Trigger Warning: Discussion of eating disorders and a mention of Alex Perry.
Fashion is not my thing. I’m no where near being a fashionista. However something caught my eye in the paper today.
There is an article today on the Courier-Mail Online about how Alex Perry is being a douche bag again. Since most of us know this already, I’m going to skip over it and talk about the last part of the article.
Certainly, the criticism of Moone’s body size stands in contrast to the decision by Melbourne Spring Fashion Week organisers to only use models with a healthy BMI on this year’s runways.
Models will be vetted by casting agents to ensure they are not too thin before they are signed up.
You might be surprised to find that I have an issue with this.
As a fat activist, I have been on record time and time again talking about how the BMI is not a good guide of health. The BMI does nothing to tell you the health (or ill health) of a person. It tells you the ratio of weight to height squared, and that’s about it. It is as if humans were designed to have the same height to weight ratio, but I don’t see how this can be so. I therefore have a issue with BMI being used to decide whether a model is ‘healthy’ enough to be on the catwalk.
I’m not a model so I don’t know what it is like to be in the fashion industry. From what I read, there is a lot of pressure to be a certain size and shape to make it. I have all kinds of issues with that. I read about models who are starving themselves to fit the mould of what the industry thinks is acceptable and it is really disgusting that people think they need to go as far as having eating disorders to maintain this ‘ideal size’. Yet excluding models because they don’t fit the BMI classification of ‘healthy’ is a bit rich as well.
I read a few months ago the story of Cody Young, a Queenslander who is making it big in international modelling. One of her shoots recently was for TOPSHOP and a British tabloid published claims that she was “danger to anorexics”. Cody came out swinging and talked about what it was like growing up being a young, tall and slim woman.
Throughout my entire childhood I was called anorexic and people would ask if I was bulimic. And it was really hard sometimes for me to deal with as I have always been this way .
The article doesn’t talk about her BMI but it would be interesting to see if she is considered ‘healthy’ by the BMI scale. Would she end up excluded even if in her own words “naturally skinny”?
I don’t want people to judge me based on my BMI. I don’t think anyone should be judged based on their BMI. This focus on a number meaning anything is just crazy crap. What we should do is somehow take the pressure of models to be this mythical perfect size. Perhaps then their beauty would shine through without them feeling they need to starve themselves or worse.
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I know right. According to the BMI, my grandmother should be around 52 kg. If she was that weight she would have nothing on her bones. BMI dismisses sooo many aspects of what it takes to be healthy on the inside. There are people who are naturally “underweight” – it’s in their genes and that’s the way their body is. And dont get me started on how many times I’ve heard people say to me “you’re too skinny! you need to eat!” They automatically assume that I DONT eat when little did they know that I eat more than my husband most times.