Fashion, magazines and anorexia

I hardly ever see women on campus who look like those women on runways in Milan or in Vogue magazine. I think magazines, with their fake air-brushed models, really need to stop promoting the idea that skinny is beautiful. Girls develop a low self esteem after looking at the perfect bodies of models displayed in magazines. Never do the magazines show pictures of unattractive models or chubby ones. This promotes the idea that thin is good.

The entire fashion industry, from the fashion houses and model coordinators to the fashion magazines, should all share the blame for creating and perpetuating the “ideal” female body shape and size. Therefore, to put a stop to this, they should use models with realistic figures regular girls can relate to.

One cannot pinpoint exactly when this perception took shape, that clothes look good on a skinny model, and that body shape must not come in the way of a fashion catwalk. Magazines and Fashion houses promote the idea that clothes are important and models should not distract from the garments and be, in effect, “shadows.” As a result of this unrealistic fashion standard, models have gone from slim to thin, and thin to skinny and shapeless. Young girls look at these skinny models and get the notion that they too must look like them.

It all starts with strict diets, which bring about a state of semi-starvation, which lead to severe malnutrition, loss of weight, anemia, infertility and loss of sexual desire. Young girls then enter a state of Anorexia Nervosa, which is a serious eating disorder.

Anorexia Nervosa is a disorder where the sufferer starves herself because she has the irrational belief that she is too fat, is not losing weight and does not need either treatment or food.

Bulimia is an offshoot of Anorexia, where vomiting is self-induced after a bout of binge eating. The binge eating itself is a result of depression, severely low self esteem and a dissatisfaction with one’s body or self-image.

It is said that out of every four college-aged women, uses unhealthy methods of weight control such as fasting, skipping meals, excessive exercise, laxative abuse and self-induced vomiting to become skinny and that statistic is shocking to me. The magazines we read sell the diet industry to women, making them feel anxious about their body image.

The media, in collusion with the fashion houses, and their unrealistic, bizarre dictates, have created a culture where thinness is regarded as perfect or ideal. Women’s magazines help in promoting this idea because advertisements and articles found in these magazines continuously promote weight loss and body weight change, either by diet control, exercising or cosmetic surgery.

So fashion houses and fashion magazines should squarely take the blame. They started the trend and it is up to them to put a stop to it. How? By asking models to be realistic about their weights. I understand magazines want to make sales, and usually pretty people on the covers will sell magazines fast, but the people in the fashion industry must realize the negative impact their magazines have on women, and perhaps even men. Magazines and fashion houses should make a woman feel good about herself. By doing so they can save a lot of women, teens and children from succumbing to illnesses such as Anorexia and Bulimia.