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Are Teenagers Better At Solving The Thin Model Problem Than "Vogue" Editors?

As one 14-year-old led a well-publicized protest outside Seventeen magazine’s offices, 19 Vogue editors drafted an apparently meaningless “Health Initiative.”

I know, right? Now tell your friends!
Are Teenagers Better At Solving The Thin M...
Amy Odell

An April editorial in French Vogue.

Source: i.models.com

Editors of 19 international editions of Vogue, including the American one, have banded together to form a “Health Initiative” — basically a pledge to curb the unhealthy effects the beautification of thinness might have on high fashion models and, presumably, the people who look at them. But like many of the fashion industry’s attempts to show they care about this issue, it felt like theater instead of an actual solution.

The Health Initiative is the latest in a string of an awful lot of recent attempts to make the “too thin” stuff go away. Pinterest and Instagram have banned “thinspo.” Italian Vogue’s editor-in-chief spoke at Harvard about eating disorders, largely to deflect the blame from the people like herself who run the fashion industry and unrelentingly hire the “too thin” models.

The initiative includes six points that say that Vogue editors will not “knowingly work with models under the age of 16 or who appear to have an eating disorder.” And they will “ask agents not to knowingly send us underage girls and casting directors to check IDs when casting shoots, shows and campaigns.” And they will “encourage designers to consider the consequences of unrealistically small sample sizes of their clothing, which limits the range of women who can be photographed in their clothes, and encourages the use of extremely thin models.” And they’ll make sure models have mentors, and don’t have to work too late, the list goes uninterestingly on.

This is not the first high profile “initiative” that has been created to try to make sure models don’t have eating disorders and aren’t too young to be working (as in, age 13 or 14). The Council of Fashion Designers of America also created a “Health Initiative” in 2007 to encourage designers to hire healthy models. But none of these pledges or initiatives are laws with legal implications — they’re just promises.

What kills me about all these initiatives and protests and guidelines is that they’re necessary in the first place. Isn’t it insane, when you think about it? That models are so disturbingly thin and making women around the world feel so bad about their bodies that the industry has to put on this great a show of self-regulation? And any time a model comes along who isn’t a size zero or two, everyone who cares about this stuff and follows fashion practically shoots off fireworks in celebration that a “plus-size” girl finally made it??

From a February 2012 Italian Vogue editorial.

Source: i.models.com

But the Vogue editors needn’t have bothered with an “initiative” to curb the exposure of thin models in their pages. I don’t need them to tell me they won’t knowingly hire a model with an eating disorder, or knowingly hire a 14-year-old, or encourage designers to consider the damaging results of making very tiny clothing samples. Frankly, did they really need to write all that DOWN? And also, who cares what they intend to do? Just show me you care about this already!

Extremely thin girls have been the ideal in fashion for years — and this may be the most pushback against the super thin movement we’ve seen in a decade. So if you really are sick of it, Vogue editors, actually do something about it. Stop talking about it, stop drawing up toothless guidelines that fit into tidy press releases, and just change it. Don’t call in the tiny clothing samples for shoots. Don’t hire girls who are so thin you wonder if they have eating disorders. Don’t only shoot Adele from the neck up. And don’t talk about it. Don’t write it down. Just do it.

Like 14-year-old Julia Bluhm, from Maine, did yesterday, when she led a protest outside of Seventeen magazine’s New York office to try get the editors to feature one spread a month that features girls with a realistic appearance, who aren’t photoshopped. (She gained entré to the Seventeen editor’s office to discuss her concerns, but the magazine would not say if they would start meeting Bluhm’s painfully reasonable demands.) She did it. She up and went to New York one day, with her friends, with her 24,000 signature-strong petition in support of her cause, and just did what she needed to do.

You, fashion industry, can do the same.

I promise you: you’ll sell more magazines.

Julia Bluhm (center) and friends.

Image by Leanne Italie / AP

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    • margaretlouisec thinks Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... is Win  about a week ago
    • A02 thinks Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... is Win  about 2 weeks ago
    • eunjinel thinks Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... is Win  about 2 weeks ago
    • nickir2 2 weeks ago

      How about having beautiful pictures of girls/women of all sizes, beauty comes in all sizes not just one or two.

    • Audrey   Are Teenagers Better At Solving The...  about 3 weeks ago
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    • maxinecallejau a year ago

      These magazines are just bad for you in general. Almost everyone I know who reads them is obsessed with whether they’re skinny enough or pretty enough or wearing the right clothes. Fuck that, that’s not what I want to spend my life worrying about.

    • stefani   Are Teenagers Better At Solving The...  about a year ago
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    • biancam4   Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... and thinks it’s Win  about a year ago
    • Julia Chambers   Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... and thinks it’s Win  about a year ago
    • carlyk2 thinks Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... is Win  about a year ago
    • Alisson Wherewithall   Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... and thinks it’s Win  about a year ago
    • First of all, ‘Seventeen’ may not post ‘average’ girls, but most of the girls they post do not look unrealistic or unhealthy, so they shouldn’t be compared to ‘Vogue’.
      Second, statements like this bother me (in the context of this article): “Don’t only shoot Adele from the neck up.” - why? Why should we censor images of thin women, because it might trigger anorexia, but not censor images of overweight or obese women? Adele is not the picture of a ‘healthy’ body… is this really about health, or has it become about fat acceptance?

    • Inquisitive Kat   Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... and thinks it’s Fail  about a year ago
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    • Aubriejedi   Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... and thinks it’s Win  about a year ago
    • kefkai a year ago

      Need a first world problems or who cares button, humans just model themselves after what they want to be seen as. It’s the same as exercise addicts who think that having tons of muscles is what’s attractive, people like to blame the media for their problems a lot, but all humans are capable of independent thought. And to all of those saying think of the children, when I was a kid hell I probably thought boy-bands were cool but I didn’t jump on the band wagon to try and be Justin Timberlake or one of the Backstreet Boys.  Impressionable people will always be impressionable.

    • janecitizen thinks Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... is Win  about a year ago
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    • Rare Parrot a year ago

      And little children shall lead them.

    • saraw8 thinks Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... is Win  about a year ago
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    • RhiRiot a year ago

      I hate when people blame the photo editors for cleaning up photos. Don’t punish the photo editors for doing their jobs, punish the clothing designers for only catering to body styles that fit their sewing dummies.  All photography gets edited in the printing world or else it would like shit.
      If you blew up a models face to the size of a billboard for an ad, would you REALLY want to see that large zit she had that day, in your face and selling your product?
      (For humor, hell yeah! But for selling my product, no.)
      Argh.

    • FlickMontana a year ago

      Hey! Maybe, I dunno, actually stop fucking buying Vogue? I mean… seriously. How long do you think they’d last if every woman that cared about this hunted down all of Vogue’s ancillary brands/goods and just starved them out? (no pun) I mean… really, ladies.

    • Robot On thinks Are Teenagers Better At Solving The... is Win  about a year ago
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    • cap_gun_girl a year ago

      I would not ban total photoshop but body morphing photoshoping is unfair.The article would have had more punch if you used pictures with more photoshoped girls. The girl in the first picture looks normal and the asian girl looks normal for asian, granted a bit thin but seeing as it is italian vogue and the set/clothing/makeup styled as it is, she fits the scene perfect.  Genetics also play a big role in fashion, not just photoshop. People have to remember that too.

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