Letter to the fashionistas: It’s not about the dress

In the media there has been all kinds of buzz and chatter about models being too thin.To address my viewpoint, I decided to write a letter to the fashionistas (basically all who work in the industry of fashion and beauty)

Dear fashionistas, 

We do love the creativity and originality in your designs, and we do enjoy the occasional glamour and glitz. It is fun to place dress up. However, you have a serious problem that is no loner going unnoticed. It's in the New York Times, USAToday.com, Katie Couric is highlighting the issue, and it's around the blog world. At what point have you decided as a majority that it is more important for a dress to look better then the person wearing it? It’s not about the dress. It’s about the people wearing the dress. A dress is not who we are, it is what we wear. 

Models who are too thin, modeling agents who defend the rights of the naturally gazelle-like models and just doing what the designers ask of them, and designers who want a dress to look just as good on a human as it does on a hanger, is not a problem of the body, but of the mind. It’s not about the dress. It’s about the mindset that you have created and create every day that is fueling society’s obsession with the body, and the perspective that if we, members of society, can just conform to the image of beauty that you have shaped at the moment, than we too can be worshipped, accepted, and loved. 

It’s not about where the problem originated, it’s about everyone who is contributing to it. Our problem is not that we hate you for being beautiful; it’s that you are putting profit and the dress before the person. All of you (models, agents, designers, show producers, retailers) are powerful creators and you know that. To deny the power that you hold in our society because there is now a spotlight shining on a serious problem in your industry is both irresponsible and ugly. You are now being given an opportunity to move toward a higher standard of being in the world, so take it. It’s not about the dress. It’s about what you are going to do next. 

And you are not the only contributors and creators of society’s obsession with the body, the media, Hollywood, corporations, and we the consumers are contributing to the problem as well. As a society, we deem it more important to be pretty than to be real. We show our young and ourselves that the prize to win is that of adoration and worship from others. The fastest way to achieve all that idolizing, by the “rules” today, is through physical beauty and money. 

We tie our sense of value and worthiness of love to how we measure up to the images of beauty we are bombarded with everyday. If you are hit with a message every single day, it starts to become a belief. And those who make the most money in our society are the ones who do the best job of making people feel and look pretty, and who have the level of beauty that others revere like fashionistas, plastic surgeons, the weight loss industry, make up creators, actors, rock stars, and athletes. 

Beauty does matter, and the desire for beauty is part of being human. As citizens of humanity we have been given things like nature, the arts, food, and design to inspire us, move us, and bring us joy. We are not asking you to turn off or ignore what is part of our human existence. We are asking for you to put the well being of people before the dress. We are asking for balance and variety. We are asking you to expand your minds so that you take into account that beauty exists everywhere and in everything, and comes in all shapes, sizes, and colors. You design for people, not for hangers. We are asking you to remember that it is not about the dress.

Thank you,
A fellow creator