The Model & Celeb Weight Thread [Read post #1 before posting] #1

[*Bianca*]

redruby, grunged mentioned it here in the section I'm quoting.

Originally Posted by Grunged

I don't know of anyone who would want to adopt this body image unless they had no knowledge of how unhealthy it is and/or lacked knowledge of anything overall and just felt that they weren't worth anything more than trying to have a 21 inch waist. When I said "smart" I didn't mean book smarts, I meant someone that has a healthy mindset and is knowledgeable that body images like that are not healthy by any means nor do they send out a healthy message.

Well, I don't know if you're talking about common dieting or eating disorders, but if you are talking about eating disorders... from the people I've personally known, I think many KNOW how unhealthy the disorders are. Some have even been med, nutrition, or psych students, so it's kind of impossible for them not to be aware of the dangers and damages it does to the body.

But then I think also denial comes with the disorder too...it serves to enable the disorder, and problems that arise get justified e.g "well i've lost my hair, nails and my bones are brittle, but, you know what, it's okay" (thinking of that youtube video /watch?v=stH-LRTjEC0) or the disordered-part of the persons mind convinces them self "it may have happened to them, but it's not going to happen to me".

I think irrational and rational mindsets can work a the same time, for instance, often those with EDs warn about the dangers and are against the glamorisation and unhealthy messages that the media send out, but being knowledgeable and being against the promotion of EDs doesn't necessarily mean they are able to quit their own disorder.

That's just my thoughts on it.

[Fahion_Girl22]

Wow
Being pretty to make "friends". Are Those people really your friends if they only like you becasue your pretty? This just shows how parents can force views onto their children, that later become accepted as their way of life. Its so sad becasue she's going down a path of destruction...
Thanks Katherine

[mkd1187]

Originally Posted by katherine

I have something interesting for you guys! It's ridiculous and this girl's mum is totally ruining her daughter's life. But you can see how media and fashion also influence her. Oh Sasha, haven't you seen what happened to Jonbenet Ramsey?

Katherine!! You're Terrible!!!! .....

[karen sofie]

Originally Posted by Grunged

Katherine - I think everyone is well aware that people are sharing their own opinions too, I mean it's a forum after all.

Yup! That's pretty obvious

[Cola]

That's the part that makes an ED a sickness .. you can't just say "what the fcuk am I doing, this is so stupid, hand me that bacon" and get over it, you have no control over it .. it deeply screws over your behaviour and thinking patterns, it overwrites common reason with sick reason. Why would recovery be so hard otherwise? Your mind is kind of temporarily reprogramed .. ugh ugh sorry but some people's simplistic mindset really pisses me off.

And EDs can be coping mechanisms that come into being in complicated and abstract steps that require a potent and active brain and psyche. There you have your smarts.

[katherine]

Cola, I agree with you 100%. It pisses me off so much when people are like oh she can just eat a pizza, lets shove a cheeseburger down her throat. Okay yes, it's physically possible to do so but it's mind over matter in their minds and it's so, so hard. It almost becomes second nature not to eat.

[karen sofie]

Cola's very right, yes.

[ms-nietzsche]

Originally Posted by Fahion_Girl22

Wow
Being pretty to make "friends". Are Those people really your friends if they only like you becasue your pretty? This just shows how parents can force views onto their children, that later become accepted as their way of life. Its so sad becasue she's going down a path of destruction...
Thanks Katherine

I remember in fifth grade when this girl I know made a list of things her and her group of friends had to do (learn the model walk, say "like" so many times per sentence, only wear this color eye shadow etc) in order to be "popular." At the pre-teen age girls are willing to do anything to fit in and make "friends."


Teaching your daughter that her self-worth depends on how other people think she looks is setting her up for problems later on.

[Grunged]

Originally Posted by XxXRedRubYXxX

I disgagree, when i looked at your comments never have u mentioned what a "smart" was to you, Women can defiitely be smart but they also can be easily infuenced my the media or fashion no matter how smart they are you dont have a teenager to be easily influenced by the stigma of the "ideal" body type, you can be middle class or multi-million dollar woman who has the smarts and drive to back it up.

You must not have read my comments fully because you would've noticed this:

Originally Posted by Grunged

When I said "smart" I didn't mean book smarts, I meant someone that has a healthy mindset and is knowledgeable that body images like that are not healthy by any means nor do they send out a healthy message.

[TheKiwi]

Thanks so much for posting that video... British TV has the BEST documentaries! This is so sad...

[Grunged]

Thanks *Bianca*, I didn't see your post before.. I agree with what you said, but I also think that what I would like to add is that if you're more comfortable than uncomfortable with yourself then you're not going to be inspired by an image of a deathly thin person's body.

So when somebody said earlier that women were being "told" that they needed to have a 21 inch waist, 29 inch bust, etc. I was kind of upset because nobody's being told anything, people only allow stuff like that to get to their heads on their own.

[twin star]

Source | Telegraph.co.uk | By Roya Nikkhah

Top models 'will boycott London Fashion Week' over size zero good health rules

Last updated: 5:48 PM BST 06/07/2008

Sarah Doukas sure knows how to strike a pose. Hand on hip, tossing her platinum blonde hair over her shoulder and pouting for the camera, she could teach a thing or two to some of the "new faces" on the model cards behind her.

"Gosh this takes me back a few years," she laughs, referring to her own brief career as a model. "I did Harmony shampoo ads, loads of shoe modelling because I have such tiny feet and all the car adverts because the tall girls couldn’t fit in the cars. But it was never really going to work because look at me, I’m pint sized."

Even in four-inch Christian Louboutin heels, Doukas cuts a tiny figure. But as the founder of the Storm modelling agency - the woman who discovered Kate Moss and first put the likes of Eva Herzigova, Lily Cole, Cindy Crawford and France’s first lady, Carla Bruni, on the front covers and catwalks, Doukas is one of the undisputed giants of the fashion world - the original "model maker" whose eye for a new face sets the look agenda every season.

This month, Storm turns 21. Looking around at her 30-strong team who, from Storm’s offices just off the Kings Road in west London, scour up to 3,000 submissions a month from aspiring models, Doukas, 54, recalls how the world’s most famous model agency started from the rather humbler beginnings of her bedroom.

"I walked out of school in the middle of my A-levels - I was never one for exams - and had no bloody idea what I was going to do with my life," she laughs. Brief stints followed as a model, the manager of a punk band and an antiques dealer in Paris before she took a job as a booker at the Laraine Ashton model agency in London.

"It sounds a bit crass, but I liked selling things and I liked beautiful things, so a model agency kind of fit," she says. After securing a £200,000 loan from Sir Richard Branson, whose sister was an old school friend, Doukas founded Storm.

"For the first few months, I ran it from my bedroom in Battersea," says Doukas, who lives in the same house where it all started, with her husband, Tim, an art director, and her two youngest daughters, Genevieve, 16, and Poppy, 10.

"I had this thing - which I still believe in - that I didn’t want to steal any girls from other agencies - I wanted new, fresh faces, but I had no girls, so I literally went looking for them out on the streets. I found one at the Dovercourt garage in Battersea, one with pink hair on a CND march, and off we went."

While Doukas is credited with creating some of the key "looks" of the past two decades - the glamorous supermodels of the 1980s and early nineties - and the superwaif, led by Kate Moss, that followed, one of the biggest changes she has witnessed in the fashion industry is the fact that ethnic beauty has become almost invisible.

"When I started, Iman was everywhere, Naomi Campbell was on front covers, and I had Karen Alexander and Kara Young," she says, counting on her fingers at least five other black models who "made it big back then".

"It is bizarre that we have so little diversity in our idea of beauty now," laments Doukas, who has still managed to elevate the Sudanese model, Alek Wek, into the supermodel league and whose recent signing, 17-year-old Londoner, Jourdan Dunn, looks set to follow suit.

"When Jourdan did the Prada show in Milan this year, she was the first black model to have done Prada in more than 10 years, which is ridiculous," says Doukas crossly. "Are clients racist? Well, some of them must be if they are not booking the beautiful black girls, but I can only hope that Jourdan breaking through means that things are slowly starting to change."

Diminishing waistlines is another worry for Doukas, who is thankful that 90 per cent of her girls stick to editorial work instead of the catwalk, where the pressures of shrinking down to a size zero are most intense. But she admits that the stringent demands of the catwalk make her heart sink, and the poster for Beat, the eating disorder charity, which is discreetly tacked to the back of Storm’s bathroom door, hints at this darker side of the industry.

"When the fashion weeks come around, it is a nightmare, and the girls put themselves under huge pressure," she says, shaking her head. "I hear them saying "I’ve got to lose three inches from my waist before I go to Galliano," and I go mental and tell them to do no such thing. It is simply not realistic to expect a 5ft 10in girl to fit into a 34-inch hip."

Doukas is not afraid to throw her weight around, so to speak, with the biggest names in fashion, to protect her girls from the pressures of the catwalk. "Lily (Cole) recently came to me before the shows in Paris and said she was panicked that she wouldn’t be able to fit into anything - she is a tall girl with a reasonable hip size. So we called Gaultier, Dior and Lacroix and told them to change the clothes to fit her. And they did. So why can’t they do it for the other girls?"

But does she believe that the fashion industry, for all its talk of cracking down on the size zero phenomenon, is really willing to change? "Put it this way: not using such thin girls is against the odds and getting attitudes to change is like trying to turn a laden oil tanker in the middle of the Atlantic."

Male models, says Doukas, are also feeling the pressures of slimming down for the catwalk. "I think there is a bit of a backlash to that whole bulked up, muscle boy look of the nineties, so yes, the men are definitely getting skinnier," she says. "But a lot of them come to us far too skinny and I tell them to go away and start eating, or they won’t get any work."

The modelling industry is not renowned for nurturing its charges, a fact highlighted earlier this month by the apparent suicide of Ruslana Korshunova, the 20-year-old model from Kazakhstan who fell to her death from her ninth-floor apartment in Manhattan.

But Doukas, who describes herself as "mother" to her models, gives them more pastoral care than most, running Storm as a "family" business, with her younger brother, Simon Chambers, 46, a co-director and her eldest daughter, Noelle, 28, a booker at the agency.

"We are a family here and I want the models to feel a part of that," says Doukas, who still sends chaperones to accompany her youngest models on jobs. "What happened to that young girl in New York is tragic.

Who knows what led to it. I deliberately choose staff who I know can pick up on any problem - emotional or health-related - and I insist that all our models are in touch with us constantly, either by phone or email, because I want to know how they are.

This morning Jourdan called us from Paris and I could tell she wasn’t very happy because she was in a serviced apartment where she had to go out and get food. She’s young, she doesn’t feel comfortable walking about everywhere on her own, so straight away, we moved her somewhere she can get room service and eat properly."

Doukas’s expertise in models’s welfare was called upon last year when she was invited to sit on the panel of the British Fashion Council’s Model Health Inquiry, chaired by the Labour peer Baroness Kingsmill, which was established to assess the health of models working at London Fashion Week.

While she is thrilled with the some of the inquiry’s 14 recommendations, such as the ban on models under 16, she is unhappy about the decision to force models to provide a doctor’s "certificate attesting their good health", which, she fears, will cause girls unnecessary anxiety and may even keep them away from the British catwalks.

"The committee was a very good thing, but I think people see some of the issues as a bit too black and white, and think that guidelines will provide a quick fix for the problem," she says.

"That is unrealistic. I think they [the certificates] are crazy - not a good idea. It will make some of the girls even more paranoid and freaked out about the weight thing, and they won’t come to the UK market, they simply won’t come to London Fashion Week. It will keep them away and they will stay in Paris and New York where they don’t have to do it."

While Doukas predicts that the current economic downturn will prompt a return to the "safe" model look - "you know, nothing too quirky - the look all the Russian girls have", Doukas insists Storm will remain, as it always has, an edgier agency that takes on girls who might not necessarily fit the conventional modelling bill.

Indeed, many of Doukas’s biggest signings over the past 21 years would have been considered too short - Kate Moss, too big - Sophie Dahl, too ginger - Lily Cole and too black - Alek Wek, by almost any other agency.

"I just like an interesting face," she says, shrugging her shoulders. The most interesting of them all, she says, "stuck out like a sore thumb in a sea of faces" when Doukas spotted a 14-year-old Kate Moss waiting to board a flight at JFK airport 20 years ago.

"There she was, sitting on the floor, looking really bored and pissed off, and I was drawn to her," says Doukas, who has since become something of a surrogate mother figure for Moss, who she speaks to every day.

So just what is it about the girl from Croydon that has made Moss the most successful model of all time, with whom the public and top designers continue to conduct a love affair of unprecedented longevity despite what appears in the tabloids, and whose every outfit and hair cut is immediately copied when she steps out of her front door?

"She has a huge personality and is, quite simply, the coolest girl on the block," says Doukas. "She works damn hard, she never complains about a job and has never conformed to any one style. When you know her well, you realise she is exceptional. There will never be another Kate. Ever."

Carla Bruni is also still officially a Storm girl. "She was one of our very first," says Doukas, who is unsurprised by her ascent from the catwalk to the Elysee Palace, recalling one of Bruni’s first jobs for a Kodak advertisement.

"She was always super smart and sophisticated, but bit of an unknown then, and on the day of the shoot, I remember the president of Kodak turned up and was a bit surprised we didn’t have a bigger name for them," says Doukas. "Needless to say, by the end of the day, he was smitten, absolute putty. You see, cream always rises to the top."

[MikChick]

I can't believe they did that for Lily! And indeed: why can't they do that for everyone? Size zero is insane.

[Fontenrose]

Great article! Lousy title! The top models already skip London fashion week, so no loss. Why can't the headline writer stick to the point?

Diminishing waistlines is another worry for Doukas, who is thankful that 90 per cent of her girls stick to editorial work instead of the catwalk, where the pressures of shrinking down to a size zero are most intense. But she admits that the stringent demands of the catwalk make her heart sink, and the poster for Beat, the eating disorder charity, which is discreetly tacked to the back of Storm’s bathroom door, hints at this darker side of the industry.

"When the fashion weeks come around, it is a nightmare, and the girls put themselves under huge pressure," she says, shaking her head. "I hear them saying "I’ve got to lose three inches from my waist before I go to Galliano," and I go mental and tell them to do no such thing. It is simply not realistic to expect a 5ft 10in girl to fit into a 34-inch hip."

It's nice to hear she went to bat for Lily. Now some other girls can ask their agents why they don't rate that kind of phone call.

[lovefrommilan]

I really liked reading that article, thanks for posting it!
She seems like she really cares about her models personally. Maybe even a little too much. It seemed like she really babied Jourdan by getting her room service and all of that. It's not hard to go out and get your own food, you know.

It was a bit hypocritical imo to claim that it isnt realistic for these girls to fit into a 34 inch hip, when Jourdan is very, very thin and maybe even has less than a 34 inch hip. Suffice to say, Jourdan is beautiful and a great model, and the article was a great addition. Kudos!