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For decades way-too-thin models have been en vogue and in Vogue as our culture's representations of beauty, but just now, for some reasons related to the Internet, we're suddenly seeing the fashion industry respond.
Yesterday, for example, Vogue announced a pledge to use healthy models, agreeing to not employ models under 16 or with eating disorders. "Vogue believes that good health is beautiful," Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast International, said in a statement via the BBC. "Vogue editors around the world want the magazines to reflect their commitment to the health of the models who appear on the pages and the wellbeing of their readers," he continued. We've been hearing about the anorexia and image problems for years, even decades. So why now? We're thinking it has something to do with the convergence of fashionable extreme-to-the-extreme thinness and the Internet.
Models have been the idealization of beauty pretty much forever, and that aesthetic has been "very skinny" since at least the mid-90s, when the slender Kate Moss appeared in this Calvin Klein ad (pictured above), popularizing the "waif" look. "The reason for Kate [Moss] and this whole group of women I found that someone named 'waifs' was because before that, a lot of women were getting breast implants and doing things to their buttocks," Calvin Klein told Women's Wear Daily in 2011. "I wanted someone who was natural, always thin. I was looking for the complete opposite of that glamour type that came before Kate," he said.