Designer Mark Fast and his Managing Director Amanda May broke high-end fashion convention at London Fashion Week by opening Fast’s 2010 Spring/Summer collection show with size 12 model Hayley Morley.
[UKPRwire, Tue Oct 06 2009] Designer Mark Fast and his Managing Director Amanda May broke high-end fashion convention at London Fashion Week by opening Fast’s 2010 Spring/Summer collection show with size 12 model Hayley Morley.
Hayley, aged 21, was one of three size 12-14 models featured in the Mark Fast Spring/Summer 2010 show who were included to demonstrate how good Mark’s clothes could look on ‘normal’-sized women.
"There's this idea that only thin and slender women are able to wear Mark's dresses and he wanted to combat that,” commented May. “We wanted women to know they don't have to be a size zero to wear a Mark Fast dress - curvier women can look even better in one."
This is the latest fashion story that appears to show a direction within the industry towards a more realistic ideal for women to aspire to, a move many feel is overdue.
It was back in 2007 that the deaths of several size zero models led to the launch of an inquiry into models’ health, but despite this there are still no clear industry guidelines around the issue.
Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman reignited the size zero debate in June this year by writing to British designers asking them to provide samples in larger sizes so they could use more realistic models in magazines.
Meanwhile Professor Ulrike Schmidt, chairwoman of the Institute of Psychiatry’s eating disorders team recently decried Fashion Week as a promoter of anorexia. “The catwalks of international fashion events such as London Fashion Week can act as a showcase for underweight women,” she warns. “We are very concerned that the lack of medical checks for models at London Fashion Week, coupled with working in an environment where being underweight is considered the norm, prevents models with eating disorders from gaining insight into their condition.”
Designers such as Fast and his team were not alone in adding some welcome diversity to the London catwalks. PPQ used only black models, while the Sykes’ show saw models as old as 70 take to the runway.
Andrew Simmons of leading UK and European Modelling Agency Models Direct welcomes this new trend.
“Things have been gradually changing within the industry and it is long overdue,” he says. “Models Direct are very happy to see more evidence of an increase in ‘real’ models becoming the norm within our fashion industry.”
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