14 DAY TRIAL // The size 0 models controversy has been raging for far longer than most of us would care to remember – and this definitely applies for people effectively working in the industry, such as designers and, bosses and staff at modeling agencies. In its desperate attempt to relieve some of the heat it’s constantly under, the fashion industry has come with a temporary umbrella-like solution: singer Beth Ditto who, by being morbidly overweight, is the reverse of stick-thin models – and sets just as bad an example as these, a new piece in the Daily Mail says.
Beth Ditto is also the leader of a rock band called The Gossip, which is enjoying relative popularity especially on the underground scene. The truth is, Damon Syson of the Mail says, that the one thing that Ditto is most famous for is for being overweight and having been turned into a style icon. Ditto has been featured on the covers of most fashion magazines and has become a fixture on the fashion shows circuit, but what it all boils down to is that she’s being used by the industry as a shield against criticism. She is the way of the fashion world of saying “stop attacking us, look, we’re also using normal people,” says the Mail, but that does not change the fact that they’re actually using a morbidly overweight person as a role model. At the end of the day, this is just as bad as using size 0 girls, it is being said.
“Despite years of pressure and countless column inches about rising levels of anorexia, the fashion world continues to fete models who are dangerously thin. Clearly the fashion industry has a problem with normal women’s bodies. Does its canonization of Beth Ditto let designers and photographers off the hook? No, it does not. I think there is something weirdly artificial and tokenistic about the way Ditto is being cited as this season’s coolest new accessory. A cynic might even argue that the coteries of skinny minor celebrities who like to be photographed with Ditto are merely employing the time-honored trick of standing next to a fat person to make themselves look thinner. And I can’t help suspecting that the singer has been adopted as the cool set’s favorite mascot because she’s seen as a useful weapon in their PR armoury.” Syson says, summing up other reports in the media as well.
Beth Ditto is far from a style icon, as she is more of an emblem for something that does not even exist in real life. With her massive weight, she is not the image of the real woman but the poster child for an unhealthy lifestyle and future probable health complications, the Mail piece argues. In using her as a shield, the fashion industry is doing exactly the same thing it did with size 0 models, only in reverse, namely projecting an unlikely image of how a woman should look.
Marie O’Riordan, former editor of Marie Claire, also tells the Mail that Beth Ditto is being used as an oversized human accessory / shield, under the false pretense that the values that the fashion industry is promoting are actually undergoing a drastic change. They’re not and the Beth Ditto phenomenon will soon fade away, O’Riordan believes. “Fashion magazines have to be aspirational. The readers may not want to look like some starved, pre-pubescent Eastern European [working girl]. But neither do they want to look like Beth Ditto. She’s the other extreme. I think the Beth Ditto phenomenon is all just a sideshow – a smokescreen with which the fashion establishment says: ‘We’re not body fascist. Look, we embrace people of all sizes’.” O’Riordan says.