Model Labelled Too Big For Catwalk

Before I get started on what may very well become a rant of epic proportions, let me make one thing abundantly clear to anyone reading. I hate the mainstream fashion industry.

I hate that it makes people think that spending big on apparel is a recipe for happiness. I hate that it encourages us to obsess over clothes that, frankly, look weirder every year. And more than anything I hate that it makes us hate our bodies for what we are not, instead of celebrating them for what they are.

Too Big?

This rage surfaced just recently when I read the story of Agnes Hedengard. If you didn’t hear it, let me recap for you. Agnes is a 19-year-old girl from Sweden who embarked on a life as a model in her teens. Just last year she was third place on Sweden’s Next Top Model but for some reason she just hasn’t been booked lately. I can’t really see why. The girl has legs that stretch as far as the eye can see, confidence that’s clear from her stance, and what appears to be a great sense of humour.

Yet according to agents, she’s too big.

She outlines the issues that she’s been having in a YouTube video, in which she says that every time her measurements are sent off, the same response comes back. Sorry, she’s just too big.Growl.

Closer To Home

Let me tell you another story..

One that makes me angrier than I ever been, and sadder too. A few weekends back I was all set to take my nine-year-old niece for a swim at the waterpark. She was in the changeroom, and she told me she didn’t want to come out. When I asked her why, she started crying. Through the tears I managed to translate that she was embarrassed that her thighs touched, and that meant she was fat.

My jaw hit the floor. Here was my beautiful, bubbly niece echoing exactly the same thought I’d had since I hit puberty, but she was so much younger, so much less equipped to deal with the debate. I was about 14 when I realised my body didn’t look like the girls in the magazines, and that it never would. They were thin, lean and bony. I had musculature, puppy fat, and thighs so in love they never wanted to be apart. Instead of being empowered by the realisation I was different, I was floored by it.

All the women I saw around me, in films and television, on billboards and in magazines, were svelte and sexy. When starving myself didn’t produce these results, I went in completely the other direction. I gained 25 kilos in 6 months. If I couldn’t be that, I’d be the opposite. It took me another year and a half to realise that healthy was more important than skinny, but it’s still something I struggle with every day. I don’t believe I’ve beaten body image issues, but I’m dealing with them better every day. Of course, I’m not nine years old.

How the hell could I explain something that took me 10 years to figure out to someone who hasn’t even lived that long?

Why I Hate The Fashion Industry

For an industry that has been at the centre of all the worst kinds of attention in the last years, you’d think the folks of fashion would get a clue. Instead, and despite the backlash, they continue to obsess over just one kind of body. If you’re a model, you have to be tall and stick thin. There just isn’t any way around it. They don’t care how you do it, or how unhealthy you are. Just deliver your body to the studio and allow them to work their magic on it.

The major problem with the fashion industry is that they’ve saturated our world. You can’t go anywhere without seeing a model staring hungrily from a billboard, or the cover of a magazine. In most cases she’s been blow dried and airbrushed to perfection, before being touted as the real deal. These ideas filter down through society, like acid rain over the unsuspecting pedestrians. They’re invasive and hard to shake. Yet still the fashion industry claims they do no harm.

Well sorry, but that’s a load of bull, and the sooner they figure that out, the sooner we can repair the damage that they’ve done. Yes, that means no starving models, no crash diet advice, and no labelling of normal women as ‘plus-sized’.

Yes, it means never saying to healthy, happy 19-year-olds, sorry you’re just too big.

And it definitely means never having to listen to a nine-year-old tell you how much they hate their body, before they’ve even had a chance to love it.