James Scully

>> Last night, the CFDA gathered an audience at Milk Studios in Manhattan for a Health Initiative discussion on “The Beauty of Health: Resizing the Sample Size.”  James Scully, the casting director who worked on the likes of Jason Wu's and Stella McCartney's shows last season and Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent's during Tom Ford's reign, laid it out:

Of the 172 girls I saw for casting for fashion week, 75 of those were 16 or under. Everybody is demanding the girls fit into a 33-inch hip. A teenage boy has a 32-inch hip . . . they start too young and suddenly when they’re 17 turning 18 and they grow breasts and hips, they’ll do anything to fit into the size.

Doutzen Kroes, who started in the industry at 18 and was pressured to lose weight, offered her perspective: “I never fit the sample. I probably fit it once, when I was 11." Her solution? “We had what we called an ‘ass meeting’ with my agent. I chose to have a healthy lifestyle and work around that.”

So how will the standard be changed? »

>> He filled in as chief designer at Bill Blass for the Spring 2008 season before Peter Som took over, and was set to produce the Fall 2009 Blass collection after Som left until things with the label fell apart.  Now former Blass design director Prabal Gurung is striking out on his own with a signature label for Fall 2009, his first show kicking off Fashion Week Feb. 12.  And judging by the pre-show coverage — WWD, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Fashion Week Daily — he'll do just fine, even in a recession.

Working out of his makeshift showroom — an on-loan studio apartment that belongs to an editor friend — Gurung, who has been selling made-to-measure to private clients for a few years, is putting the finishing touches on his self-funded, twenty-look collection, which he says is all about "well-made clothes": "At Bill Blass, I learned the way clothes are supposed to be made — there are no shortcuts. Just well-finished clothes. That’s the kind of approach I’m taking — it’s not about being trendy."

It helps that he already has the industry support — "It’s been very emotional, the amount of support I’ve gotten, without asking" — and scoring coveted casting agent James Scully and T Magazine and former British Vogue stylist Tiina Laakkonen to cast and style the show, respectively, won't hurt.  Now it's all about bringing that sketch of four of his Fall 2009 looks to life — we'll be watching.
*image: source

>> At last night's CFDA-hosted "Beauty of Health" discussion, Michael Kors, Coco Rocha, and casting agent James Scully all stepped up to the plate to address the waning weights of models. 

Kors threw in a designer's perspective, suggesting that his peers should "stay away from child-size clothes unless [they're] designing for children," and pointing out that when designers offer such small sample sizes and celebrities starve themselves to fit into them, their super-skinny aesthetic has a far-reaching impact on the general female population.  He also advised agents to only send the most suitable girls to castings:  “Sending a girl when there's little chance of her being booked throws a 16-year-old into a tizzy.  The odds of a girl being booked for my show and Rick Owens’s are slim.”

Next up to the podium was Coco Rocha, who just like Natalia Vodianova and Ali Michael before her, admitted that the job comes with some very unhealthy habits.  Two years ago, she weighed 108 pounds (at 5'10"), and yet people were stilling telling her "you need to lose more weight.  The look this year is anorexic.  We don't want you to be anorexic, we just want you to look it."  Even crazier, an agent once advised her to throw up after meals. 

Eventually, she submitted to the pressure.  "Last season I took diuretic pills. Once I took so many on an empty stomach that I was doubled over for hours. That's the last time I ever did something so terrible to my body."  She asked designers to provide healthier food at their shows — "No one wants to be caught with that photo 'Model Eats Cake'" — and to make their fit models, and therefore their sample sizes, bigger — models are humiliated when zippers won't zip up at castings. 

Finally, casting agent James Scully advised insiders to consider the weight of their words.  "Let's stop treating models like greyhounds we plan to shoot after a race. We have to remember we are dealing with real people who have real feelings."

Francisco Costa, Georgina Chapman, Keren Craig, Donna Karan, Richard Chai, Marcus Wainwright, David Neville, Derek Lam, Doo-Ri Chung, Diane von Furstenberg, Phillip Lim, and Anna Wintour, plus several other Vogue editors, were all in attendance at the event — which leaves quite a few American designers unaccounted for.  But as Michael Kors pointed out, designers aren't the only people responsible. "The next one we need to do is about skinny people who work in fashion: editors, buyers, stylists. That’s called ‘Why Does This Sample Fit Me?”

*images: source