The fashion world...

I’ve heard the cliché that beauty equates to success. Beauty as it seems, in this modern day is to be size zero, to be a skeletal figure with the lack flesh, a visage without character. The complexion to us of malnutrition, starvation and hunger, but in the Medias’ opinion, this face is one of beauty, one of ‘fashion’. Skinniness to the media, is not the average size 12, it is size zero: zero food, zero nutrition, but somehow to them it’s 100 percent beautiful.

This over shown airbrushed image of bones is surreal, unjust, and ugly. Females and even males form a constant burden of their figure, they feel they are unacceptable, overweight and not normal, but the way they view themselves in the mirror is constantly referred back to the ‘fashionable look’ - the size zero. People feel they need to fit the ideal image otherwise they aren’t accepted, no wonder so many are insecure. Naive young girls witness the media endorsing ‘skinniness’ to be healthy, to be right and most of all to be ‘beautiful’, nothing other than skinny can be accepted in their fashionable laws. To me, fashion by the media is shown to be that of perpetually dieting until ridiculously underweight, until skin and bone, until size zero.

There have been various complaints about the idealised figure in the fashion world (causing upset and insecurity to those with or without a sensitive disposition); this figure is overly shown: on the front of magazines, on television, on the internet and even as far as mannequins in shop windows. Due to this, ‘plus size’ models have been introduced, the name even sounds trite... Models are now labelled according to size, when will the fashion world wake up and see reality?

Models are selected individuals to flaunt clothing on the catwalk, this means setting an example to those who love fashion, giving the message “this clothing looks fashionable on my body”, but in reality, no one is absurdly skinny. They are almost modelling curtains: they are shapeless, loose-fitting and overwhelming for their petite bony frames. Personally, and I am sure plenty of others loathe to see surreal human bodies model clothes which we in reality, have no chance of wearing, as the possibility is, those clothes only fit the modelling population.

I couldn’t imagine the emotions of a model – a size zero model. Would this model feel as though they still aren’t ‘ideal’ and that they are overweight, or will some wake up and realise what they are doing to their bodies? Looking at their bodies must be reminiscent of a skeleton, a lifeless, frail frame with no inclination to move. But what differentiates a skeleton from a model, is a model has a life, it has to move, it has to live with the starvation, the hunger, the pain of not touching any nourishing foods – they feel the effects, and this, they have to carry on, just to be in the fashion world: to fit in, to be beautiful and to be accepted.

The mirror in the fashion world must be that of a shattered one, just as they shatter lives of aspiring and existent models: forcing them to be in their eyes, beautiful and perfect, forcing them to fit in. The path of success to these shallow employers of fashion is that of size zero, another skeleton with a walk of fragility whilst on the catwalk as if they’re about to snap.