Thursday, April 5, 2012

♥ health is beauty: FAIL.

image via the boston globe.

on monday evening i attended the 15th annual public forum on healthy and the fashion industry,
hosted by the harris center at mass general hospital. the health is beauty:defining ourselves
panel was made up of the highly esteemed arianna huffington of the huffington post
vogue italia editor in chief, franca sozzani and super model doutzen krous.

similarly to diane von furstenberg's discussion last year, ariana opened the panel
with a personal story of her own experience with eating disorders- mainly that her daughter,
isabella had suffered from one at a young age, and that the best advice she could offer 
was to start with yourself: learn healthy eating habits, change your mindset to one which 
values healthy body images over all else, to start a dollar jar for any comments made negatively/positively about weight, and be open for healthy discussion 
about health whenever possible.

franca followed up by stating that the fashion industry has become flat- all of the models look
the same, which is her way of explaining why there is very little diversity in the pages of fashion magazines, and with fashion becoming more democratic, this process has trickled down to the laypeople who can afford knock off pieces which also allows them to look just like everyone
else as well. on the one hand, i agree with her. on the other, i felt that it was a pretty lame 
excuse to explain why vogue has to single out specific "black" and a "curvy" issues, 
rather than just include black and curvy models in their editorials 
ALL OF THE TIME. duh!!!

but the worst of all was when model doutzen krous had her chance to speak.
here is what i can remember of her terrible foot-in-the mouth failure of a monologue..

what the pages of a magazine and victoria's secret sell is a fantasy.
 people want to buy into a fantasy. most people know they are not going to look like the 
women in the ads, but studies show that larger people don't sell as much products, 
which is why they use models. models are thinner and have longer limbs. 
if everyone did- i would be out of a job.

 sitting there in the audience, i was reminded of this famous scene
 from the film billy madison (1995). FAIL!

4 ♥ love notes.:

  1. Ah, I couldn't attend this event but was so excited to hear about it! It's too bad Krous had such a major fail. But I LOVE the video response you have. =)

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  2. Oy... maybe I'm glad I wasn't there.

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  3. This is an interesting topic, I agree the fashion industry has a distorted view of a world that is ever changing in terms of what people want to see verses what we're told we want to see. I'm just starting out shooting fashion and I like to photograph normal girls, I sometimes don't see what the fuss is about. We come in all shapes and sizes, depending on the styling and the creativity of the photographer everyone can look amazing.

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