Does size really matter?

(This image was photoshopped to make the model look healthier, to be published on Vogue UK)

Shocking news in the fashion industry when the British designer Mark Fast chose size 12 models (Italian 44) to put on the catwalk alongwith standard size models for his SS10 collection.

Also Miuccia Prada and Louis Vuitton chose curvy models for her latest fashion show, and Vogue Italy opened its brand new website with a wonderful Vogue Curvy section.

Honestly, watching Mark Fast’s collection video, would you call those women “fat”?

The answer should be “no”. If it’s “yes”, that’s because we are not used to see realistic bodies anymore.

I bet you would not call the ones in the previous images “healthy”.

It’s not the same old story about eating disorders among the super skinny models: working in the fashion industry and dealing with many of them, I could see with my own eyes that the majority of these girls are blessed by nature with a beautiful skin, silky soft hair and long, long, endlessly long bones. Most of them are teen agers, and their phisical development isn’t over yet, so they’re just very tall girls which are not yet the woman they will become. That could be also a size 12 or more, who knows. So really, I swear: many of them DO care about what they eat of course, it’s their job to look perfect, but 90% is due to nature and 10% to diet, at that age.

(Then some of them have obvious eating disorders. And they definitely do not look good even in person. Tired eyes, hair and skin without light, abuse of substances to stay up on tight schedules.)

It’s a fact nowadays that these girls, made like they are by nature, are a model for a large majority of girls around the world that were not given the same things. Girls with large hips and short bones that start starving diets without understanding that they’ll never get the same appeareance. That don’t understand that they have unique features that are as much beautiful, and that can be improved by a healthy life style before all.

The point is that beauty is not one and one only. Beauty is a universal value with many sides.

It’s just stupid to fix everything around an only beauty canon for all the people in the world. That’s just fake.

I’ve been a normal teen ager with all my average complexes: height, weight, hair and so on. The first time I went to a backstage and saw those models I admired on the magazines, I had a real revelation: they’re like another breed. A Yorkshire cannot become a hound. But it can still try to look as good as he can with what he’s got.

And a healthy Yorkshire is much more beautiful than a starving hound.

Ariko

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