Well, it's finally happened. Supermodel Gisele Bundchen has taken time out of her busy catwalking schedule to defend the trend of uber-skinny fashion models. Gisele, who is not at all biased in this particular area, explains that healthy eating habits are learned/formed in the home, and not (as previously thought) on the runway.
The Amazonian beauty attempts to rouse our sympathy, claiming that her heroine chic look was initially mocked by classmates, and attributing her eventual success and healthy passable BMI to the family she never sees:
"I never suffered from this problem (anorexia) because I had a very strong family base. Parents are responsible, not the fashion industry," she said in the Friday edition of O Globo newspaper.
Moreover, Gisele is careful to remind us that she is—in every way—genetically superior, and finishes up by detailing how the cold, unforgiving fashion world unselfishly took her under its wing:
"Everybody knows that the norm in fashion is thin," said the model who is 5'11" and 125 pounds. "But excuse me, there are people born with the right genes for this profession."
Gisele added that, as a child, her peers teased her for being skinny, calling her names like Olive Oil (meaning the Popeye cartoon character, not the viscous liquid containing a high content of monosaturated fat and polyphenols).
"In fashion I felt accepted,” she said. “I never felt lonely because I always relied on my family."
Although generally dismissed as uninformed and ridiculous, Gisele's comments immediately drew comparisons to designer Karl "Formerly Obese" Lagerfeld's earlier musings on the subject, particularly his empirically unsound contention that anorexia does not plague the fashion world.
Unfortunately, Lagerfeld was unavailable for comment, as he was busily trying to schedule his next liposuction appointment with "someone other than the plastic surgeon who did Tara Reid."
Editorial Director
In the REAL WORLD, both of those people are TOTALLY insignificant.
i completely agree with Giselle. fashion influences everyone but the person you are happens at home.
karl lagerfeld used to weigh about 3 tons!! he is a liar and a hypocrite, and it's no less than ludicrous for him to allege fashion has no correlation with the impulse to drop down to skin and bones. he himself lost approximately 300 pounds, and never looked back, famously designing clothes exclusively for skinny people and then insisting they "just wouldn't look as nice" on overweight folks.
According to the statistics presented in this blog, Gisele's BMI is 17.4, which is considered underweight. However, in defence of Gisele, modelling is a profession which some people are genetically better suited for. At 5'11", I am a healthy eater who exercises occasionally and weighs about 130 lbs, making me "underweight". My entire family is thin, and I can only attribute this to genes.
Just to clarify, no one here is suggesting that every single solitary fashion model–or your average skinny person–has an eating disorder. And yes, of course, a great percentage of these girls are undoubtedly naturally thin. But the industry does place a certain added pressure on the girls to do whatever it takes to slim down, especially since most designers admittedly prefer to show their clothes on girls who are stick-thin and/or grossly underweight.
And so, while Gisele herself may well be of the naturally skinny, genetically blessed persuasion, plenty of other models are not, despite feeling the pressure to keep their weight down. Thus, while certainly there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, on the whole, fashion does tend to encourage some extremely unhealthy eating habits in its models (not to mention set an uber-thin standard for throngs of impressionable teenage girls), and it'd be inaccurate to say that there's no correlation whatsoever.