Andrej Pejic starves in the name of fashion
Über famous androgynous runway model, Bosnian-born 20-year-old Andrej Pejic, admits that it’s not that easy to fit in with the girls in the fashion world. Of course he’s getting a lot of great campaigns and being featured in multiple glossy mags (like ours, October 2011, ‘Pushing The Identity Boundaries: Fashion’s Extraordinary New Faces’, pg. 76). Yet, it’s not all fun and games in the world of fashion.
In a recent interview with Grazia magazine, he said: ‘Let’s be honest. You can’t eat much if you want to do this. To do womenswear I have to be disciplined. My waist has gone from 29 to 25 inches, my hips are 35 inches.’ He does this in order to compete at the same level as the rest of the female models. Female models also get paid a lot more than male models. He said he’s not really sure how the female models feel about him modelling womenswear, saying that they are all very…well, competitive (usually code for catty/bitchy). It seems that irrespective of how you were born, whose clothes you model, and whether the clothes were originally intended for men or women, being skinny is mandatory for anyone wanting to be successful in the super competitive world of fashion, and this is not about to change soon.
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It’s interesting to see that no matter how much people say that fashion is changing, word from the inside tells us the truth
Though there’ve been countless attempts at revolutionising the fashion industry’s unrelenting obsession with coat-hanger women (and one man!), I don’t believe healthy women will ever be ‘de rigeur’ on the catwalks and magazine pages. The glorification of emaciation, eating disorders and substance abuse (though subliminal) has ruined millions of young women’s right to joy and pride in her own body and style. Quite how ‘fashionable’ retrograded from Rubenesque health to what we have now makes very little sense. I can’t imagine, even with my wildly idealistic imagination, that a reverse regression is possible. But, we can each choose to cherish our uniqueness and nurture our health, and then to instill these values within our daughters.
Rubenesque views on health were based on wealth – back then, scrawny women wouldn’t last the winter, tanned women worked in the fields – thus, being plump, and white skinned denoted wealth, and thus, desirability.
Today, only wealthy women can afford nutritionists, trainers, tanning booths, and nannies to take care of their kids. Marie Claire posts an article mildly criticizing a model for over-dieting – yet use rail-thin models in their house photo shoots.
Coat-hanger models is an apt term – if all your models are size 0, a Designer’s Style Director need only grab the size 0′s when s/he goes to figure out who will wear what down the runway.