Fatphobia in the Fashion Industry
- onceuponageneratio
- Jan 7, 2022
- 3 min read
What is fatphobia?
Fatphobia is an irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against obesity or people with obesity.It is an pathological fear of fatness. The social stigma of obesity or fatphobia has caused difficulties and disadvantages for overweight and obese people. It leads to them being discriminated against, harassed and bullied for their weight. Due to fatphobia and the stigma around gaining weight people are often forced to conform to rigid body ideals. Oftentimes fat people are unfairly attributed with attributes like laziness, lack of patience, unmotivated or incompitent.
Decades of clinical research regarding the negative consequences of fat-shaming, fat-phobia, and weight stigma show that discrimination against overweight people has contributed to the rise of eating disorders.
The stigmatisation of obesity, and thus unhealthy aspirations for thinness, begins in children as young as three who told scientists studying the phenomenon at the news agency Reuters that overweight people are ‘mean, stupid, ugly.’
The fashion industry's role in promoting fatphobia.
Ever since the boom of the modern fashion industry in the 19th century, fashion has stayed fatphobic and racist. From the lack of representation of plus size models on the runway to limiting the sizes of garments sold, the fashion industry has repeatedly failed at catering to the interests of plus size individuals. In 2009 Karl Lagerfeld, the head designer of Chanel said that ‘no one wants to see curvy women on the runway.’
The exclusivity of fashion trends can be further seen on the runway. Jacquemus’s Spring 2021 line features his influential role in creating fashion for the “feminine woman.” His wild success begs the question as to why he hasn’t created the space for fat women.
Instead of trying to diversify their models and sizes brands like Victoria’s Secret have said that they will not have plus size women in their show as they dont think ‘no one will have any interest in it.’ These are lazy excuses to justify their lack of diversity. Brands like Savage x Fenty and Brandon Maxwell that feature plus size models on their shows have been getting rave reviews and are doing well if not better than Victoria’s Secret.
Other brands like Brandy Melville operate under a ‘one size fits all' system which sadly only encapsulates sizes 00-04.
Although the average American woman is a size 14, sizes 0-4 usually dominate the industry. Plus size models are rarely hired and when they are, they usually range from 8-12 and have an hourglass figure.
Sometimes in brands like Zara even though the garment is labelled as ‘plus size’ it is modelled by smaller and skinnier models.
The effect-
The visual diet phenomenon shows that increased exposure breeds preference for body types. This means that the overuse of underweight models lowers our baseline image of ideal/healthy weight.
The effects of visual diet are worsened by associative learning, which increases our inclination towards body types of seemingly aspirational figures. Seeing only thin models on billboards, runways, media adverts, and online catalogs contributes to our preference for thinness.
During the yearly 2000’s anybody above a size 2 seemed to be demonized and were seen as disgusting and the ideal beauty standard was someone who was extremely slender and thin. To no one's surprise this led to a rise of eating disorders. There was a 24% increase in the diagnoses of eating disorders in the years 1999 and 2000.
A study conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that the percentage of pre-adolescent children hospitalized for eating disorders rose nearly 120 percent between 1999 and 2006.
Research from the Mental Health Foundation with more than 4000 participants, cited in The Guardian found that ‘idealised’ media images are not only undermining our self-confidence, they are also contributing to our poor mental health.
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