Last week was New York Fashion Week (branded as the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week since 2009), previewing the Spring 2014 designer lines. For seventy years, established and aspiring designers alike have gathered to showcase their collections in a grand, highly anticipated celebration of fashion. However, the fashion world has become the target of criticism over the years due to the almost exclusive use of “super-skinny” models and only creating original dresses in “sample sizes” of 00-2.
About a year ago, Barneys New York and Disney announced their collaboration on a campaign for the department store’s 2012 holiday window display. The installation would be titled “Electric Holiday,” featuring a three-minute video of beloved Disney characters such as Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, Snow White, who join the elite fashion world as runway models in Minnie’s dream. But when the first sketches were released, fans were horrified – the soft, familiar characters had been radically altered and slimmed down to unrealistic, disturbing subzero sizes.
The campaign was met with outrage from bloggers and parents who worried about the impact of the images on the ideals of young boys and girls. Even a Change.org petition was drawn up (and signed by yours truly), outlining the statistics of eating disorder development and body image problems in children. Both Disney and Barneys took a step back and listened to the criticism before releasing new images that promised “Minnie is empowered throughout the video” and that the video “maintains Minnie in her classic self.” They kept Minnie in her traditional form for the majority of the video, only transforming her and her friends into tall models for a brief time. They also softened the model versions of the characters, eliminating the disturbingly skinny sketches in favor of slightly more reasonable waistlines. Check out the final video and see what you think.
However, change might finally be coming to the fashion world – for the first time in seventy years, this fall’s NYFW featured a plus-size designer collection on the runway. The inclusion of Eden Miller’s brand Cabiria in this year’s show was met with excitement. Those opposing the fashion industry’s obsession with thinness saw it as a victory – even Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn noted that few designer fashions are actually commercially available to “’real women’ in the ‘real world’” due to the limited production of clothing sizes. Nigel Barker, former photographer for America’s Next Top Model, also rejects the elitism of super-skinny fashion. Barker has now “devoted his career to making high fashion and photography accessible to the masses.”
Towards the start of this fall’s NY Fashion Week, New York fashion and pop culture blog “Swagger New York” came up with a similar idea to the Barneys campaign, stylizing 90’s cartoon characters such as Lisa Simpson and Angelica Pickles as models and dressing them in designer outfits. While the pictures are supposed to be silly, and they don’t alter the characters as drastically as the original “Electric Holiday” images, there’s still something disturbing about seeing childhood favorites being portrayed this way. It actually exemplifies the artificiality of “the super-skinny” model – as if this body shape is so unrealistic that even our beloved cartoons can only achieve it through image retouching.
This article is part of a series focusing on beauty and the media.