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How Walk the Catwalk Got Started
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With the launch of The Fenomenal Calendar in late 2006 and early 2007 came a lot of information I wasn't expecting. My friend and business partner Diane and I were inundated by emails from people all over the world. We were only selling our product in North America but with the way the internet is, word travels fast! There were nights we would be on the phone crying reading emails together from women of all ages telling us their life stories - stories about feeling underrepresented in fashion, TV programs and in clothing stores because of their size, about not being able to feel and look fashionable because there were simply no shopping options where they lived. There were stories of eating disorders and trying to live up to the perceived beauty expectations of others. Fathers wrote in thanking us for creating a project that featured sizes larger than a 4 and bought calendars for their teenage daughters and wives. Women wrote to tell us how refreshing it was to see women with their body shape in elegant, creative photos - finally. Our little project that we threw together at the last minute had touched a nerve.
Around the time this was all happening, the runways of the world were under a microscope. The need for change in fashion was emphasized when model Luisel Ramos died of heart failure caused by anorexia during a Uruguay Fashion Week show in August, 2006. Her diet consisted mainly of diet cola and lettuce leaves. 2 more models died within a few months - Ana Carolina Reston Macan in November 2006 from complications due to anorexia and Luisel's sister Eliana, 18, in February 2007 from a heart attack related to an eating disorder - putting pressure on the fashion industry to change. Worldwide discussion was created out of the tragic deaths of 3 beautiful women trying to maintain a size that did not work for their bodies.
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The Fashion World Makes Baby Steps
I read the headlines regularly and was impressed by some initiatives for change but mainly just became more frustrated with the flippant comments made by many in the fashion industry. Nobody was taking any responsibility - agencies, designers, fashion houses and clothing manufacturers were all passing the blame onto someone else - usually young, impressionable models selected by the fashion industry precisely because they were already thin. BMI (body mass index) became a big factor in the talks of many governments. Madrid banned models with a BMI of less than 18 from shows (16 is considered starvation) and many other government officials toyed with implementing a BMI ban. I appreciated their want to create change but I didn't think this was a prudent move. The sole use of BMI in today's society is not an accurate indicator of someone's health. Muscle mass is not taken into consideration nor is body frame. On the other end of the BMI scale, if I am roughly 200lbs/90.9kgs (so my doctor tells me - I don't own a scale) I am considered overweight by BMI standards. If I gained about 10 lbs for my height, I would be considered obese. Would both ends of the BMI spectrum therefore be banned from the runways for being "unhealthy"? Using BMI standards to pass or ban models on the runways of the world was and is not the solution and does not answer why the runway model seems to be shrinking in size every year. When governments were suggesting models get health cards in order to work - many times based on faulty BMI information, I knew a new fashion foundation was going to be created that was just as faulty as the one already in place. Everyone was focusing on the wrong end of the fashion spectrum - the models represented the end result of a long chain of events leading up to them being on the runways in the first place.
What really jarred me into needing to create change on my own is when I saw the recommendations from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Everything was a bandaid solution affecting the models the day or week of the runway event - ie. offer more nutritious foods to the models the day of their shows during Fashion Week, don't keep young models up late at fittings etc. No thought went into the root cause of the problems, no discussions were had to implement lasting change in the industry. There was no discussion about why models had become smaller each year - because the sample sizes created by the designers which determine who gets cast in a show were getting smaller each year. If you didn't fit the ever decreasing sample size, you didn't work. Simple. Time for change. Time to create change if nobody else would.
Walk the Catwalk Is Born
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I felt like the fashion industry was "talking the talk but not walking the walk." I thought it was time to see different sizes in magazines, the media and on the runways of the world. Change needed to start in our ideas and the beliefs that we have held onto for years - we needed to get down to the root of the problem. There could be no change until the fashion belief system was exposed and analyzed. We needed to open dialogue with fashion schools in order to understand the messages being passed down to the designers of tomorrow, to understand what sizes new designers were encouraged to make and what size limits were being encouraged or discouraged and why. Most importantly, we needed to start questioning the long held belief system that designers should only create one sample size for shows and print media - generally under a size 4. Why? We needed to see what ideas were being transferred to the next generation and what thoughts were being absorbed and why.
Originally we tried to instill change in a short period of time. Eventually we realized this would be impossible and have transformed Walk the Catwalk into an ongoing, educational process while pushing to expand the size diversity range needed in fashion in order to count all women in. I could go on and on here about this initiative but maybe it would be better if you simply took a few minutes to visit the website... In a nutshell, if we change the sample size, we can change the world!
Click here to visit Walk the Catwalk
