It seems like once a week I run across something interesting with regard to fashion and culture.
From The Guardian (UK)
Brigitte, Germany’s most popular women’s mag,
bans professional models
• Will only use ‘real women’ in photoshoots
• Editor sick of ‘fattening girls up with Photoshop’Brigitte, which is Germany’s best-selling women’s title with more than 700,000 copies, offers readers a familiar diet of fitness, lifestyle, recipes and sex, which tends to appeal to upwardly mobile younger career women.
German magazine Brigitte wants to feature more images of ‘real life’ women. Photograph: Public Domain
“Today’s models weigh around 23% less than normal women,” Lebert said. “The whole model industry is anorexic.”
He said the move was a response to complaints by readers who said they had no connection with the women depicted in fashion features and “no longer wanted to see protruding bones”.
“For years we’ve had to use Photoshop to fatten the girls up,” he said. “Especially their thighs, and decolletage. But this is disturbing and perverse and what has it got to do with our real reader?”
Germany‘s most popular women’s magazine is banning professional models from its pages and replacing them with images of “real life” women instead.
In what is seen as the latest attempt to stamp out the “size zero” model, the editors of Brigitte said it would in future only use women with “normal figures”.
“From 2010 we will not work with professional models any more,” said Andreas Lebert, editor-in-chief, adding that he was “fed up” with having to retouch pictures of underweight models who bore no resemblance to ordinary women.
There’s a certain irony in that as I’m typing this, I’m sitting in the family room with Mrs. Edge, who is watching “The Biggest Loser”, an American “reality” show in which two personal trainers push their respective teams of overweight “normal” people through a 4 to 6 hour per day routine for up to 4 straight months.
Anyway, not everyone is applauding the move.
Model agencies reacted with scepticism to the Brigitte plan.
Louisa von Minckwitz, owner of Louisa Models in Munich and Hamburg, where models have to be “size 36 (UK size 10), tending towards size 34 (UK size 8)”, said she understood the rage about underweight models but doubted that readers really wanted to buy a magazine to look at ordinary women.
“The fact is that women want to see clothes on beautiful, aesthetically pleasing people,” she said.
This is just one more example of how some of the people in the media business simply are not living on the same planet as the rest of us.
