Models are eating tissues to trick their stomachs into feeling full.
Models are regularly fainting from hunger before taking to the set for a photo shoot.
In fact, models are so starving they can’t function enough to keep their eyes open.
Brace yourselves. Because these anecdotes are just the beginning of the fairly horrific details about what goes on in the fashion and modelling industry, as recounted by the former editor of Vogue Australia.
At the helm of our country’s premier fashion glossy for thirteen years (before being unceremoniously dumped from the position), Kirstie Clements has spoken out against the use of skinny and anorexic models in her autobiography, The Vogue Factor. She wrote about one model who had scabs on her knees caused by falling on the ground from being so faint she could no longer stand up.
Clements recalled a trip to Marrakesh where she didn’t see the booked model – a Russian girl- eat a single meal for the whole three days they were shooting there. By the end of the trip, Clements wrote, she could barely stand up. Yep, that’s right. The shoot didn’t get cancelled. No one intervened or took her to get help. The industry wheels kept grinding – the blatant starvation worked around – all to get “the shot”.
I feel like now I understand that vacant stare you so often see in fashion editorials; it’s the starving model dreaming about eating the photographer’s arm off. I feel horrified that I was unknowingly complicit in this. It makes me feel sick to know that I’ve bought magazines and poured over fashion editorial shots of models who were quite literally starving themselves to death. But I wouldn’t and couldn’t know what I was actually looking at because the tell tale signs of anorexia – the fuzzy facial hair, the sunken cheeks, the jaunty collarbones – are photoshopped out.