Sally, a 16 year old high school student, sees pictures of models on runways and throughout social media, and began to think how much better her life would be if she looked like those girls. Maybe, if she was skinny, that boy in her math class would finally notice her. Maybe, if she was skinny, she wouldn’t be so embarassed to change for gym class. The thing is, Sally wasn’t overweight, but a healthy weight of 132 lbs standing at 5’7. Not being able to stand her appearance, Sally started eating almost nothing but 5 crackers a day and some water. After a few days on her new diet, her face began to look sunken, her body fragile. Eventually, Sally stopped eating completely, surviving only on water. By this time, Sally weighed 85 lbs and thought she was gorgeous. She proudly strut around school, showing off her new body. The people she passed couldn’t believe that the creature prancing around before them was human. It wasn’t beautiful. It was a hollowed corpse.
What is beauty? The answer to this question has infinite possibilities. The ideals created by the fashion industry have been known to influence men and women of all ages, often making them feel inferior to models because of the contrast between the body types. In magazines, a woman is only seen as beautiful if she is tall, thin, and showing her curves, even if her bones are practically coming out of her body. By providing these images, the industry creates a distorted perception of beauty in the minds of their consumers. While there are many positive assets to the fashion industry, it has a negative impact on children and teenagers by promoting an unhealthy body image. The overall health of young adults is affected by pressures from the fashion industry.
The women advertised in fashion magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Vogue, and Bazaar largely influence what is beautiful in society. Jill Zimmerman, a psychotherapist that specializes in women's issues, states that young girls allow themselves to become vulnerable to health problems by following current beauty trends. Such trends can cause mental illnesses and physical changes. According to Zimmerman, some “women feel justified in their starving, binging and purging, and excessive exercise” as they attempt to drain themselves of fat and mold their bodies into the “illusions of perfection that pour into their senses from every direction”. As you can imagine, these processes end up harming the girls as they try to fit into society’s definition of beauty. As time goes on, and models get thinner, adolescent girls think that methods of losing weight, such as excessive binging and purging, are condoned, if it results in them looking like a Brandy Melville model . Zimmerman goes on to explain that while people are so focused on what is wrong with their bodies, they forget to appreciate that their natural beauty is far more attractive than the “stick figures that prance around at fashion shows”. This is such a foreign thought because "for over a century, newspapers and magazines have been deluging Americans with images of ideal beauty, and only strict emulation of these ideals has been sanctioned as attractive", further encouraging women to take drastic measures to be “sanctioned” as attractive. Reporter Jeremy Laurance of The Independent, a newspaper in England, wrote that “an estimated one million people in Britain suffer from the [eating] disorder". NEDA, an organization that supports individuals and families affected by eating disorders, defines Anorexia Nervosa as a “serious, potentially life-threatening eating disorder characterized by self-starvation and excessive weight loss ”resulting from desires of a person to relieve themselves of all bodyfat. The physical effects of anorexia, such as infertility, shutdown of major body systems, brain damage, heart attacks, and even death, are often irreversible. The fashion industry should be focusing on altering the standards set forth by models seen across media.
Models are seen everywhere, from TVs to magazines. As this is such a judgmental century, if you don’t look like the picture perfect models on the runway, you get body-shamed, and become encouraged to try to achieve society’s standards of beauty. So, what is beauty? Beauty is looking at a fashion model and not seeing anything wrong with your own image. Beauty is accepting your appearance the way it was made instead of pointing out every flaw. Beauty is appreciating the beauty of others while not desiring to look like a clone of them. Beauty is what modern adolescents are trying to achieve but never will, because they don’t realize they are already beautiful.
