Super thinness

My daughter is interested in majoring in fashion merchandising, and naturally she enjoys reading fashion and style magazines. I am really not into fashion nor do I follow trends, but the other day I was looking through one of my daughter's magazines, Vogue, to be exact, and I was absolutely disgusted by the pictures of super thin models and celebrities. They were too thin and looked very unhealthy. No, let me rephrase that. They didn't look thin, they looked like walking skeletons!

Do designers actually think that clothes look better hanging on rail-thin models that look like third world refugees? A clothes hanger would display their fashion just as good as these models if not better. Heck it would be a lot cheaper to use hangers. The sad thing is that the fashion industry continues to use these girls who look like they are inmates at a concentration camp. This sends a message to young girls that you must be a size O for your clothes to look good on you. Teenagers are following these examples and are starving themselves b/c they think that the skeletal thinnes is ideal. It is time for the fashion industry and the media to stop all this. It is not healthy to be fat, but being bones is not healthy either. It is impossible to be skeletal thin and healthy at the same time. We need to see real women with curves in these fashion magazines. They look good in fashionable clothes, too!

Dove is not a high fashion retail house, but the company is trying to bring a positive change into all this mess by delivering a message that all women are beautiful. Have you seen the Dove Ads for their Real Women Campaign? They are trying to change the way society views beauty by using curvier non-airbrushed real women from different ethnicities for their new skin line products. I’m not sure if Dove is really trying to improve women’s self esteem or this is simply a marketing trick for the company, but I’ll say, more power to them.

I applaud Dove for refusing to hire skinny models to promote their products. In any event, these ads are getting plenty of attention; both positive and negative. Men in Chicago complained that they didn’t want to see full figured women in underwear on billboards. Let me tell you, these women are hardly chunky! They are more like size 8-10. How said is it that we can’t even see a picture of a real woman (not even fat) in the media without having to hear negative remarks. Unless your bones are protruding through your skin, you’re not beautiful in this society! Then they wonder why eating disorders are on the rise.