In a damaging indictment of the emotional pressure placed on models to maintain unhealthy and unrealistic weight targets, former Australian Vogue Editor-in-Chief turned loose lipped scribe Kirstie Clements (read her last interview as EIC here) has transformed herself from The Devil Wears Country Road to The Patron Saint of Models, calling for drastic changes in procedures and attitudes within the industry with regard to the physical and emotional welfare of models.
Among the meatier revelations from her book, The Vogue Factor, is the story of a three day shoot she oversaw in which a model was physically incapacitated after not eating for its duration, a second hand story about a fit model who regularly spent time on a hospital drip and instances of models eating tissue paper to stave off hunger pangs.
“It’s not every model, but there are certainly parts of the industry
where you will see that girls have got eating disorders,” Clements reiterated in an interview ET.
“They’re normally required to lose a great deal of weight to actually
get into those sample sizes that you’ll see on those international
runways, and that’s where you start to see trouble happening.”
Clements attributes the welfare issue to a “pretty small pool of very influential people” including casting directors, agencies, designers and stylists, but admits that she was culpable too.
“I did consider myself to be part of the problem, to tell you the truth,” Clements admitted. “I felt that that everybody was complicit in it. … As an editor, as a woman as a mother, I would make my judgment calls as the models passed me…as to whether I felt that they were too thin…and you had to make that call every single day, but yes, the industry is complicit in some of these areas, definitely.”
Doubtlessly her most important work yet.
The Vogue Factor is out now.
