Media Release: TRUE Fashion Show September 26th, 2013

After receiving a number of comments about our TRUE Fashion show held on September 26th, 2013, we thought we would begin to not only break the silence around disordered eating but also look at beginning to change the modelling industry within Canada.

The industry in North America typically presents images of individuals and particularly women at an unhealthy body weight (BMI). We believe that this presentation of unhealthy body images as the “model” for “beautiful” is one of the many root causes of Eating Disorders.

A number of countries in Europe who share our belief have enforced bans on underweight models, and moved to create new industry standards that models must meet a minimum body weight (BMI) in order to model. Although this is not a complete solution to the problems associated with the beauty industry, we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are confident that all of the models we used in the TRUE Fashion Show would meet the minimum BMI requirements to model in Europe.

It is true that all of the models in the TRUE Fashion Show were beautiful with pristine hair and make-up; compliments of the “beauty” experts at Trinity Salon and MAC make-up. We sought confident individuals to model in an effort to show our audience that beautiful does not equal a size zero. The beauty industry is a complicated beast. We all want to feel loved and desired and part of this is a seemingly unavoidable focus on appearance.

Perhaps the future world will look back on our initial efforts as shortsighted because instead of radically challenging our ideas of beauty we only replaced “beautiful” size zero models with “beautiful” models that are not size zero. It is our hope that some of the stories we told of pain and perseverance presented a doorway to this deeper view to human beauty and that further steps will be taken in the right direction to move away from images of starving models to a focus on being healthy and confident.