14 DAY TRIAL // Karl Lagerfeld is not the kind to mince his words or, for that matter, care what people think of him but, when it comes to talking about fashion’s role in the increase of number of cases of eating disorders, he’s not likely to keep quiet.
The Chanel designer sat down for an interview with ITV and, among the topics touched upon was also that of anorexia and how the fashion industry is somehow responsible for the message young girls get from it, namely that beauty always equals skinny.
Video of the interview is below, embedded at the end of this article.
From the get-go, Unkle Karl refuses to have this dialog, blasting it as “ridiculous.”
As he sees it, in a few years from now, it will become socially acceptable to be fat because of our current unhealthy lifestyles and our excessive love of junk food.
At the opposite pole is anorexia, which, he says, has nothing to do with fashion.
“I’m sorry to say that it’s a subject I consider ridiculous for several reasons; the story with the anorexic girls – nobody works with anorexic girls, that’s nothing to do with fashion,” Karl argues.
“People who have that [anorexia] have problems to do with family and things like that. There are less than 1 per cent of anorexic girls, but there more than 30 per cent of girls in France, – I don’t know about England – that are much, much overweight,” he goes on to explain.
“And it is much more dangerous and very bad for the health. So I think today with the junk food in front of the TV it’s something dangerous for the health of the girl. The models are skinny, but not that skinny,” Largerfeld says.
However, his final argument is the one that practically absolves the fashion industry of all responsibility when it comes to “educating” young girls and women as regards beauty standards: fashion and the real world are nothing alike, he says.
Little does he think that many of the girls who read beauty magazines actually believe that they’re supposed to look like the models featured in their pages – and kill themselves to get that way.
