If we know idealising thinness is silly, why do we keep on slating fat people?

Shoppers at the mall where Topshop’s unnaturally skinny mannequins sparked a social media furore earlier this week reflect on all the fuss

The story of the Topshop mannequin is a body image one, sure: mainly that. But it carries some social media messages, too: viz, that if you want to have a Facebook page, and invite your shoppers to “engage” with you there, then sometimes they may say things that don’t suit you at all. So it was on Monday, when Laura Berry took a picture of a mannequin in the Cribbs Causeway store outside Bristol: she put it on their Facebook page, with the message: “I’m calling you out, on your lack of concern for a generation of extremely body-conscious youth.”

The store, after trying and failing to contact Berry privately, was reduced to a public justification. “As the mannequins are solid fibreglass, their form needs to be of certain dimensions to allow clothing to be put on and removed easily; this is therefore not meant to be a representation of the average female body.” Huh. Things that are fibreglass need to be really really small. Who knew?

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from Health & wellbeing | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1JVWmei
via health