“I was getting messages on Instagram from young girls saying: ‘I want to be a model, how can I be a model? Can you give me any tips?’” Charli Howard told World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service. “And I just thought, why? Why do you want this for your life when you could be an astronaut?”
Howard’s story has once again thrust the issue of ultra-thin models into the spotlight, less than a month after MPs said they would investigate whether very thin models should be banned from British catwalks.
Caroline Nokes, who heads the all party parliamentary group on body image, will lead the inquiry into whether the fashion industry is promoting unhealthy standards of beauty. It begins in November.
She said: “This is an issue that I have been doing a bit of work on over a quite long period of time and the experience that Charli outlines resonates with a lot of the other stories that models, former models and the parents of models have come to me with over the past few months.
“One of the messages that’s coming through loud and clear is that models are being put under enormous pressure to conform to a size and shape which is unrealistic and unsustainable. The figure of a girl at 14 or 15 will be different by the time she is 22. Mostly they come into the industry young and then they find it very difficult to retain the teenager figure when they become women.”
Nokes said the industry is in a vicious circle, where agencies brought in young women to satisfy the designers, and designers made clothes “to fit the frame of a teenage boy” because those were the kinds of models that were available to them. “These are not clothes for women with busts and hips,” she added.
Howard made headlines around the world after posting on Facebook: “Here’s a big FUCK YOU to my (now ex) model agency, for saying that at 5’8” tall and a UK size 6-8 (naturally), I’m ‘too big’ and ‘out of shape’ to work in the fashion industry.
“I will no longer allow you to dictate to me what’s wrong with my looks and what I need to change in order to be ‘beautiful’ (like losing one fucking inch off my hips), in the hope it might force you to find me work.”
She added: “In case you hadn’t realised, I am a woman. I am human. I cannot miraculously shave my hip bones down, just to fit into a sample size piece of clothing or to meet ‘agency standards’. I have fought nature for a long time, because you’ve deemed my body shape too ‘curvaceous’, but I have recently began to love my shape. I don’t have big boobs, but my bum is OK plus, a large majority of my clients are OK with this.”
As well as the many positive responses to Howard’s message, there was a post from Annette-Marie Kjean, head of women at Wilhelmina London, an agency which has represented Howard, who wrote: “You have chosen a very public forum to air your feelings.
“In fairness you should be obliged to tell the whole truth of our experience representing you as a model. You are quick to fat shame the women in the office yet you claim that this is the precise reason why you feel hurt.
“Perhaps now is a good time to reflect upon the facts of how and why we truly decided to end our management relationship with you ... Remember that you left us once for another agency and then came back a second time asking to be with us again and we welcomed you back. You left that part out.”
Howard has not responded to the KJean’s post.
On Friday afternoon, Howard told the BBC she felt it was the agencies that had the power to influence the kinds of women who were hired as models, accusing her former agency, which was not named, of refusing to pass on requests from clients to work with her.
“In a nutshell, I was getting told that a client had complained that I was out of shape,” she said. “But for three months prior to that I had not worked. I had been getting emails from people saying I have tried to contact your agency, we tried to book you and they hadn’t got the agency’s approval. They [the agency] hadn’t allowed me to work or got me any work.”
Caryn Franklin, the fashion commentator and former co-editor of i-D, said she was excited by what she saw as a growing backlash against stick-thin models that came not just from outside the industry, but also now from within.
She said: “Models do talk among themselves and they do say that model agencies do tell them to lose weight, and I think they have finally got to the stage where they have had enough. Fashion has no ethics, we certainly don’t have any ethics around the promotion of images that can influence body image anxiety.”
The Guardian contacted the agency which represented Howard, but it did not wish to comment. The Association of Model Agents, which represents the UK modelling industry, said that agency was not a member and so it could not comment on the case.
However, a spokeswoman said: “In order to be a successful model a girl/boy must be physically fit, in good health and in a happy and positive state of mind. It is not in an agent’s interest to give advice which might compromise this.”
