False Advertising Body Image and the Emergence of Plus-Sized Models

Models: False Advertising body Image and the emergence of plus-sized models

        A model is an individual with a responsibility either to display, endorse or advertise commercial products; mainly fashion clothing; or to serve as a visual aide for artists or to pose for photography. This profession started in the 1853 and quickly merged with the market needs. Models have a strict range of measurements and weight to be considered a model but with time these measurements are reducing exponentially and the companies demand became more strict and leaning towards more skinny and less curvy models. As we can see in Figure 1, the current measurements to fit as a model are very close to the measurements of an anorexic individual, which the latter make up 8% of the worldwide population. Models, especially with the rise and accessibility of social media platforms, are becoming more influential like celebrities and idols to a huge body of fans. These dimensions have gotten very small that they don’t even represent a realistic body image. Do you believe that promoting such models and body figure is a type of unethical false advertising for the realistic body image? In the following, we will be developing the practices of companies to promote an unrealistic body image. Moreover, we will emphasis about the ethicality of this false advertising. Afterwards, we will expand our topic to talk about plus-size models as a form of revolution against these practices.[pic 1][pic 2][pic 3]

Firstly, since the start, modeling companies are practicing many activities to promote unrealistic body images to the public. Famous companies like victoria secrets, head and shoulders, sports illustrated, playboy … are all promoting an unrealistic body image to their customers. All of these companies have been exposed and scandals were leaked to the public for using photoshop, hiring very skinny anorexic looking models and promoting an unhealthy lifestyle for promotional and advertisement incentives. For example, in figure 2, we notice a victoria secret model and even though she fully fits the measurement of current fashion models, she was photoshoped to look even skinnier to an unrealistic proportion and thus false advertising the common body image and distorting it, as well as giving a new picture for what sexy is. Such practices aren’t very uncommon; the companies are going crazy over the use of photo and video editing programs. On the surface, all of these practices are for the promotion of selling magazines, increasing fashion-clothing sales, beauty products, to encourage sales and revenues. But the dilemma is that all these practices are inducing many subliminal responses and especially in women. The consequences of these practices over the years have been shown in increasing the number of anorexic, bulimic and eating disorder patients. The numbers proves it all, especially because such a subject isn’t really expressed in society since it is subliminal.  I did my modest research on google trends and the results were shocking. See Figure 3. The input was entered under, the most famous modeling and fashion underwear company Victora secret  along with skinny, photoshop and diet. The results showed that after each victoria secret show, the diet searches spikes and what I concluded that the use of photoshop increased drastically over the years and skinny was increasing in searches and interest. People are becoming more conscious about their body figures and this increased the number of eating disorder patients with time. The real proof that the current measurements aren’t healthy at all was France increasing the measurements of the average model a year ago.[pic 4][pic 5][pic 6][pic 7][pic 8][pic 9]