Zero intolerance

London fashion week begins tomorrow and I, for one, am waiting with less than baited breath. Whilst I really enjoy looking at lovely clothes, bags and shoes, it isn’t one of my great obsessions (no, honestly). I don’t buy fashion mags and I don’t make any great effort to keep up with trends. In fact, I gave up reading women’s magazines many years ago because they did very little for my self-esteem. Now, we are talking decades ago here when I was in my mid twenties. Since that time it seems to me that the tenor of these offerings has got worse – especially given the advent of the gossip glossies. Whilst I don’t buy them and when I flick through them in the doctor’s surgery or at a friend’s I often end up feeling decidedly seedy; that I have engaged in an act of voyeurism concerning people I don’t even know.

An additional outcome of these nasty mags is an increase in female bitching about other women and the way they look. Why do we do this to each other? Why the obsession with Victoria Beckham, an individual it seems to me, more need of sympathy and support than the endless bitching and sycophancy about her figure, her marriage, her clothes and her career. What does this dreadful fare do to its large teenage readership? Please don’t tell me that these are sophisticated young women who are much more in a position to make sensible evaluations about what they read, because the evidence suggests that this is not the case. And I am referring here to the worrying rise in eating disorders. A horrible confluence of forces exists here whereby everyone blames everyone else for the advent of the size zero model, but in fact the answer is actually very simple. We should stop buying fashion mags or any other magazine that uses skinny models to sell its produces or is used by advertisers. These magazines have it within their power to say to designers that they won’t accept the samples sent to them if they are for size zero’s and that the models they will use are a size 10 (minimum) with a tendency towards ‘plus sizes’ (size 12 upwards) and the sizes that reflect the actual figures of the female population.

Many women won’t like this because we have become so brain-washed by the skinny ideal. But if you go back 50 years, models to my mind looked so much more gorgeous and were slightly shorter and a good 36, 24, 36 which is a little more like it. Mind you, I’ve got a 26 waist, so how you get down to a 24 is anyone’s guess! What I feel is that the gains of feminism are being lost and have been eroded since the early to mid 1990s. I’d like to see more public sisterhood and a healthy relationship to our bodies and their use as signifiers. I’d like us to appreciate good women more and bitch about the ‘bimbos’ less. Just ignore them, they’ll eventually go away.