Free The Vogue Factor: The Inside Story of Fashion's Most Illustrious Magazine by Kirstie Clements

there are many female fashion editors who perpetuate the stereotype, women who often have a major eating disorder of their own. They get so caught up in the hype of how brilliant clothes look on a size 0 they cannot see the inherent danger in the message. It cannot be denied that visually, clothes fall better on a slimmer frame, but there is slim, and then there is scary skinny.
    Despite protestations by women who recognize the danger of portraying any one body type as “perfect,” the situation is not improving. If you look back at the heady days of the supermodels in the late eighties and early nineties, beauties such as Cindy Crawford, Eva Herzigová and Claudia Schiffer look positively curvaceous compared to the sylphs of today. There was a period in the last three years when some of the girls on the runways were so young and thin, and the shoes they were modeling so high, it actually started to seem barbaric to me. I would watch the ready-to-wear shows on the edge of my seat, apprehensive and anxious. I’m not comfortable witnessing teen waifs on almost the literal point of collapse.
    After the shows, the collection is made available for the press to use for their shoots. These are the samples we all work with and they are obviously the size of the model who wore them on the runway. Thus, a stylist must cast a model who will fit into these tiny sizes. And they have become smaller since the early 2000s. We’ve had couture dressesarrive from Europe that are so miniscule they resemble christening robes. There are no bigger samples available, and in any case, the designer probably has no interest in seeing their clothes on larger women. Many high fashion labels are aghast at the idea of producing a size 10, and they certainly wouldn’t want to see it displayed in the pages of the glossies. As a
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editor I was of the opinion that we didn’t necessarily need to feature size 10–plus models in every issue. It is a fashion magazine; we are showcasing the clothes. I am of the belief that an intelligent reader understands that a model is chosen because she carries clothes well. Some fashion would suit a curvier girl, some wouldn’t. I see no problem with presenting a healthy, toned size 6. But as sample sizes from the runway shows became smaller and smaller, 6 was no longer an option and the girls were dieting drastically to stay in the game.
    It is the ultimate vicious cycle. A model who puts on a few kilos can’t get into a sample size on a casting and gets reprimanded by her agency. She begins to diet, loses the weight, and is praised by all for how good she looks. But instead of staying at that weight, and trying to maintain it through sensible diet and exercise, she thinks losing more will make her even more desirable. And no one tells her to stop.
    Girls who can’t diet their breasts away will have surgical reductions. They then enter into dangerous patterns of behavior that the industry—shockingly—begins to accept as par for the course. We had a term for this spiral in the office. When a model who was getting good work in Australia starved herself down two sizes in order to be cast in the overseas shows—one of the ultimate achievements for models, and the first step to an international career—the
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fashion office would say she’d become “Paris thin.” This dubious achievement was generally accompanied by mood swings, extreme fatigue, binge eating and sometimes bouts of self-harming. All in the quest to fit into a Balenciaga sample.
    Not every model has an eating disorder, but I would suggest that every model is not eating as much as she would like to. In 1995 I cast a lovely Russian model for a studio shoot in Paris, and I noticed that by mid-afternoon she hadn’t eaten a thing (we always catered). Her energy was fading, so I suggested we stop so she could have a snack. She shook her head and replied, “No, no. It is my job not to eat.” It was one of the only sentences she knew how to say in