Skinny Jeans & Sub Zero

I cheered Milan's fashion catwalk when in a radical move it decided to ban drastically thin models from its catwalks. Imagine a 20 something model wearing clothes that a 7 year old child could wear. Think about Hollywood's pressure on stars to be super thin. I recently saw a comparison of photos of Demi Moore in a magazine; Demi in the 1980s and Demi today. It was proof of how a healthy young woman can starve herself thin. Dove has a wonderful video on their site in support of their self esteem campaign for young women. It shows a model, pretty girl, and then we get to view the transformation she goes through until her photograph is plastered on a billboard. Photo enhancement in magazines, on billboards and in the media is big business. There should be a disclaimer: the people you see in these photographs are real people who have been enhanced to perfection.

And then I discover that the hourglass figure is the shape used for most of women's clothing. Only 8% of women are a true hourglass, and although Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren fell into this shape, Marilyn had to work hard to keep it. Most women are either an apple, spoon/pear or rectangle. Designers don't cut clothes for these shapes and haven't in 50 years!! There is a push on in the fashion industry to change, to start designing and cutting clothes for the top 3 shapes. I await this change and I will applaud it!! Maybe I will finally be able to find skirts and pants that fit my waist without gapping because I have to buy pants/skirts to fit over my hips but which end up being too big in the waist.

This week, I read with horror that there is a new size! Often when shopping sales, I find a plentiful supply of size 0s which haven't sold. Shouldn't this be telling someone that size 0 people aren't plentiful and that there are a mutitude of leftover clothing! Now subzero has been introduced into the UK size 00! Maybe the UK is trying to sell adult clothing to seven year olds?? Who in the world is size 00, other than those terribly sad photos of starving children in Africa? Is this what we are asking our young woment to aim for?

Sure there is an obesity problem in North American, but asking people to starve themselves thin isn't the answer to this problem nor is it a healthy body image to promote.

And then there are skinny jeans at the Gap using Audrey Hepburn as the model. Audrey who was one of the worst eaters, and who like a lot of stars at the time was on a strict diet to maintain her shape.