Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Fashion designer Victoria Beckham is experiencing severe criticism over an eyewear campaign that featured a model who was so thin she appeared sickly.
The New York Post is reporting on the ad which depicts Lithuanian model Giedre Dukauskaite, 29, posing in a pair of oversized glasses. Beckham posted two Instagram shots of the ad over the weekend which went viral and brought the designer a barrage of criticism.
“This image is why my already tiny daughter thinks she needs to eat less,” said one mother in Facebook.
“Victoria I adore you, but with the exorbitant prices you charge for [your] clothing couldn’t you at least buy this model a sandwich for god’s sake?” another Facebook poster complained.
In a column for the Daily Mail, Piers Morgan said he, like so many others, was “rendered dumbstruck in horror at the sight of the shockingly underweight model Victoria Beckham had chosen for the photos. She wasn’t just slim, or ‘skinny’ – she was emaciated.”
His article quotes Wall Street Journal columnist Dr Amanda Foreman, who tweeted: “A model who looks like a teenager with severe anorexia is the face for the #VBEyeware 2018 summer collection. This is the reason why every study on social media and advertising calls the threat to young girls’ mental health ‘dire’.”
Beckham has been criticized for using “skeletal” models in the past and admitted in her 2001 autobiography that she battled an eating disorder.
At the time, the former Spice Girl told the BBC that she went through a period when she was obsessed with dieting and her appearance after being pressured by management to lose weight.
“In the gym, instead of checking my posture or position, I was checking the size of my bottom, or to see if my double chin was getting any smaller,” she wrote in her book.
The pressure this kind of imagery puts on young girls is well-documented and very real. In my Young Women of Grace class, girls frequently spoke about the pressure they’re under to be more thin than they feel comfortable with. This pressure only intensifies by popular styles meant to be worn so tight that only the thinnest girls can wear them.
The good news is that the criticism over the Beckham ad has reached a fever pitch and is once again drawing attention to the problem of using underweight models in advertisements. Keeping this discussion alive and in front of our young girls can only help to reinforce the idea that it’s one thing to be slender, but quite another to be so thin that one can see protruding bones.
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