When food was scarce, a plumper figure was considered a status symbol and therefore the ideal of beauty. After the deprived time of the Second World War, women like Marilyn Monroe with clothing size 44 were considered the prototype of femininity. Today, food is available in abundance in our latitudes, and a slim figure is considered the ideal. It stands for health and self-discipline. Hollywood’s most famous blonde would probably be less successful today. The role models are now often skinny models like Victoria Beckham, who are proud to wear jeans in children’s sizes and fight aging with Botox injections and cosmetic surgery. More and more people, especially young women, are emulating their supposed beauty ideals and ruining their health in the process. According to the TK, in 2005 almost 11,000 patients were hospitalized due to eating disorders, 90 percent of them were women. For 89 of them, the illness even ended fatally. TK psychologist Inga Margraf warns against false role models: “Many young women take prominent slim stars as role models to starve themselves to a dress size or a weight that does not fit their physique at all. This usually only increases their dissatisfaction with their own bodies. It is much more important to strive for a healthy body weight instead of uncritically adopting beauty ideals and current trends.”
Healthy image of women
Now that the skinny trend has already taken on unhealthy proportions in many countries, there has been an increasing number of initiatives for some time to return to a healthy image of women. In Spain, for example, models are now only allowed on the catwalk if they have a body mass index of at least 18, which for a woman of 1.75 meters in height translates into a body weight of around 56 kilos. At the same time, some textile manufacturers have entered into voluntary commitments according to which future collections will no longer be based on model measurements but on the proportions of the average woman. This is intended to prevent women from returning from their shopping trip frustrated and feeling that they are too fat because they do not fit into garments that a designer has defined as size 40. The fact that flawless dream measurements are not necessarily a prerequisite for successful advertising is also shown by the campaign of a cosmetics manufacturer that deliberately focuses on “real” women with its “Initiative for True Beauty.” The manufacturer has cast women with different figures and ages directly on the street because of their positive charisma. Together, they pose for the cosmetics company’s brands. Inga Margraf sees this as a first step: “These initiatives show that the previous title pages with beautifully operated women, whose pictures are subsequently retouched, do not reflect reality. They help define an ideal of beauty that is not based on a specific body mass index, but rather has healthy people as its guiding principle.”
