Michael Kors, Coco Rocha Uncover Fashion's Nasty Habits at CFDA Health Event June 11, 2008 10:45 am >> 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.
Paris, New York, Milan Force London to Renege on Model Health Certificate Requirement August 13, 2008 11:14 am >> A lot of attention has been placed lately on increasing model diversity, but what about that other troubled topic — model weight?
Today, the British Fashion Council announced that their initiative to ban "size zero" models from the London catwalks next month has been abandoned after the other three major fashion capitals refused to follow suit.
The plan was to require models to obtain a doctor's certificate proving they were in good health, but the Chambre Syndicale in Paris thought imposing model health certificates lay outside their realm, the Camera Nazionale della Moda in Milan preferred self-regulation, and according to Steven Kolb, executive director of New York's CFDA:
We looked at things like doctor’s certification and body mass index and decided that, for us, it wasn’t the appropriate recommendation.
Marc O'Polo
GHD