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

English.
    A few years later we booked another Russian girl, who also was starving herself, on a trip to Marrakech. When the team went out to dinner at night she ordered nothing, but then hunger would get the better of her and she would pick small pieces of food off other people’s plates. I’ve seen it happen on many trips. The models somehow rationalize that if they didn’t order anything, then they didn’t really take in the calories. They can tell their booker at the agency before they sleep that they only had a salad. By the end of the trip, she didn’t have the energy to even sit up; she could barely open her eyes. We actually had her lie down next to a fountain to get the last shot. Naomi telephoned her agency to report that we thought she had a serious eating disorder, but we got the “No, it’s just that she hasn’t been well lately” spiel.
    In 2004, a fashion season where the girls were expected to be particularly bone-thin, I was having lunch in New York with a top model agent who confidentially expressed her concern to me, as she did not want to be the one to expose the conspiracy. “It’s getting very serious,” she said. She lowered her tone and glanced around to see if anyone at the nearby tables could hear. “The top casting directors are demanding that they be thinner and thinner. I’ve got about four girls in the hospital. And a couple of the others have resorted to eating tissues. Apparently they swell up and fill your stomach.”
    As a not unintelligent woman, I was horrified to hear what the industry was covering up and I felt complicit. We were all complicit. But in my experience it is practically impossible to get a photographer or a fashion editor—male or female—to acknowledge the repercussions of using very thin girls. They don’t want to. For them, it’s all about the drama of the photograph. They convince themselves that the girls are just genetically blessed, or have achieved it through energetic bouts of yoga and some goji berries.
    I was at the baggage carousel with a fashion editor collecting our luggage after a trip and I noticed an extremely anorexic woman standing nearby. She was the most painfully thin person I had ever seen, and my heart went out to her. I pointed her out to the editor who scrutinized the poor woman and said: “I know it sounds terrible but I think she looks really great.” The industry is rife with this level of body dysmorphia from mature women.
    This was really hammered home to me when there was a swimsuit casting at the
Vogue
office in the late nineties. After seeing dozens of top girls, the then fashion editor decided that not one of them had the “perfect” body. The
Vogue
office was situated across the road from the Northside Clinic, which specializes in treating eating disorders. The clinic also happened to house the only café near the office. I walked over to buy a fat-free chicken sandwich after the casting had wrapped up, and regarded the pale, young, female patients on portable IV drips, smoking in the courtyard in their dressing gowns. The sad irony did not escape me.
    In my early years at the magazine there was no minimum age limit on models, and there were certainly occasions that girls under the age of sixteen were used. Fourteen-year-old beauty Kristy Hinze graced the January 1995 cover and was instantly put under contract with
Vogue
. Kristy had a fresh, outdoorsy appeal, bright-green eyes and a beamingsmile. The fashion team tended to feature her frolicking at the beach, or staring serenely into the camera next to a horse: she had an Aussie glamour that was also wholesome.
    The readers had no complaint about her age, because she wasn’t being dressed up to look more mature, or overtly sexy. Sexiness in the early days of
Vogue Australia
was more equated with the sun and surf than playing a vamp. Younger girls can also differ wildly in terms of maturity.
    For one job, I had to collect two models from the airport: one a