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According to TMZ, Tyra's gonna go on the air tomorrow wearing the same ugly bathing suit that got her called "America's Next Top Waddle." She will prove -- definitively -- what women have feared for years about photographs. "it's not the thighs, it's the angle!"
Tyra Banks answered her critics in this week's People magazine. Though she's put on 30 lbs since she stopped modeling, she now weighs 161 lbs and says, "I still feel hot." And at 5'10", she would have a BMI of 23, well within the range of "normal weight". People writes:
On her hit show America's Next Top Model, Tyra Banks has always stressed the importance of body confidence – but it still hurt when tabloids ran an unflattering photo of her in a bathing suit under headlines that screamed, "America's Next Top Waddle" and "Tyra Porkchop."
Now, for the first time in an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Banks, 33, is publicly discussing her much-buzzed-about weight gain. "I get so much mail from young girls who say, 'I look up to you, you're not as skinny as everyone else, I think you're beautiful,' " she says. "So when they say that my body is 'ugly' and 'disgusting,' what does that make those girls feel like?"As for how Banks feels about her own 5'10" body – which she says is at 161 lbs. these days, about 30 lbs. heavier than when she landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue in 1997 – she says: "I still feel hot, but every day is different. It's when I put on the jeans that used to fit a year ago and don't fit now and give me the muffin top, that's when I say, 'Damn!' "
In other words, yes: She has put on weight, though not nearly as much as those recent tabloid stories suggested. (Banks believes the pix were snapped at an unflattering angle.) "She has a very womanly, gorgeous body that goes up and down," says her good friend Heidi Klum.
The Lede at the NY Times has an excellent wrap up of what the various international fashion councils are doing (or not doing) to address the issue of fashion and eating disorders. It is aptly titled, "Smoke, Mirrors & the Size of Women":
Spain will, for the first time, be standardizing its clothing for women. Seems until now, it was something of a crapshoot when shopping for a blouse in, say, Barcelona — where as BBC News points out today, a European size 40 (about a 10 in the United States in one shop could mean something completely different in another.
Even in the same store, women in Spain were typically forced to eyeball items labeled with wildly different sizes, take a handful of them to the dressing room, and hope for the best, rendering the “sizes” all but meaningless.
No more. From BBC News:
But by 2008 those days could be over. Spain’s biggest fashion retailers have bowed to government pressure to standardize their sizes and reflect the real size of Spain’s growing population.
Under new regulations, a size 40 garment in one store will need to be at least roughly comparable to a size 40 in another shop.
The size standardization is accompanied by a push to scrap the nation’s rail-thin window mannequins in exchange for models that are at least a European size 38, ideally 40 — which roughly corresponds to a sizes 8-10 in the United States.
The Age newspaper in Australia also reports that retailers also agreed to begin regularly stocking sizes at the upper end of the spectrum — something most shops don’t currently do, apparently.
The news from Spain — which also took the aggressive step last year of banning what are known as “size-zero” models from fashion shows in Madrid last year — comes the same week that four major fashion powerhouses in the United States, France, Italy and Britain agreed to address growing concern over the industry’s use of “ultra-thin” models.
Or at least to talk about addressing it.
The four industry groups — France’s Federation de la Couture, La Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, the Council of Fashion Designers of America and the British Fashion Council — met for talks on the topic in Paris on Wednesday.
Beyond agreeing that “all actors concerned must get involved in the matter of information,” whatever that statement from the French contingent means, however, it was unclear what the fashion industry groups were prepared to do. And it certainly seems that super-super-thin bodies are not easy for the industry to give up.
From Reuters:
The head of the French fashion federation, Didier Grumbach, said earlier this week Paris would not take extra measures to ban ultra-skinny models from catwalks because its rules on their health were already strict.
“We must be attentive and inform young women but not regulate even more,” Grumbach said on the sidelines of an haute couture show in Paris Monday.
France’s health minister has said he wants a working group to assess the impact that images of skinny models have on young women.
The fashion world has been debating the issue of ultra-thin models, with many designers and models shrugging off concern that they encourage eating disorders in girls and young women.
New guidelines were developed earlier this month in advance of New York’s big shows this fall. They included some scheduling shifts to help models get more sleep, urging designers to identify models with eating disorders, and more nutritious backstage catering.
But it all fell short of body-mass requirements for models that are starting to take root in places like Madrid. Late last year, the regional government of Milan — which essentially controls the major fashion shows in Italy — established body-mass requirements that force models to hew to World Health Organization standards for their heights.
And of course, much of the problem was brought into stark relief last year with the death of a 21-year-old Brazilan model Ana Carolina Reston, who died of apparent anorexia. Ms. Reston, 5-ft. 8-inches, weighed just 88 lbs. when she died, according to reports.
Growth at the luxury unit was driven by solid gains at its top brands, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, as well as a 66% rise in sales at Bottega Veneta, which benefited from continued rapid expansion in its core Japanese market.
Bottega Veneta also recently took its first step into China, opening a store in Shanghai and plans a further 10 stores worldwide in 2007.
Shares in the group climbed 3.2% higher in Paris. PPR's shares had been under pressure ahead of the results, losing around 6% since the start of January.
The Gucci brand enjoyed strong sales in the U.S. and Japan, where it benefited from a new flagship store in Tokyo.
"All the luxury goods brands continued to outperform their markets, due to the talent of the designers and the brands strong positioning," said Francois-Henri Pinault, chairman and chief executive in a statement.
Gucci is also repositioning its range of watches by increasing their quality and selling price, though the impact from this initiative likely won't be seen until the second half of 2007, the company told analysts on a conference call.
Why promote such impossible and unhealthy notions of beauty when all you really want to do is sell more handbags? Duh...because it works.
Bob Eckstein at Time Out New York has drawn up some wicked cartoons about the underweight model controversy. Bob adds to the CFDA's guidelines for fashion week:
The organizers of London's fashion week are following in the wimpy footsteps of the CFDA. They're not issuing any specific requirements of models, only that they be "healthy".
The British Fashion Council believes that barring models with eating disorders is "neither desirable nor enforceable."
Among their recommendations....
“We have asked designers, model agencies and image makers to respect this responsibility and to use only healthy models for their collections. Additionally, we recommend that only models aged 16 or over are used."
British Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell had previously called for regulation of the fashion industry, only to back away from that stance. She is now supporting the industry's attempts at self-regulation.
The cabinet minister says:
“Too many teenage girls try to starve themselves into unhealthy thinness, at great risk to their health. The fashion industry is hugely powerful in shaping the attitudes of young women and their feelings about themselves. Teenage girls aspire to look like their role models. If their role models are healthy, it will help inspire girls to be the same.”
Kate Moss must be so relieved.
Last September, before models like Ana Carolina Reston and Luisel Ramos died of anorexia, the Spanish government took the lead at recognizing the link between eating disorders and the images presented by the fashion industry. The Spanish government persuaded Madrid's fashion establishment to require a minimum BMI of its models.
The decision was mocked, initially, by fashion industry insiders who suggested that Madrid was an inconsequential fashion center and that this would mean that only second-rate models would appear in the Spanish shows.
Now, the Spaniards has gone even further. The Spanish government, led by the Health Ministry, has persuaded fashion designers, including the owner of the Zara chain, to standardize women's clothing sizes. A size 40 (a US size 10) made by Mango will fit the same woman who wears a size 40 made by Zara. Dress sizes can be so head-spinning and flexible that this represents a concrete and substantial change to an industry that seems to delight in playing mind-games with its customers.
The participation of Zara and the Inditex Group is an enormous asset to this program. According to Wikipedia, the Inditex Group has over 3,100 stores around the world. BusinessWeek notes that its sales in 2005 were $8.15 billion. If you've been close to an american mall, or Moscow's Red Square, you've seen a Zara. It can bring new styles to its stores in only two weeks (vs. 9 months for its competitors) while trying to be a responsible producer. It is so successful, that Louis Vuitton fashion director Daniel Piette described it as "possibly the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world."
Beyond the standardization of dress sizes, stores will no longer use waif-sized clothes in window displays. Only clothes size 38 (the Associated Press article equates this with a US size 8 -- but some retailers equate it with a US size 2) and up will be featured. Moreover, designers will no longer label size 46 as a larger size.
To bring some scientific rigor to these changes, the Spanish health ministry will be obtaining bio-metric information from a large sample of Spanish girls and women. They have plans to measure 8,500 women from ages 12 to 70 to generate accurate and current data.
Now, if only the CFDA could follow suit in some small way. New York's Fashion Week starts February 2, and if even one model faints in front of the public, the industry will be under immense pressure to better address the health of its workers and the health of its consumers.
According to the New York Daily News, Al-Jazeera, the Arab-CNN, contacted the Council of Fashion Designers of America to learn more about the CFDA health initiative. Apparently the skinny model controversy extends worldwide. Will Dubai's fashion week be the next to require a minimum BMI?
Gisele Bundchen demonstrates why she is a supermodel, and not a rocket scientist. In an interview with O Globo newspaper, she says the following:
“I never suffered from this problem (anorexia), because I had a very strong family base. Parents are responsible, not the fashion industry.”
“Everybody knows that the norm in fashion is thin, but excuse me, there are people born with the right genes for this profession.”
According to Wikipedia, Bundchen's mother encouraged her to begin modeling when she was only 13 years old. Gisele left home at 16 to move to New York to begin her modeling career in earnest. Gisele points to the fact that her classmates called her "Olive Oyl" to demonstrate how skinny she has been all her life and to assert that genetics play a role in her continued thinness.
At 5'11" and 127 lbs, Gisele has a BMI of 17.7, which means she would be considered underweight by NIH standards, and this would exclude her from modeling in Madrid or Sao Paulo. Fortunately for Gisele, all it would take is a hamburger and fries (i.e., two more pounds) and she'd have a BMI of 18.
Who knows if Gisele is lucky to be both underweight and healthy. However, for her to assert that eating disorders exist solely because of family influence is ignorant and absurd and contrary to the opinions of experts on eating disorders. It is even contrary to what the CFDA believes. She has been called selfish and arrogant, and these criticisms seem warranted.
