council of Fashion Designers of America panel on eating disorders. It was Monday, the first day of Fashion Week, at 8am. There was an air of anticlimax in the room, since the group's guidelines - released to the media weeks before - had already been picked apart like a chicken sandwich. Whereas Madrid and Milan had passed rules barring models whose body-mass index fell below 18 and 18.5, respectively, the US organisation presented non-binding suggestions. Designers should offer healthy food backstage, eliminate drinking, and ban smoking. They should stop using models under 16 and should not keep them up past midnight. The guidelines seemed at once a good first step and a bit of pre-emptive ass-covering, but even these mild suggestions were unlikely to stick: could an industry devoted to unrealistic standards of beauty really recognise an eating disorder, let alone prevent one? Already, designers like Karl Lagerfeld were grumbling about 'politically correct fascism'.
All through Fashion Week, the models told me they felt persecuted by the media conversation, as if they were being blamed for their bodies.
'There's always going to be that one somebody who has taken it too far,' Sophie told me. I asked her if she knew of anybody who had. No, she said. 'All the girls in my model apartment eat everything. We stuff our face.'
But another model, Marvy Rieder, told me she had no patience for that kind of talk. 'It's balls,' she said flatly on the phone from the Netherlands, where she was busily packing for a photo shoot in Zambia. A Dutch model who has worked to educate the public on the subject of eating disorders, Rieder beat 20,000 girls to be the face of Guess watches. Then she came to New York, where she was told that if she wanted to do runway work, she needed to lose weight. She dieted and exercised, but that wasn't sufficient.
'I started skipping things. I was still eating, but not enough, really not enough, and going to the gym every day.' Her roommates in the model apartment were eating a can of corn a day, Rieder said. 'Or an apple. Or whatever. And that's just one of the things I've seen.' I asked Rieder if models are open about restricting food. No, she told me. 'They hide it. By saying, "I just ate so much at home, I'm not hungry any more". I've heard it a million times.'
Why do models not speak out about these issues? 'In my opinion, I think it's because they're afraid of losing work,' said Rieder.
Sabrina Hunter, 27, agrees. I found the gorgeous Afro-Caribbean woman not strutting the catwalk but promoting mobile phones at a booth in the pavilion outside. She'd left runway modelling, she told me, because the pressure was so intense that it required her to eat in a disordered way. At five-ten, Hunter was expected to be '115 pounds or lower, preferably'. After she signed with an American agency, she was given a choice: Lose weight or gain and be a plus-size model. After trying to gain unsuccessfully, she went the opposite direction, eating just 600 calories and jogging five miles a day. 'It made me extremely moody and depressed. And I looked it, in the face. But that's how all the models look,' she says.
Both Rieder and Hunter have known models who are naturally skinny. But many of these girls are exceptionally young: a model who is effortlessly flat-chested and hipless at 14 will start to struggle as she hits her late teens. If she's already rising in the industry, she may find that she needs to take more extreme measures to continue to fit the bony aesthetic. And that goes double for the new breed of models, many of whom come, like Vodianova, from the poorest regions of Eastern Europe. For these girls, pressures to stay thin may be a small price to pay for escaping the small towns they came from.
'It's a far more complex issue than people realise,' Suzy Menkes, the British fashion writer for the International Herald Tribune, told me. 'You know, many of these girls were brought up in the postcommunist years on an extremely bad diet. From childhood, they've not been properly nourished. That may make them very appealing to designers, but they don't start off with a healthy body. And nothing is simple. I think it must be incredibly difficult to come from a vegetable stall in the Ukraine and find yourself in Paris among Ladurée macaroons. People have to accept that it's a much bigger picture than terrible fashion folk starving to get into frocks.'
Towards the end of the week, I feel sick of it all. I go home to watch Ugly Betty. Rebecca Romijn is strutting and bragging, having a fantastic time, as the transsexual brother of the editor of Mode. Here was the cocky strut I had imagined I would find on the runways. And I remembered back in the Eighties, when I thought the supermodels were bad role models. Who knew I could ever miss them this much?
So who banned size zero?How the fashion world reacted
Sept 2006 India's health minister says no to'waif-like' models on his country's catwalks. Major Israeli retailers avoid 'overly thin' models in their ads.
December 2006 Brazilian agencies say models must produce medical evidence they are healthy.
February 2007 Spain's biggest fashion show rejects five models for being too thin.
March 2007 Melbourne Fashion Week employs nutritionists to monitor models. French health officials say skinny models 'need special attention'.
April 2007 John Lewis says it will only use 'normal sized' models in ads. Australia Fashion Week won't use models who 'are unnaturally or extraordinarily thin', but won't use BMI rules.
May 2007 Unilever bans size zero models from ads. Australia Fashion Week is criticised for not following its guidelines and allowing very thin girls to model at a swimwear show.
July 2007 UK Model Health Enquiry reports that despite concluding that 40 per cent of models have disordered eating there's no BMI ban. Most models the panel spoke to said they felt pressured into losing weight. Africa Fashion International bans size-zero models from the catwalk.
Aug 2007 British Fashion Council says extra funding is needed to enforce the health enquiry's policy on minimum model age and drug use.
Rebecca Seal