Robyn Lawley, a healthy size 16 is paving the way for more curvy cover girls.
Are “Plus Size” Models setting a healthier image for today’s youth?
Robyn Lawley, a healthy size 16 is paving the way for more curvy cover girls.
The recent June 2011 edition of Vogue Italia caused a stir when the magazine featured plus-size models Tara Lynn, Candice Huffine and Robyn Lawley on the illustrious cover of the fashion bible.
While the efforts of Vogue Italia to highlight the curve appeal of the voluptuous models has been welcomed by most, a new study by Italian researchers suggests that using plus-size models on the catwalk and in advertisements could make women fat.
In their paper “Thinness and Obesity: A Model of Food Consumption, Health Concerns, and Social Pressure,” Dr Luca Savorelli and Dr David Dragone from the University of Bologna to assess whether increasing the ideal body weight is socially desirable, both from a welfare and from a health point of view.
The paper cites the relationships between Italy, Germany and Spain and their respective fashion communities to produce more plus-sized clothes and uphold a minimum size for models and question whether this would work in the reverse and increase obesity rather than reduce it. They write in their report:
“If being overweight is the average condition and the ideal body weight is thin, increasing the ideal body weight may increase welfare by reducing social pressure.
By contrast, health is on average reduced, since people depart even further from their healthy weight.
Given that in the US and in Europe people are on average overweight, we conclude that these policies, even when they are welfare improving, may foster the obesity epidemic.”
The pair also said, according to the Daily Mail, in plain English, “To promote chubby fashion models when obesity is one of the major problems of industrialised countries seems to be a paradox.
Everyone has to trade off in life a number of things like the pleasure of eating and going to the gym or something as a cost. So if you just fix the average healthy weight then maybe you will throw up some incentives to be thin.”
Mia Freedman who pioneered the Australian Cosmo ‘Body Love’ policy and the regular use of real women of all shapes, sizes and nationalities back in 1997 when she was the editor of Cosmo weighed in on the issue in her weekly column in Sunday Life magazine.
“So I don’t buy the argument that featuring large women or plus-size models in a positive way is a statement about health. It’s not. It’s an endorsement of diversity, an acknowledgement that no particular size or shape of woman has a monopoly on being attractive or even ‘normal’”.
Robyn Lawley is one of many plus-size models gracing the catwalks and pages of glamorous fashion magazines better known for their penchant for size zero models than plus-size models. Other well known plus-size models include Crystal Renn who has appeared on the catwalk for labels such as Chanel and Jean Paul Gaultier.
While the public, fashion magazines and fashion commentators have largely embraced the plus-sized models, fashion designers are still resisting the plus-size trend.
Karl Lagerfeld has always been vocal about his preference for skinny models. Here’s a quote from the notorious fashion designer.
“No one wants to see curvy women,” he infamously said last October when asked if he thought people wanted to see fuller figures on the catwalk. “You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly.”
However even the influential designer has jumped on the plus-size modelling bandwagon casting Crystal Renn in one of his shows and shooting a plus-size singer Beth Ditto for V Magazine. In time, hopefully other fashion designers will follow in Lagerfeld leather patent shoes and embrace plus-size models.
At size 16, Australian plus-size model Robyn Lawley is proof that you don’t have to be thin to be big in fashion.