Celebrity Report

Debate around skinniness in fashion is not new. From blogs to magazine editors to parliament, the issue of abnormally thin models comes up again and again, whether it’s Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson calling for airbrushing to be banned in advertising or Vogue Italy’s Franca Sozzani admitting that “the current inclination to embrace a female beauty standard that exalts thinness has devastating consequences on many adolescents’ eating habits.”

But despite the chorus of protest, alarm and disgust, nothing ever really seems to change. The catwalks continue to feature ultra skinny girls, while designers continue to cite the now worn-out justification that they make their clothes small to save money; if you’re spending hundreds of thousands on a fashion show, why would you make your clothes a size 16 when size 6 requires far less material?

But what if persistently using young, white, tiny girls to model clothes was bad for business? Ben Barry, a modelling agency CEO with a scholarly background, surveyed over 2,000 women while researching female representation in fashion and discovered that there is a real business case for models to look a bit less like concentration camp prisoners and a little bit more like their actual customer base.

Writing in Canadian Elle, Barry says: “My study found that women increased their purchase intentions by more than 200 percent when the models in the mock ads were their size. In the subgroup over size 6, women increased their purchase intentions by a dramatic 300 percent when they saw curvier models. Conversely, when women saw models who didn’t reflect their size, they decreased their purchase intentions by 60 percent, and women over size 6 dropped their purchase intentions by 76 percent.”

(It’s worth noting that US sizes are usually two below those in the UK, so the size 6 referred to above is likely a size 10 in the UK, and so on).

Dove's real women advertising campaign
Dove’s real women advertising campaign was a financial hit

Beyond the issue of weight, Barry found that diversity is good for, yep, a completely diverse consumer base: “My results weren’t limited to the issue of size. Consumers increased their purchase intentions by over 175 percent when they saw models who reflected their age; in particular, women over the age of 35 increased their purchase intentions by 200 percent when they saw older models. When models didn’t reflect their age, consumers decreased their purchase intentions by 64 percent. Furthermore, black consumers were 1.5 times more likely to purchase a product advertised by a black model.”

Further details of Barry’s findings can be found in the Elle article, but I’ll leave you with this quote from the author: “In the business community, the general consensus is that there is a discrepancy between marketing and the market because fashion advertising fuels consumer demand by creating a craving that can’t be satisfied”.