Smoke & Mirrors

I remember being around 12 when it occurred to me that all my favorite models had one thing in common - cigarettes. It seemed at the time like an odd shared habit given the little I knew about cigarettes themselves but I couldn't help but notice that in every other runway picture or behind the scenes photograph the models were standing around sipping champagne and puffing on Marlboros. The images were so prevalent that I began to merely consider smoking to be one of those things models did - much like wearing fancy clothes or knowing how to walk in 6 inch heels. It was just part of their job.

It wasn't until a year or so later that I learned models use cigarettes to avoid getting hungry and suddenly it made sense.


Snejana Onopka lights up

This week The New York Times has an article Still Too Thin, and Getting Younger on the rampant use of cigarettes and other appetite suppressants along with the continuously decreasing age of fashion models. Its a sobering (and depressing) look into the tactics girls use to keep themselves waifish. The facts are unsurprising yet still manage to be staggering - a few choice excerpts:

There, one might be startled to find, scattered on the makeup table alongside the iPod and the Motorola SLVR (a device that electronics blogs approvingly call the anorexic phone), other currently common tools of the trade like Vicodin, clenbuterol and Marlboro Lights.

Vicodin, of course, is the prescription painkiller Eminem liked so much he immortalized it on “The Slim Shady LP,” and a drug better appreciated in the fashion business for its appetite-suppressing powers than for the truly unappetizing truth that it is only slightly less addictive than heroin. Clenbuterol is a steroid used by athletes, horse trainers and models to reduce body fat (one study of clenbuterol in horses showed significant weight reduction in a matter of weeks). “A lot of girls are using it now to keep their weight down,” said Kelly Cutrone, the founder of People’s Revolution, a fashion production company.

The one thing you will never hear anyone utter a peep of concern about when it comes to models is smoking. Yet it’s pretty common knowledge that they smoke more than long-haul truckers, road workers or Sylvia Sidney in “Beetlejuice.” The blue-collar reference here is intentional since, despite its putative glamour, a modeling gig is more like that of a supermarket checker than one would imagine. Both draw on a work force that tends to be uneducated and young.

. . .

No matter where, fashion-show readying areas all seem subject to local fire-safety standards, which designers observe by posting No Smoking signs prominently above the communal ashtray. Models smoke every place and all the time, in a nimbus of backstage hairspray, in alleyways at the rare shows (Prada, Bottega Veneta) whose designers won’t permit smoking indoors. They smoke at smart fashion parties and in the little Smart cars their agencies use to ferry them from one casting to the next. They smoke in a number of surprisingly tolerant restaurants here, of course, because the maître d’ has not been born who would tell the gorgeously sultry 18-year-old Australian Catherine McNeil to stamp out her cigarette.

. . .

It happens that there’s a sinister circularity in this process. Killing appetite is one reason people reach for a Marlboro. And there is no question that dieting is an occupational necessity for the girls paid to make the refined but punishingly slim clothes that Raf Simons showed in his much-lauded Jil Sander show on Tuesday (brave and courageous were words that were used a lot) look chic and also humanly feasible to wear.

It is also true that smoking to lose weight only leads to more smoking. Or at least that is what animal studies linking food deprivation to the use of stimulants have found. When the fashion community is used to its next fit of moral dudgeon and wakes up again to the problems of underweight girls and the largely hidden abuse of things like clenbuterol, it will be worth reminding them that there is good science demonstrating that when you starve an animal, you make it a lot more vulnerable to self-abuse.

I think this last bit really hits the nail on the head. The standards that many of these girls are place under are in unrealistic and in general unhealthy and given the relative ages of models (the article mentions girls as young as 12) its easy to see how very vulnerable they can be to eating disorders and/or drug use. Take a girl away from her family, dump her in a strange city or country and tell her that her job is dependent only on her ability to fit into clothing small enough to be sold at Baby Gap and its going to create problems. End of story.

As informative as this piece was it didn't seem to offer any solutions and lets face it the fashion world isn't exactly looking for them either. Things are still business as usual. Now depending on your views on cigarettes you may or may not feel that models smoking is a big deal but I think we can all agree that the use of cigarettes in place of food is a bad thing, not to mention the use of steroids and prescription drugs.

As always I ask you to tell me how this makes you feel - right now I can't help but feel frustration. After all the talk of model regulations it seems nothing has changed at all.

Thanks to Harini for linking me to this article and reminding me to check my beloved Thursday Styles