The Model & Celeb Weight Thread [Read post #1 before posting] #5

[Lapin de Lune]

Something that often confuses me when reading this thread:

I dont understand the general attitude towards the thinness of models, due to something which seems to be a huge contradiction. In one breath, it is the general consensus to declare that emaciated figures are unhealthy, unattractive and 'unacceptable'. Yet on the other hand, i frequently hear the term 'she got lucky in the genetic lottery' applied to the girls who actually possess these exact same, overly thin physiques. This looks like a pretty weird contradiction, to me, and i wish someone could explain it.

Basically, who is to say what is ideal, or 'lucky' in terms of a genetic lottery? the outlook on that would have been dramatically different a decade ago...and likewise in M. Monroe's time.

It is like saying that an emaciated looking model is somehow a bad thing, yet at the same time declaring her lucky, enviable, etc. Perhaps the media has twisted our brains to this extent, that the contradiction has become almost second nature to us now, an acceptable conundrum. I dont know.

 

[Gabriel29]

Doesn't it? The strategy seems to work, they are using this type of girls again. VS is not in the business of having status as opposed to clients.
I think no one is going to dispute that Adriana Lima has the better body for conventional standards , but that doesn't mean I want someone with her style and demenour selling me lingerie. I would way more easily buy something Anja was wearing, or even Chanel (and i really do not like her ) than Adriana.
This idea that all women want or (even should) want to look "super hot" and hyper feminized it's quite offensive, I totally agree with wetsleeves.

Are you sure? If you read the facebook page with the comments towards Chanel I'm sure you'd beg to differ. Just because they are using her constantly doesn't mean the strategy is working. VS is known to just drop girls as quick as you can finish this sentence. (Marisa, Lindsay, Emanuela were all girls who were used prominently.)

I'm not saying women need to be sexed up all the time and look like Adriana Lima, but most women do not look like Chanel and cannot relate to her. How many women are 5'10", have non existent hips, big boobs, and skeletal legs?

 

[LifeNatureLove]

What I find interesting are the comments about VS celebrating curves. I do not see this at all. The girls have always been skinny,aside from their boobs (which are enhanced by the bras).

 

[Psylocke]

I'm not saying women need to be sexed up all the time and look like Adriana Lima, but most women do not look like Chanel and cannot relate to her. How many women are 5'10", have non existent hips, big boobs, and skeletal legs?

And that makes it OK for people to hate on her?
Even if her body type may not be very common, it does exist and I know quite a few girls and women who look like that. Whereas I can't think of anyone around me who has Candice's perefct hourglass figure.

 

[agee]

Are you sure? If you read the facebook page with the comments towards Chanel I'm sure you'd beg to differ. Just because they are using her constantly doesn't mean the strategy is working. VS is known to just drop girls as quick as you can finish this sentence. (Marisa, Lindsay, Emanuela were all girls who were used prominently.)

I'm not saying women need to be sexed up all the time and look like Adriana Lima, but most women do not look like Chanel and cannot relate to her. How many women are 5'10", have non existent hips, big boobs, and skeletal legs?

Perhaps it is a timing thing, but when I went to the page linked, by far the majority of the comments were positive, yes, there were several negative comments but it is a significant minority not an overwhelming majority (I would copy the comments over, but I am too lazy to edit out the names). This page also explains perfectly why Chanel Iman is at VS, of the pages that I browsed, this page by far has the most comments and also has the most likes, it has 800+ likes, and IIRC the next highest likes were in the 500s. Also, of the pages that I saw and based on my quick scan of the comments, proportionally, two other models received more negative comments about their bodies.

 

[Les_Sucettes]

Are you sure? If you read the facebook page with the comments towards Chanel I'm sure you'd beg to differ. Just because they are using her constantly doesn't mean the strategy is working. VS is known to just drop girls as quick as you can finish this sentence. (Marisa, Lindsay, Emanuela were all girls who were used prominently.)

I'm not saying women need to be sexed up all the time and look like Adriana Lima, but most women do not look like Chanel and cannot relate to her. How many women are 5'10", have non existent hips, big boobs, and skeletal legs?

Well the strategy is indeed working or this crop of skinny girls would have been dropped like stones this season.

Well I do not not Know a single person that can relate to Adriana Lima, wishing to have a body like Adriana Lima is not the same as relating to her body, on the other hand i can guarantee you that a lot of young teenagers I see shopping at Topshop on saturday afternoon can see themselves reflected on Chanel. Besides the fact that she's extremely tall, something that is impossible to suss out just by looking at pics, she just looks like a skinny young girl.

Regardless, I have a huge problem with this idea that women need to relate to the bodies we see in the media, like we are some sort of fragile flowers that cannot handle the fact someone looks better or sometines not even that, just different than us, and personally I think this skinny look is incredibly popular now days exactly because in a sort of level it is relatable, people have in the back of their minds that regardless of their body shape if they loose obscene amounts of weight, they would look like models, that's exactly what celebs do. You do not have to be pretty, you do not have need to have great proportions, big breasts, a perfectly toned body,a shapely butt, you just need to be scarily skinny and you are in fashion being hailed as a beauty.

 

[nijuyanah]

Hmmm not that I'm into anatomy, but i once read in my class book that the human body tends to put on a few stones with growing older. There was written it wasn't possible to not gain "hip measurement" in puberty. But i think they only reffered to the offscum/aliens outside Bryan Park - since fashion people got a different bone structure, different metabolism and more brain than people who don't deal with fashion. They simply have different genes. High fashion Models don't age phisically, and they skip over puberty, don't they? My nutritionist Rachel Zoe confirmed that.

Totally!!! People always forget that models are a certain species of humans. I mean, isn't absolutely common that girls in the fashion biz keep the same measurements throughout their entire life-span?! Why worry about a model who is too skinny if she HAS ALWAYS BEEN THAT WAY? That's totally normal and okay. Because why should a girl who works as a model be fuller in her 20ies then she was with 16? ...

 

[agee]

Something that often confuses me when reading this thread:

I dont understand the general attitude towards the thinness of models, due to something which seems to be a huge contradiction. In one breath, it is the general consensus to declare that emaciated figures are unhealthy, unattractive and 'unacceptable'. Yet on the other hand, i frequently hear the term 'she got lucky in the genetic lottery' applied to the girls who actually possess these exact same, overly thin physiques. This looks like a pretty weird contradiction, to me, and i wish someone could explain it.

Basically, who is to say what is ideal, or 'lucky' in terms of a genetic lottery? the outlook on that would have been dramatically different a decade ago...and likewise in M. Monroe's time.

It is like saying that an emaciated looking model is somehow a bad thing, yet at the same time declaring her lucky, enviable, etc. Perhaps the media has twisted our brains to this extent, that the contradiction has become almost second nature to us now, an acceptable conundrum. I dont know.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I recently made a genetic lottery comment and if you read my posts in this thread, I am certainly not a celebrant of emaciated models, but I am not a radical anti-thinspo either who assumes that every visible clavicle or hipbone means an ED. To me, winning the genetic lottery means being tall and thin (but not frail or refugee-like) with the right hip-to-waist-to-bust proportions and a having a face and body that photographs well. It also means having the right look at the right time.

Totally!!! People always forget that models are a certain species of humans. I mean, isn't absolutely common that girls in the fashion biz keep the same measurements throughout their entire life-span?! Why worry about a model who is too skinny if she HAS ALWAYS BEEN THAT WAY? That's totally normal and okay. Because why should a girl who works as a model be fuller in her 20ies then she was with 16? ...

I agree with this and have made similar comments previously. Now I don't know if this is a general comment or if you are referring to specific models, but I think if the subject is a young model like Chanel, she can still be in her formative years, and for all we know she'll be as big as a house by the time she's thirty. Now models like Anja, Freja, Magdalena (until recently), Iris and MariaCarla are all in their late twenties, save Freja, and I doubt if their model proportions are "natural," but the question is if their bodies are the result of discipline - moderate eating and exercise, which I don't have a problem with, or more extreme measures.

 

[Fontenrose]

Even if her body type may not be very common, it does exist and I know quite a few girls and women who look like that.

I am surprised by the number of people who think they have a figure like Chanel's (or a lot of other very-thin fashion models) without having any comprehension of just how thin those models are. A lot of girls over age 16 could measure their hips (properly, over the bum) and find out their hips are not under 36", let alone 34". Basically if you have any bum at all you either are born with naturally narrow hips (rare) or you must starve yourself down.

I tried to find a picture in the VS thread that showed 3 models, including Chanel from behind. You could see just how much thinner her legs were at the top of the thigh (fronts were covered by the costume).

Note: I am not saying Chanel is not beautiful. She also has the outgoing personality for VS.

 

[TREVOFASHIONISTO]

I dont agree with that comment that the girls skip puberty
i mean look at Ali Michael, Alyona Osmanova, Keke Lingard, Frida Gustavsson, and JAC
all of these young girls are not as skinny and can actually put on weight as opposed to
their starting weight they had on the runway. They skip puberty because of their eating and other habits...just like females who are athletes at a young age. There is no such thing as missing puberty

 

[nijuyanah]

Oh my... you guys are aware of a thing called sarcasm, right?

 

[TREVOFASHIONISTO]

and Magdalena didnt miss Paris because of her weight

 

[TREVOFASHIONISTO]

Oh my... you guys are aware of a thing called sarcasm, right?

i read to far into those posts

 

[cologne_rocks]

Oh my... you guys are aware of a thing called sarcasm, right?

As for my part, I was serious - Models like Snejana or Chanel simply cannot be human beings, they're elfins and don't need to eat I wished i was an elfin as well.

 

[Les_Sucettes]

Totally!!! People always forget that models are a certain species of humans. I mean, isn't absolutely common that girls in the fashion biz keep the same measurements throughout their entire life-span?! Why worry about a model who is too skinny if she HAS ALWAYS BEEN THAT WAY? That's totally normal and okay. Because why should a girl who works as a model be fuller in her 20ies then she was with 16? ...

Everyone is different, some people do indeed stay the same, while others lose a lot of weight in their twenties. I do not know where people got this idea that in your 20s you should look heavier. A teenager is not a child, i would be worried if a 20 year old women didn't pass puberby, but the vast majority of people I knew in their teens in their 20 and even early 30s, before they had children, looked looked body wise more or less the same as their 15/16 year old self.
The same way that keeping your measurements does not mean anything, looking different when you get older, unless the contrast is radical, is also not a sign of absolutely anything. There is nothing more irritating in this thread than pics of before and after to prove a point.

 

[FRANCY ITALY]

^^^ THANK YOU.

She looks awful. I actually recoiled in horror when I saw those photos of her. You can see it not only in those legs but in the hollowness of her face.


It's almost like she's paying everyone back for the uproar last year when all those sick, delusional people were calling her fat.

this pic of karolina looks even worse

rockthetrend

 

[LabelWhore4]

I didn't even notice how thin KK's legs were. It really reminds me of her when she was an angel. Her waist was just smaller.
I noticed that almost every girl in the show had the same sized legs. It was just the hip width that varied. If Chanel's hips were even slightly larger I'm not sure if as many people would disagree with her being in the show.

 

[Psylocke]

I am surprised by the number of people who think they have a figure like Chanel's (or a lot of other very-thin fashion models) without having any comprehension of just how thin those models are. A lot of girls over age 16 could measure their hips (properly, over the bum) and find out their hips are not under 36", let alone 34". Basically if you have any bum at all you either are born with naturally narrow hips (rare) or you must starve yourself down.

I know very well what 34" hips look like I really don't see the point in this part of your post? I wouldn't have said this if I didn't know what I was talking about. I don't know if it also depends on the area where you live, but I know tons of girls, especially in Chanel's age, that are just as lanky as her. Not every woman's hips just explode by the time they're 20.

And I agree with you LabelWhore, Chanel is very narrow over all, but that doesn't mean she has less meat on her bones than someone like Ale Ambrosio who simply doesn't look as skinny because she's got a wider and longer torso and short legs. But she's much more bony than Chanel and looks gaunt in the face, too.

 

[99 Apples]

Basically if you have any bum at all you either are born with naturally narrow hips (rare) .

what are you basing that statement on? I'm in university and since most of us are still thin and active, I see girls with narrow hips all the time.

the united states is currently suffering from a 30% obesity rate. that's just clinical obesity, it doesn't include the category of people who are clinically overweight. the sum of those categories climbs to a shocking 61%

does it occur to you that people, at least in the united states, may be born naturally thin, but because of poor eating and sedentary lifestyles gain weight and lose the narrow hips that they are supposed to have?

here's the web MD article:

Feb. 10, 2010 -- More Americans are becoming overweight or obese, exercising less, and eating unhealthy foods.

That’s the finding of the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which shows that 63.1% of adults in the U.S. were either overweight or obese in 2009.

That was a small but measurable increase from 62.2% the previous year. The survey finds that 36.6% of Americans are overweight and 26.5% obese.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index findings are based on telephone interviews with 673,000 adults in January 2008 to December 2009. About 90,000 surveys were done each quarter, and the margin of error for the quarterly results is +/- 0.3 percentage points.

The survey finds that:

59.2% of obese Americans exercised at least one day per week, compared to 69.9% of overweight people, and 73.8% of normal-weight people.
Obese people are less likely than people in every other weight category (overweight, normal weight, underweight) to have eaten five servings of fruits and vegetables on at least three days of the past seven.
Obese Americans also are less likely to say they ate healthy “all day yesterday.”
Here’s a breakdown of groups that ate the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables three to seven days per week:

71.6% of normal-weight people
69% of underweight people
68.9% of overweight people
67.2% of obese people
Body mass index (BMI) is a common measure of body fat based on height and weight.

(Calculate your body mass index at www.webmd.com/diet/calc-bmi-plus.)

A BMI of 30 or greater is considered obese, overweight if it’s between 25-29.9, normal if it’s 18.5-24.9, and underweight if it’s less than 18.5.

People who are obese are far more likely to report being diagnosed with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, or to have had a heart attack.

The survey found that:

Of people with high blood pressure, 46.2% were obese, 31.1% were overweight, 19.3% were of normal weight, and 17.2% underweight.
Of people with high cholesterol, 36.8% were obese, 30.1% overweight, 19.2% normal weight, and 14.1% underweight.
Of people with diabetes, 21.1% were obese, 9.8% overweight, 5% normal weight, and 4.2% underweight.
Of people reporting heart attacks, 6.3% were obese, 4.8% overweight, 3.3% normal weight, and 4.4% underweight.
Of depressed people, 23.3% were obese, 15.3% overweight, 15% normal weight, and 20% underweight.
The survey says that African-Americans in 2009 were among the most likely to be obese, at 36.2%, compared to the national average of 26.5%. The obesity rate among Hispanics, at 28.3%, is also higher than the national average. Asians are far less likely to be obese, with only 9.6% falling into that category.

The survey also reports that:

18.3% of young Americans are obese, compared to 27.6% between ages 30-44 and 30.6% among 45- to 64-year-olds. Of people 65 and over, 24.2% are obese.
Men are more likely than women to be obese, 27.8% compared to 25.2%.
The report concludes that obesity is still on the rise and that reversing this trend may require the involvement of communities, businesses, and governments.

link

 

[cestmagique]

I'm not saying women need to be sexed up all the time and look like Adriana Lima, but most women do not look like Chanel and cannot relate to her. How many women are 5'10", have non existent hips, big boobs, and skeletal legs?

And how is Adriana Lima anywhere close to relatable?

The relatable bit makes no sense, especially with VS. Their whole business is selling fantasy.