65% of Australian women are a size 14-16

The 15th annual Australian Fashion week has come to a close for yet another year. Last year many designers embraced “body diversity” by using plus size models.

Cynics like Garance Dore feel this was just a ‘gimmick’ used by the fashion houses to gain publicity and attract new clients.

“I think it’s too much and almost naive of the fashion industry, because it would be nice in a few years that the idea of different body shapes is normal, but right now it’s not quite there yet,” the 35-year-old French illustrator said.

It was disapointing that this year Australian designers returned to the “thin is beautiful” stereotype, with designers like Alex Perry saying “are you going to use thin girls? yeh we are! Tall thin and beautiful and that is, I make no apologies for the fact that – me personally – that’s what I like to see on the catwalk”. 

In old fashioned terms this comment could be seen as ‘chauvinistic”, at the very least it seems very inappropriate at a time when research has shown that promoting these kind of images on the catwalk and in magazines only reinforces unrealistic images of body types to impressionble teenagers and young women. It places an unneccesary pressure on them to conform to the so called ‘norms’ in fashion.

However the use of plus size models on the catwalk raises the very serious question of how women are portrayed in the media and how the members of the public accept those images.

In an attempt to show that bigger models can be just as “beautiful”  BGM Models demonstrated outside Australian fashion week. All the plus size models looked gorgeous and healthy and all looked more like the size and shape of Australian women everywhere.

In the print media there has been a shift of late towards plus size models being featured in major mainstream fashion and lifestyle magazines (we are talking size 12 here – so they are hardly large ladies – rather the size of the average woman in the street).

In January’s Marie Claire magazine they ran the story ‘ You Tell Us’ about what mainstream Australia find beautiful in a woman.  A size 12 model won 59% of the votes followed closely by a size 14 model and then Katie Lansell-Smith, a size 16 model.

Also for the first time ever a plus size model has graced the front cover of a woman’s fitness magazine. Fernwood gyms, long a leader in helping women achieve realistic used a plus size model for their cover of Fernwood.

In January Women’s Weekly ran a 15 page spread using plus size models and the April issue of French Elle featured plus-size model Tara Lynn on their cover and included a 20 page editorial featuring her in luxury labels. This follows on from V magazine’s ‘size’ issue that also featured Tara Lynn alongside plus-size supermodel Crystal Renn.

More recently AAP ran an online poll which asked: Should the fashion industry showcase a variety of physiques including plus-size and older models?  the response was an overwhelming  83% in favour.

The views held by Perry and Dore who said that “it’s not such a good thing to show plus-size because it’s not really physically healthy and not always flattering to fashion,” are fast becoming outdated and are harmful to the growing movement which is seeing a backlash in the way women are portrayed (especially the sexualisation of young girls through the media and the way they are frequently represented in sexually provocative setting with the emphasise that skinny is sexy).

Veteran Australian fashion designer Leona Edmiston has built her successful business around dresses cut for a feminine shape. At the launch of her Spring/Summer 2010/11 collection she  welcomed the return of the curvier silhouette, “I think naturally a lot of us are curvy, and so why fight it?” Edmiston said.

She added, “we have to embrace it and celebrate it, and curves are beautiful and we can look so beautiful emphasising them, so there’s no reason to hide them.”

Writer Helen Splarn. Editor Dr Ramesh Manocha.

Source: Bella models. BGM Models