Thin

It is difficult to turn on the TV, flip through a magazine, or walk down the street in any American city without being bombarded with images of so called “perfect women." These images put pressure on women, both young and old, to look thin, beautiful, and flawless. This pressure is put forward by advertisers, and transferred to the mass of consumers through models who are starved and photo shopped into what the advertisers consider to be the ideal female form. As a woman living in Los Angeles, trying to avoid these images is impossible. On my way to school in the morning, I pass at least fifteen billboards covered with slim, sleek women. Nearly all of the models are size 0, and almost none reflect the body type of an average American woman. This certainly was the case for Paris model Isabella Caro, who battled with Anorexia Nervosa from the time she was 13 to her recent death at the age of 28. Caro, who was a fashion model, got her claim to fame in 2007 when she appeared in a controversial “No- Anorexia” ad campaign shot by Oliviero Toscani. She later wrote a book about her battle with the disease, called The Little Girl Who Didn’t Want to Get Fat, documenting her struggles within the modeling world, including the development of anorexia. She blamed her development of the disease mainly on her mother, Marie, who killed herself after her daughter's death. She wrote that when she was a child, her mother was depressed and took her depression out on Caro. She kept Caro in diapers until she was 7-years-old, dressed her in clothing that was too small for her, and kept her locked inside her apartment because her mother told her “fresh air makes children grow." As a way to rebel against her mother’s actions and feel like she had control over something, Isabelle began to starve herself. She describes how she only ate tiny chocolate squares and corn flakes to make sure that she stayed thin. Caro had many close calls with death due to her disease.  Her weight fluctuated from a maximum of 73 pounds, to a low, in 2006, of 55 pounds, at which point she slipped into a coma. When she died in November 2010, she was in the hospital for a respiratory disease; the rest of her causes of death are unknown. Caro spent most of the end of her life doing various interviews about her illness and how much pressure is put on women in the fashion industry to be unhealthy and deathly thin. She recalls going on several go-sees with various designers weighing 73 pounds and being told that, in order to be in their fashion show, she would have to loose 10 pounds to even find work in the fashion business. Caro immediately lost the weight plus another 10 pounds. 
 

Stories like Isabelle’s happen too frequently and often go unnoticed in the fashion industry today. In London, fashion week organizers have taken steps in the right direction, banning size 00 from walking the catwalks. In Milan and Madrid, they have made it a rule that a model must have a body mass index of at least 18, although anything below 20 is considered unhealthy. The CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) in America has expressed concern about the pressure put on women in the fashion industry to be thin, but nothing has been done on the part of the designers. I find the images of women like Isabelle Caro’s heartbreaking. No one should feel that they need to be that thin in order to be noticed in society or to be considered fashionable and beautiful. I believe it is the responsibility of the fashion industry to take the next step in the right direction and celebrate women of all shapes and sizes. They should promote models of healthy weights who could serve suitable role models for young women. It is ridiculous that fashion designers require women to be like “hangers” for their clothing, not distracting the viewers from the clothes with their healthy, feminine forms. It is disappointing to me as a woman that most of these images that we are told to look like are photo-shopped to the point of impossibility. The fashion industry seems to regard average women of being unworthy of being admired. What kind of a message does this send to young girls? If we as a society want to stop the amount of young girls and women becoming anorexic, then it is our job as women and men to reject these images and ask for something more real and healthy.