At size 4, Fashion Week model Coco Rocha, 21, is latest of many women considered fat by industry
BY Amy Diluna
DAILY NEWS FASHION EDITOR
Tuesday, February 16th 2010, 8:57 AM
So it's come to this.
After all the hype, promises and international outcry, fashion's still calling normal girls fat.
Coco Rocha is the latest victim of fashion's irresponsible, unattainable demand that young women - some barely into their teens - be emaciated.
The 21-year-old top model, an outspoken advocate for industry reform, told The New York Times that demand for her services has waned, thanks to an occasional hamburger habit.
Sunday, she modeled for Diane von Furstenberg. Monday, she walked in Zac Posen's show.
Look at the pictures.
She's a size 4 - and she's gorgeous.
Gemma Ward, an Australian who quit the business last year, got attention recently for chunked-up pictures (read: she's got thighs) that circulated online. One blogger suggested she could get work in the plus-size biz.
Compare these women with the models getting all the bookings - stick figures with jutting collarbones, thighs the size of their ankles and not a whisper of a womanly curve.
They're following in the footsteps of waifs like Kate Moss, who recently gave us her words of wisdom: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels."
It didn't feel good for Ana Carolina Reston, the 88-pound Brazilian who died in 2006 of complications from anorexia.
Don't feel sorry for the models: They live in a country where there's access to food, and are actively starving themselves to make money. They're making a choice.
Crystal Renn, a size-12 model who spent the early part of her career starving herself, says she was chasing a dream.
"No one chained me to a treadmill; no one forced me to starve," she told the Daily News. "I made those decisions to reach for the standards that were set for me."
Want to throw blame? Look straight at the people who are paying them.
Last week, the Council of Fashion Designers of America threw a symposium where designers, models and editors discussed raising the "sample size," the industry standard set for runway and magazine photo shoots, to a size 4.
Right now, it's a zero.
Designers and agents alike know that they're setting the bar for boniness - and that it's set pretty high.
Stunner Doutzen Kroes was at that panel and told The Associated Press she doesn't do shows because she doesn't fit into the sample size.
So she joined Victoria's Secret's brigade of sexy girls. "I eat and I am happy," she said. "I want a healthy lifestyle, and I hope other models can have choices like that."
Rocha spoke out at the event, too, saying, "It took a while to grow the confidence to say, 'This is who I am, take it or leave it.'"
And fashion, she has now revealed, decided to leave it.
Two years ago, at the first of these useless events, she admitted that when she was at her thinnest - just 108 pounds (she's 5-feet-10) - someone told her to lose weight.
So she did, and made herself ill with diuretic pills taken on an empty stomach. She vowed never to do it again - and made a plea then to the people present at the dog-and-pony show to make a change.
It was a cry for help.
And no one has listened.
she looks amazing
..coco opened it!
Anyway-I find it very hard to believe any, even borderline sane designer or agent would not cast Coco because of you know...that is absolutely ridiculous...She is a master of the runway! (Well, mistress, but that always makes me think of leather bustiers and whips...
o
