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Now I’m on fashion’s front line
This morning, I opened Instagram on my phone and within 30 seconds I had seen: a slim French blogger posing in a polka-dot bikini with the faintest hint of stretch marks on her thighs, posted with the caption, ‘Stretch marks, new chic?’; a painfully thin model doing ’90s sexy’ for a cool New York boutique (‘Get this girl a croissant!’ read one comment) and a famous plus-size model in a thong bikini asking ‘What ya having for lunch?’ All this before I had eaten breakfast.
As a 30-year-old fashion editor, I have been to hundreds of catwalk shows and along the way, learnt not to get caught up in comparisons. So I can take the mixed messaging about body image that social media throws at me in my stride. But I can hardly begin to fathom what my anorexic 15-year-old self would have made of it.
I’ve always thought that my eating disorder was, along with some unlucky genes, more about grasping some control in my life, than wanting to be as thin as a supermodel. I was a highly strung, perfectionist student at a small, pressure-cooker all-girls school, and food, or lack thereof, became a coping mechanism. That’s not to say that I wasn’t obsessed with fashion – even as a toddler, I had built an impressive collection of handbags. When I was diagnosed at the age of 14, my parents started me on a calorie-rich eating plan. My mother displayed saintly levels of devotion, sitting with me as I picked reluctantly over meals such as a bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes for more than an hour at a time. But my parents also stopped my subscription to Vogue and banned me from clothes shopping.
Looking back, I can understand why. In around six months, I had faded to little more than 6st which, at 5ft 5in, gave me a BMI of about 14.5 (anything below 18.5 is considered underweight). My periods had stopped and I was now under strict instruction from the doctor to report for weekly weigh-ins and psychologist appointments. If I lost any more weight, I’d be hospitalised. Fashion has a rightly terrible reputation for fetishising skinni-
I was lucky – anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness
ness, so why wouldn’t my parents do all in their power to get me eating properly again? I hated seeing them unhappy so went along with the plan. But I also knew I could find ways to get around it, like pouring my lunchtime yogurt down the toilet.
I still can’t work out whether the images in magazines were a trigger for me. I was pleased to be thin and not be taking up too much space (yes, a genuine emotion), but I had no desire to be a model. When I was scouted by an agency while in Topshop, I felt uneasy– I wondered if they really couldn’t tell I was ill. Perhaps, I thought, I wasn’t quite thin enough after all. If I did snatch a look at a magazine, it felt more like an escape than ‘thinspiration.’ But in a society where thin equals success, anorexia could be the ultimate act of conformity.
My memories of that time are fairly hazy
– starvation can do that to you – but I do know that it wasn’t the Vogue ban that saved me in the end. After three years, my intense regime came to an end almost as stealthily as it had begun.
During the summer after I finished my GCSES and left school, I did work experience at fashion trend forecaster WGSN. I felt independent and grown-up. One evening, we had family friends over for dinner and I found myself mindlessly finishing a piece of cheesecake while I was helping to clear up. Soon after, I started at a mixed sixth-form college where a great gang of friends helped me to, as one of them recently described it, ‘blossom’. Within six months, I’d put on more than a stone and soon after, my periods returned. I was lucky – anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness: 20 per cent of people living with the disorder will die prematurely from associated medical complications and 54 per cent never make a full recovery.
Would my story have been the same today? Thanks to social media (which barely existed while I was ill) and the increasingly online nature of our lives, we are in the midst of a body-image crisis. Knowing all that I do about the reality of living with an eating disorder, I bristle at every runway walked by hauntingly thin models, Instagram post showing an unrealistically tiny body or tabloid headline about someone ‘flaunting’ their ‘toned abs’– not because I’m worried about myself any more, but because I feel for the girls depicted and anyone vulnerable they might be influencing.
What makes our modern predicament even more complicated is that we are subjected to extremes in all forms, most of which are unachievable without dramatic surgery or are as unhealthy as being drastically underweight: Kim Kardashian and Tess Holliday (a size 26 model who coined the defiant hashtag #effyourbeautystandards, which has been used 3.2 million times) are held up by their fans as body role models as much as the super-thin are by others. It is both compelling and depressing to read stories about a woman gorging on 15 jars of Nutella a month to build up enough fat so that it could be redistributed into her bum in a quest to achieve the world’s largest rear.
Whatever happened to aspiring to simple normality and the kind of body that comes from a healthy-ish approach to food and exercise?
This summer, barely a day has gone by without a new warning about the negative effects of Love Island’s honed and enhanced contestants and the accompanying adverts that peddle ways to get bodies like theirs. A survey by Yougov, commissioned by Level Up, an anti-sexism campaign group, found that 40 per cent of women felt self-conscious about their bodies after watching the show and 30 per cent have considered going on a diet.
‘A number of Love Island’s contestants have had extensive plastic surgery, and critics have said it is creating “unrealistic” standards for young people,’ NHS chief executive Simon Stevens said on The Andrew Marr Show in July. ‘You’ve got explicit ads being aimed at young women around breast cosmetic surgery. That is all playing into a set of pressures around body image that are showing up.’ When NHS bosses feel a need to speak out, this is more than harmless fun in bikinis.
Stevens has also claimed that the NHS is ‘picking up the pieces for an epidemic of mental health challenges for our young people’. YMCA recently found that 62 per cent of 15- to 16-year-olds felt that social media had increased pressure on them to look ‘perfect’. Whatever perfect means now.
A survey last year by the Royal Society for Public Health found that Instagram had the most negative impact of any social media platform on the mental health of 14- to 24-year-olds. Users under 25 spend an average of 32 minutes a day on the app, while for older scrollers, it’s 24 minutes. The constant stream of imagery is addictive, and while
Barely a day goes by without a girl walking down a runway who needs medical help more than another job
a positively curated feed (Puppies! Great shoes! Hilarious memes!) can be life-enhancing, one filled with bodies that make you feel bad about your own can feel disconcerting at best, destructive at worst. Think thigh gaps, the Kardashian sisters gigglingly discussing Kim’s ‘anorexic’ waist as they did recently, and the ‘ab crack’ craze, as instigated by actress Emily Ratajkowski’s very specifically sculpted stomach.
Worryingly, there have also been drastic rises in eating problems at both ends of the spectrum; admissions for bulimia and anorexia in England rose from 7,260 between April 2010 and 2011 to 13,885 between April 2016 and 2017. The number of admissions for anorexia in girls under 18 went up from 961 to 1,904 in the same period. Meanwhile, one fifth of children are obese by the age of 11, climbing to one third among 14-year-olds.
My experience tells me that those numbers are about much more than dieting or overeating in response to a picture. Rather, weight and mental health have become an expression of today’s complex tapestry of pressures. And if you have a genetic predisposition to mental health problems, then you’re in trouble. Thus, I have bitten my tongue countless times at eyerolling directed at ‘attention-seeking anos’, which is how many flippantly describe teenagers struggling with issues like mine. It’s not an illness that can be faked.
Working in fashion means I am more exposed than most to the nuances of our body-image crisis. Over the past few years, rising numbers of ethnically and sizediverse models have provided a refreshing antidote to the standard young, white, thin model. But there are buts. First, the penchant for the term ‘real woman’ is ridiculous; women come in all shapes and sizes, and some really are super slim, be that naturally, through illness or any other means, but that doesn’t preclude them from being ‘real’. Second, we’re at risk of tokenism. I will often be asked to cover a new project celebrating diversity and can quickly tick off the overweight one, the disabled one, the black one, the older one… but do these kinds of people appear elsewhere in the brand’s imagery, as true diversity should result in? Often, not.
But I rejoiced when I saw that Sarah Burton had quietly used models with slightly chunky legs and a little roundness to their arms and stomachs for her spring/summer 2018 Alexander Mcqueen show. Of the major label fashion shows I’ve been to this year, only Michael Kors and Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda seemed to have achieved a mix of models with body shapes that would go any way towards representing the women who actually buy their designs.
There are also initiatives such as the joint model wellbeing charter of fashion conglomerates LVMH and Kering – it asks that models ‘present a valid medical certificate, attesting to their good health and ability to work, obtained less than six months before the shooting or the fashion show’. Yet barely a day goes by during fashion week without a girl walking down a runway who needs medical help more than another modelling job. Magazines often find themselves having to add rather than airbrush away inches and Ashley Graham is the only non-sample-size woman on Forbes’ list of the world’s highest-paid models. At least there’s one, but arguably she represents another extreme.
Designers reach for pathetically outdated excuses about samples being tricky to make in anything other than minuscule sizes. But the truth is that it’s a case of both practicality and aspiration; they believe it’s easier to make clothes look appealing on tiny frames, and all too often that that is how we would rather they were presented.
It’s not all doom. For every unrealistic message, there is an uplifting retort to our bodyimage crisis. Instagram is peppered with communities like Jameela Jamil’s I Weigh, where followers are encouraged to ‘feel valuable and see how amazing we are’ by posting pictures with personal details they feel define them more powerfully than a number of kilos ever could.
Last month an advert for new Netflix series Insatiable was released – setting up the story of Patty, who is fat and bullied at school but then has her jaw wired shut over the summer and returns gorgeous and thin. What was perceived to be a basic reinforcement of fat-shaming stereotypes resulted in a 200,000-strong petition calling for it to be scrapped. It’s a reaction which shows that the subject hits a nerve with thousands, but Netflix insists the show has an inspiring message. We’ll see.
The concept of body neutrality is now being called the new body positivity (a term that has been used since Victorian times and has come to signify proudly standing against cultural expectations of your body, particularly if you’re overweight). Body neutrality encourages more gentle acceptance rather than pure hatred or overweening pride in one’s body – it’s open to all shapes and sizes and is probably how most of us would realistically hope to relate to the skin we’re in.
Seventeen years after my own eating disorder began, I think body neutrality is the best description for how I feel too. But should such an innocuous I-don’t-mind-either-way sort of label need to exist at all? Ultimately, these are communities created by women, for women, to make themselves feel better about a deeply ingrained social ideal that is unlikely to disappear, no matter how many times a hashtag is used. But faced with that pre-breakfast blend of body image confusion, it’s a philosophy I’m sticking with.
Bethan Holt is The Telegraph’s fashion news and features director