Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Snapped, edited and airbrushed beauty
Beauty should be freedom.
Glittering spotlights, champagne receptions and drawling Parisian, London and New York accents: welcome to the world of the fashion catwalks. Journalists and reporters, thousands of them, gawp and gossip at the latest trends on the models - the ethereal waif-like beings gliding like malnourished swans down a runway, fixed emotionless expressions etched onto their sunken rouged faces.
An image of beauty? I think not! For I have seen behind the scenes of these fashion shows and let me tell you, it is a world far away from the shots snapped by the paparazzi. In this world, a stasis of fear and paranoia permeates every orifice of the bright-bulbed dressing rooms. Skeletal teens form rigid regimes of rib-counting, laxative abusing and strict weight management. For many, coffee, diet drinks, and a few sniffs of some dusty illicit substance from the cistern of the toilet is their only form of sustenance. “Just one line they think”, since it makes them “walk tall.”
Hair loss, osteoporosis, infertility, organ failure and even death faces these models. Yet even in the 21st century we remain ignorant to the problem. These images are snapped, edited and airbrushed and then flood into our magazines and adverts - these days you can hardly buy a can of coke without being confronted with an image of some stick-thin model sipping seductively from the bottle.
Is it any wonder that so many of us feel pressured to be thin, to look and act a certain way, to live up to what our warped society perceives as beautiful? Hardly!! A child learns how to talk by listening to the conversations going on around him, it is only natural that if we are continually surrounded by images of fragile women and six-pack gifted men and we are continually told that “ this is the image of beauty”, then we are going to believe it!
We are constantly being fed the message that image is everything, when it really isn’t. There are many things I would be proud to be described as: talented, kind, a great friend, funny, enthusiastic and 100 other things before I would like to be called beautiful - to me being a good person is infinitely more important than being pretty and I think most people would agree with me.
And so to combat the world of stick-thin models we now have many plus size models and clothing ranges to promote the “fuller” figure - a good move, is it not? Well, not really! Why is that we have to live in a world of extremes? Why do our models have to be either a size 4 or a size 18? Our modern day society goes from one extreme to the other and is promoting an extremely unhealthy attitude to life.
We should not be focusing on being thin or fat, skinny or curvy; we should be focusing on being healthy. Being underweight or overweight isn’t healthy, so quite frankly, I don’t think we should be advocating being either. We need to ditch our modern day image obsessed role models for ones that have some substance. What happened to wanting to be a doctor or a scientist when you grew up instead of a footballer or pop star? I know I’d rather be like Gandhi than Victoria Beckham myself.
I have a vision of a beautiful place........ A place where models of all shape and size glide happily, radiantly and most importantly healthily down the catwalk. An unprejudiced world where each of us has the freedom to be who we want to be. My vision of beauty is not the stereotypical vision of beauty however; it is a view of freedom. For me, beauty is freedom. Freedom to love, freedom to forgive, freedom to choose. Or in the words of Peter Zarlenga “Beauty is being in harmony with who you are”, words that are much more appealing to me than airbrushed images in magazine.
By: Louise Roulston
