Feminism and fashion make uncomfortable bedfellows. The fashion industry continues to champion one body type that’s virtually impossible to achieve for the majority of healthy, adult women, and in doing so, denies the diverse reality of female bodies. It places medically unsafe expectations on models in terms of their measurements, leading to hospitalizations, models eating tissues to fill their stomachs, and, indirectly, it could be argued contributed to the death of several young women, including Luisel Ramos in 2006, who collapsed on the catwalk and died of heart failure caused by anorexia nervosa.
Fashion plays an undeniable part in the prevalence of body dissatisfaction in Britain, where one in four girls aged between 11-to-21 would consider cosmetic surgery and almost 10 million women report feeling ‘depressed’ by the way they look. As of February 2015, a report commissioned by the charity b-eat estimates that more than 725,000 people in the UK are suffering from an eating disorder.
Bar a few high profile examples, fashion largely ignores women of colour and trans women, preferring to populate runway shows, magazine editorials, and advertisements with tall, thin, white, cisgender bodies. Although plus-size models have become more commonplace, the term ‘plus-size’ is entirely arbitrary, illustrated by findings that three-quarters of the plus-size models at BMA models in London were a size 12 or below.
