First I would like to point out that if one reads the AFTERPARTY – reads, not glances- one would notice that I many times have remarked on the waifishness of models. It’s a common snark theme of mine. Having never been pin thin myself, I take responsibility for my weight and my figure in my own hands through good food and exercise despite a schedule that would put many other people in the hospital.

It’s about choices.

It’s about being offered both sides of information from someone close to girls, not just the media. It’s about education.

I can not be held responsible for those who choose to eat poorly or not exercise.

Again, it’s about choices.

I could get into a thesis on how women (and men now) are habitually terrorized by the media to be thinner than is healthy. How we are bombarded with 12-21 year olds in magazine fashion shoots who are made up to look older than they are and a 35 year old mother feels worthless because she isn’t built like a 15 year old pre-pubescent girl with an eating disorder. In fact, I have written said thesis for my psychology degree.

But, I won’t.

I could get into how commercials are timed throughout the day so that the commercials with “homemaker” types are on during the day plugging cookies and diet pills – oxymoron, no?- and that the sexy wives and sexy modeled commercials are on during prime-time when men are watching. Because women will buy (figuratively and literally) what the men are told to want. (double entendre there, stay with me)

But, I won’t.

What I will say is despite the bombardment of media telling us we aren’t good enough, it solves nothing to gripe. Laugh and teach our daughters to feel good about themselves. Get out and move in the world. Then they won’t have to feel bad when they look in the mirror…either for image, or for not making the right choices.

My job is to write on the entertainment, and I do so with a happy heart. I support Rachel Zoe and Brad, and Taylor and the whole crew even when I am completely picking on them. Not because I have to – in fact it’s my job NOT to in a way – but because they are every day people working their asses off for what they believe in. They are making people feel beautiful, no matter what their size is.

How beautiful have you made yourself or someone else feel lately?

Airbrushing photos to make someone look like a prison camp reject is appalling, and the design house and the advertising agency SHOULD be held accountable. No one could ever be that thin whose hair isn’t falling out and skin isn’t paper thin and organs weren’t failing.

Marketing health should be alongside fashion. For when we are truly healthy we are radiant and will look good no matter what we wear.

When women start taking accountability for their own size, their own health of body and mind, then altered images will disappear. Until then, Herald de Paris will report on both sides as any responsible paper would.

Perhaps pin-thin is the fashion answer to the severe obesity in the world. After all, for each and every action there is an exact opposite reaction to counter it for balance. Would you be as upset to see pictures of cottage cheese stomachs and breasts hanging to below the belly button? Is that any healthier? No, it isn’t. Just because people have gotten fat doesn’t make it any more right than supporting an emaciated image either.

Becoming healthy seems like an answer to both, no?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLYbSghCtXg

Researchers at Cambridge University in the U.K. have figured out exactly what makes a perfect swivel-hipped walk with “a more angular swaying and bounce to the hips.” The mathematicians got out their slide rules, calculators, blow-up dolls, and binoculars, scientifically determining the perfect ratio of waist to hips. Their results? The closer that ratio is to 0.7 (waist measurement is 70% of the hip measurement), the sexier the swagger.

According to that article, some with perfect or near-perfect hip/wasit ratio are/were: Jessica Alba, Marylin Monroe, and Sophia Loren. I’ve heard elsewhere that Julia Roberts also conforms to the 0.70. Is it all about the walk? not exactly. A hip/waist ratio of 0.7 also suggests the perfect balance between overall physical health and fertility.

And so, the super-skinny trend seems to defy the principle, above. I think i know why – the camera. The camera makes size 0/2 look like size 2/4, so to achieve the ideal hip/waist proportion in print, you have to be skinnier in real life. This is no different than the old expression that, “the camera puts 10 pounds on you.” It does .. sort of. It all has to do with dimension. The subtle curves of the human body are oft-lost because the camera sees in a flatter plane than the human eye(s), which see from the sum of two perspectives. Inadequate lighting more than anything contributes to the dimensional flattening of a film image, as opposed to the naked eye view. Unless you have a camera with two synchronized lenses, you always lose some perspective and depth.

TOO BIG TO MODEL TODAY?

It is interesting to note that recently, Linda Evangelista said that when she and Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Christy Brinkley, et. al. were at the height of the original “supermodel” craze (early 90s), the average sample size for couture dresses was a 4/6. Now, it’s a 0/2. So, what can account in the change in the ideal female form from the early 90s to now? DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY.

I’ve long believed that the digital camera does not represent and interpret light the same way that a traditional film camera does. To me, digital images often lack the depth of their film-based predecessors. A flatter image would, as a matter of course, look wider (see “10 pounds” above). Thus, to look the way the designer intended the clothes to look, print and video photography needs to shoot a proportionally smaller model to achieve the same effect.

That’s my theory and i’m sticking by it until someone proves me wrong.

- Jes Alexander, Publisher

America, as a whole, is getting fatter and fatter, and the “perfect” size is getting more and more unattainable. While the average woman gets bigger, the “ideal” is getting smaller and smaller. It is absolutely impossible to be healthy and look like that. I’m 5′5″ (and a fourth) tall and when I weighed 123 I was hooked up to an EKG in the hospital with my hair falling out, my vision fading in and out like a powerpoint presentation, and my skin dry, scaly and flaking off, with huge, sunken eye sockets. Now, according to the charts at the doctor’s office I was actually a little OVERweight. Did you know that the charts that tell us how much we should weigh and what weight constitutes an eating disorder are actually made by insurance companies? Why do they set the standard weight so low? The answer is simple: so they don’t have to pay for eating disorder treatment! By the time you are actually within the range of what technically qualifies you for anorexia or bulemia, you need to weigh 20% less than what your ideal weight is. You have to be well into the disease in order to even qualify for help. When I received my treatment, although I had all of the symptoms and behaviors of an anorexic patient, they couldn’t label me one because my weight was actually above my “ideal” weight. So, I was considered “eating disorder otherwise specified”.

While these modeling scouts seek women who look as much like a ten-year-old boy as possible without actually being one, our daughters are growing up thinking that they are too fat and ugly. Why is it that an absolutely gorgeous and fit 5′4″ tall 13-year-old girl bursts out crying because she weighs 100 pounds? Since when does a girl need to weigh less than 100 pounds in order to be good enough? The ideals created by this society are slowly killing our young girls and women. How can we bring beauty and “sexy” back to where it is supposed to be?

“I’m friends with Helena Christensen and Linda Evangelista, and I remember Linda telling me that when she was a model [in the '90s], a sample size was a 6 or an 8. Now a sample dress size is a 0 or a 2. That’s pretty alarming. There’s a lot of pressure on [the models]. It’s not healthy. I can’t even imagine what that’s like.”

- Jes Alexander, Publisher