The Pressure On Models to Lose Weight Is a Labor Issue
Model Anna Gantt opened up about being told she wasn't "waify" enough for a job.
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Trigger warning: This post talks about eating disorders.
“These are the days I hate being a model,” Anna Gantt said in a viral TikTok video posted on Thursday. She’s sobbing into her hands as she explains how she was rejected at a casting for being “too big.” She goes on to say that she finally feels good in her skin after gaining some weight but she has struggled with eating disorders throughout her entire career – she’s only 22. “You’re not waify enough, we want to see your bones,” they told her.
It’s an upsetting video for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that we’ve seen it before. Dozens of models have spoken out about the abuse they have faced from casting directors and agents who pressured them to lose weight, and many, like Anna, have suffered from severe eating disorders because of it. It’s a brutal reminder that even when it feels like the fashion industry has taken steps to be more inclusive and redefine what models look like, ultimately, the outdated and problematic standards for size persist.
Advocates have been pushing the fashion industry to take measurable steps to combat this problem over the years. In 2017, 75 models signed a petition asking leaders in the industry to not put models under 16 on the runways, and to work with medical experts to stop practices that pressure models to lose weight. That same year, Model Alliance founder Sara Ziff told Vogue that over 62 percent of the models they pulled for a study “reported being asked to have to lose weight or change their shape or size by their agency or someone else in the industry.” On top of that, 21 percent were told they would be dropped by their agency if they didn’t lose weight. Like so many of the labor issues in fashion, the power dynamics at play make it so that not only are those in charge getting away with things like asking models to drop a ton of weight in a short amount of time for a shoot — we mostly aren’t even hearing about it. “Making it” in fashion is so delicate and is often predicated on your relationships. Telling a casting director to fuck off when they ask you to lose weight could ruin a model’s entire career.
Modeling gets portrayed as this super glamorous job filled with free clothes and makeup and people fawning all over you. That’s definitely true for some people, but most models are working constantly at the whim of whatever their next job is. Add in almost two years of less work while the pandemic grinded the industry to a halt, and the need to take what you can is even more of an issue. Eating disorders and thinness amongst those people often gets framed as a problem for the viewer, but we should be addressing this as an issue of labor. Models have the right to a healthy work environment just like any of us do and being asked to go on a juice cleanse or fad diet as a prerequisite for getting hired is not that.
Both the fashion media and fashion brands need to adjust and diversify faster – tokenizing a select group of plus models clearly isn’t pushing the change that’s needed. And agencies and casting directors need to protect their employees by pushing back when a specific size is the only thing being requested. As Anna said in her video, it’s 2021, and enough is enough.