by Lydia Dallett
Living in the orange bubble as we do, you may not have noticed that this past week was National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Across the country, NEDAwareness volunteers, eating disorder professionals, health care providers, social workers, therapists, and others organized countless events to bring the plight of eating disordered individuals into the limelight. The theme of this year’s week was, “It’s time to talk about it,” and in that vein, NEDAwareness sponsored movie screenings, walks, talks, body fairs, art shows and even a karaoke bar to encourage dialogue about this incredibly difficult topic. Attendees at these events were asked to do just one thing (original emphasis) to help raise awareness and provide accurate information about eating disorders to the general public.
Sounds pretty non-controversial, right? Who wouldn’t want to help prevent millions of young women and girls – and increasingly boys as well – from developing a life-threatening illness? Well, it turns out quite a few people, and many of them happen to work at Ralph Lauren. I, along with thousands of other Americans, have recently joined a Boycott Ralph campaign initiated by an individual who did a lot more than just one thing to raise awareness about body image issues. His name – yes, that’s right, it’s a guy – is Darryl Roberts, creator of the incredibly moving documentary, America the Beautiful.
For anyone who did not catch the screening on campus last spring, Roberts’ film captures the angst and frustration of women who are told from cradle to grave that they cannot be beautiful unless they look like Twiggy (though even she would need to lose a few to compete with today’s models). Over the course of two years, Roberts traveled the country interviewing young girls and women both in and out of the fashion industry, asking them about their self-esteem, their hopes for the future, and in essence why they do not feel beautiful. In particular he follows the story of Gerren Taylor, an innocent and gawky 12 year-old whose 6 ft. frame and amazing runway strut lands her on the catwalks of Marc Jacobs, DKNY, Tommy Hilfiger, and other top designers. Gerren’s rise to stardom is halted only a year later when Marc Jacobs required that she get her 38” hips – she’s 6 ft. tall, remember – down to 35”. (The girl hadn’t even gotten her period yet!) Even more troubling are the comments made by her mother, a similarly slim and tall individual who, after taking Gerren to one fashion show after another, begins pinching her own stomach and complaining that she’s gaining too much weight with her age. If ever there was a need for a body image interventionist, this would be it.
Roberts took his documentary to high schools and college campuses everywhere, hosting 212 screenings in 2009, and 187 screenings over the past week in honor of NEDAwareness Week. The response from his audience has been positive and enormous; well over 2,000 people are on Roberts’ email list to receive news about his expanding campaign to get the media and fashion industry to confront their contribution to eating disorders. One of his biggest successes includes organizing a campaign against MTV’s proposed “reality” show, Model Makers, which would essentially attempt to turn young women into fashion models by forcing them to lose weight in dramatic, made-for-TV ways. Roberts wrote an open letter to MTV executives calling on them to think about the message their show would send to its viewers, and encouraged his fans to do the same. Enough did that MTV ended up canceling the show.
Now Roberts is focused on Ralph Lauren’s incredibly unrealistic advertisements, seen here, that show models so thin that their heads look larger than their rib cages. Unbelievably, Lauren’s own niece suffered from extreme anorexia and wrote a book about it, criticizing her uncle’s advertisements for promoting unrealistic images of young beautiful people living “the good life.” In her quest to look like them, she nearly killed herself. In an open letter to Lauren executives, Roberts called on the company to stop airbrushing their models to the point of caricature, imploring Ralph to think about his own niece. He additionally called on all Americans to boycott Lauren products until the company stopped using their ridiculous ads. As of now, the boycott has garnered support from National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Eating Disorders, the YWCA and 60 other organizations, as well as a Facebook following of over 8,800. The media firestorm following the boycott was enough to elicit an apology from Ralph Lauren…which then turned around and published two even more anorexic advertisements!
Roberts wrote Lauren another letter and asked him again to reconsider his advertising; he added that he had received over 100,000 emails from supporters affirming their commitment to the boycott. Lauren did not respond, but CNN immediately planned to air a segment on the boycott, on which a Ralph Lauren representative would debate the issue with Roberts. For a week, the Lauren company contacted Roberts about the terms of the segment, but the night before the show, they canceled and sent a written statement instead. The statement – repeating word for word the first apology issued at the beginning of the scandal – undermined Lauren’s disrespect for Roberts’ efforts by claiming it had taken “full responsibility” for the “poor retouching” of its images. Not once has Lauren acknowledged a connection between its inhuman photos and the dangerous effects they have on at-risk viewers.
As a recovered anorexic, I know that eating disorders are not caused by media advertising. But I also know that ads like Ralph Lauren’s can be used as encouragement – “thinspiration” – for girls like me who wanted desperately to look like those models. Americans are exposed to 40,000 media messages a year, most of them promoting body images that are unattainable and horribly destructive for our self-esteem, confidence, and physical health. In light of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, and Equal Writes’ Love Your Body campaign, I urge everyone who agrees with this article to do just one thing to help stop America’s obsession with thinness. Join the Ralph Lauren boycott on Facebook and make a pledge to shop elsewhere until this company acknowledges its role in helping to perpetuate fatal eating disorders.
