Thursday's child has far to go

Day 06 – your day, in great detail - 9th December 2010

I set my alarm for 9am but as always I didn't want to get up and so finally awoke at 10am. Straight away I turned my laptop on and got to work on my Pitch for Uni. Got it finished and posted it online at around half 10. Showered, got dressed then went to co-op to buy coke, cakes and a magazine, yeah I know, really healthy. I had lunch whilst watching the film Anchorman and then my house-mate reminded me of a talk at Uni by Guest speaker Caryn Franklin. The talk was very inspiring so I'm going to give you some of my opinions on it.


The talk was named 'Every Body Counts' and featured topics such as individuality, size zero, diversity, fashion imagery and the society that we live in. I feel that it is important that different sized models are used in magazines and on the catwalks. But society needs to accept this fact first. In basically any fashion magazine that you pick up it will include a Caucasian, tall, very thin model, scantily clad in high fashion. But this is just what we have all come to know but it's time to start questioning it. Why do we feel that in our highly multi-cultured society it's okay not to represent everybody that looks at the magazine.
Caryn Franklin is part of an organisation called 'All Walks' that brought together a range of different models in all different ethnicities, age and sizes. None of them were unhealthy and yet still looked beautiful.

It's not that being skinny is wrong, and I know that Keira Knightly and Victoria Beckham have raised the issue that being skinny is obviously not a bad thing and many women are naturally this way. However we just need to broaden the idea and look at all shapes, thin, curvy, voluptuous, flat chested, large chested etc. Young children and young adults need to be shown that however you look is perfectly acceptable.

With 8 out of 10 women not liking their appearance in Britain today it's pretty shocking that the industry can carry on this way. But of course it's a capitalist issue, if they can't make money then they are not interested. Oh and we all know, sex sells, so who knows if any time soon we can change the way that society and large corporations project women to their audience.

x ^_^ x