hermetic please see post #318: ...you cannot credit threads on tFS - tFS does not own the pictures. Please post proper credits of the picture will have to be taken down.
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There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.
Did anyone else watch the E! red carpet coverage? Debbie Matenopoulous looks quite frightening...
She was terrifying...for a second I thought "damn, good arms", but my eyes soon adjusted. I just googled her, and I actually would not recognise her from any of her pics from more than a couple of years ago; she's lost a ton of weight (and gained a lot of extensions )
Standing tall: At 5ft 11in, Olivia, 26, is a size 10 on top and a size 8 on the bottom
Don't hate me for being so skinny
By OLIVIA INGE
The first time it happened was about two months ago, just when the debate about so-called size-zero models was starting to simmer.
I was walking down Oxford Street in London when I noticed a well-dressed man in his 30s striding towards me.
Rapidly, he looked me up and down, and then his eyes settled on my legs. And his lip curled into a distinct snarl. Charming, I thought.
Then, a couple of days later, a gaggle of teenage girls in jeans and trainers stopped to gawp at me on the pavement near Topshop. As I walked past, one of them said: "Oh my God, have you seen them skinny legs?"
The comments started coming thick and fast after that. "Oi", said a teenage girl in Camden: "Skinny, anorexic bitch!" Outside the Natural History Museum, a mousey woman (perm, tweed ensemble, old enough to know better) glanced in my direction, nudged her equally tweedy friend and said: "Oo, look at that - it's not natural..."
Twice since then, I've provoked the comment "Jesus" on my way to meet friends for a night out.
It seems that anyone and everyone suddenly feels they can make an impertinent comment about the way I look, as though I am a moral deviant with a scarlet letter branded on my forehead.
Like most models, I probably look a lot better in photographs than I do in the flesh. I am neither extraordinarily beautiful nor ugly - certainly not to the extent that I would expect to be pointed out in the street.
Until the recent hullabaloo about size four (the American size zero) models on the catwalk, I hadn’t been singled out for being repulsively skinny, either - or at least no one had said as much to my face.
What, I wonder, does the great British public want me to do about my body? Stuff my face with pies and Mars Bars? Wear a Michelin-man bodysuit?
And it isn't just the public who have been reacting out of all proportion to stories about models who apparently exist on lettuce and Diet Coke.
In the past month, for the first time, I have lost two modelling jobs - one for a TV commercial and one for a High-Street chain - because I was deemed too skinny.
Since Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell announced by Olivia Inge that she wanted to see extremely thin models banned from the catwalk, one critic after another has piled into the fray.
There should be doctors on hand to check that models are healthy, was one suggestion. Every model should have her body mass index (BMI) measured, was another. I have no idea, incidentally, what my BMI is, and really don’t care.
Madrid banned any size-zero models from appearing on the catwalk, and even Milan declared a BMI minimum. (Yeah, I thought, as if Donatella Versace is going to demand health certificates from her supermodels).
London Fashion Week, however, held firm and refused to institute a ban - though the British Fashion Council did send out letters to the various designers.
During the fittings before his show, Jasper Conran told me that the letter had asked him to avoid using skinny-looking girls. "That's discrimination!" I said. Jasper agreed. He was clearly annoyed: "Well, that means I can't use you, I can't use Erin, I can't use Lily. You're all skinny-looking girls ..." He went ahead and used us all anyway.
At the castings we all have to attend before the shows, no one made the slightest remark about my weight or asked me what I'd had for breakfast or checked my BMI or demanded a doctor’s certificate - and I ended up walking down the runway for eight different designers.
Why is everyone convinced that models are such unhealthy creatures? It is indeed tragic that at least two models from other countries are known to have died of anorexia in the past year, but only a fool would lay all the blame at the feet of the fashion industry.
I have no medical qualifications, but as far as I know, anorexia is a complex, psychological disease that can hinge on issues to do with control.
I've known only one model who seemed skinny to the point of danger. She shared a hotel room in Milan with a friend of mine but would never join us to eat and seemed to spend most of her spare time straightening her hair.
That was a few years ago, and her career has now fizzled out. Of course, there must be a handful of people working somewhere in the world in this massive industry who do urge their models to lose too much weight or even encourage them to go on unhealthy diets.
All I can say is that, in ten years of modelling - and ten years of chatting to other models - I haven't come across any examples of this sort of behaviour in London.
It's ironic, in view of all the fuss, that the current crop of British models do tend to be slightly "bigger" (size 8-10) than the other globe-trotters.
Yet no one has ever told me to eat less, apart from my father, who has been trying for years to wean me off sweets for the sake of my teeth.
I'm perfectly aware that anyone outside the fashion world who meets me for the first time is likely to think that I look very thin. Even ultra thin.
But the truth is that my skinniness is a bit of an illusion. When you have limbs like a daddy-longlegs, as I do, and you are 5ft 11in, as I am, your body looks unnaturally elongated compared with most other people's.
In the same way, a woman who is under 5ft and a perfectly acceptable size 14 might give the initial impression of being overweight.
Far from being a so-called size zero, I am, in fact, a size 10 on top and a size 8 on the bottom - so not exactly anorexic or unhealthy.
I have friends who aren't models with whom I can cheerfully do clothes-swops (though not, of course, of trousers and long-sleeved tops, which tend to end at the wrong point on my arms and legs.)
With the same caveat, I can wear clothes off the rack from any branch of Topshop or Zara - and frequently do, mixing them with the exquisite garments sometimes given to me by designers.
Another common misconception about models is that we are all preternaturally vain. But like many women who spend their working life posing for photographers, I find it a relief to forget about what I look like once the cameras have been packed away.
But nor do I see much wrong with the way I look. It's the way I'm made; I have a similar body shape to my late grandmother, who was a skinny 6ft debutante in the Thirties and, like most aristocratic women of her time, had many of her dresses made for her. We still have a few, and the waists are too tight even for me.
I have the same build as my mother, my sister and two of my aunts. And, after the hell of adolescence, when I wanted above all to lose a foot in height during the night and wake up with thicker calves, I am not about to be shamed out of this hard-won acceptance of my genetic inheritance.
Largely because I have sensible parents, I managed to avoid developing any damaging psychological complexes. Mum told me that she'd been called "Spider" and "Skeley" (skeleton) at school, so I was clearly in good company.
She also made sure that I ate well. During one lesson, the teacher asked if any of the girls had ever been on a diet; I was the only one not to put up a hand.
At 16, I was "spotted" by a scout who came to our careers day at school. She told me that finishing my education should be my priority but that I could model during holidays and half-terms - which is how I began.
I feel at home in this world. We are the stick-insects of the human race: women and girls who are sometimes pretty, by definition photogenic and self-evidently among the tallest, slimmest women on the planet.
Is it the fault of designers that models tend to conform to one particular shape? To them, we are giant coat-hangers on which to present their creations to best advantage. And there's no denying that clothes can be draped more dramatically on a long, slim body than on a curvaceous, 5ft 3in Miss Average.
At London Fashion Week, the talk backstage was all about how bored everyone was with the skinniness debate. "We’ve seen it all before, when they had a go at Kate Moss and Jodie Kidd a few years ago," said one model. "Nothing will change - I can’t see designers using fatter girls," said another.
Lily Cole, the star of the shows, just gave a wry smile. Last September, she was slated for being too thin. She then travelled to the Milan shows, where she was told that she was too "big". A month or two later, she was praised to the skies in the British Press for having put on a stone.
All rather unfair: she is, as ever, a normal size 8-10 and hasn't gained or lost an ounce. One thing we all agreed upon: the current emphasis on women's weight is demeaning and cheap - and it's about time we moved on from this collective hysteria to talk about something else.
Climate change, anyone?
Last edited by twin star : 01-03-2007 at 11:11 AM.
27-02-2007
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