Every woman has her breaking point. This week, Charli Howard reached hers.
The young model, already waif-like by any reasonable standard, had just been dropped by her modelling agency for failing to reach their side of skeletal.
In yet another example of the absurd obssession with girls of skin and bone, she was told that despite being a 6-8 dress size, she was still not quite thin enough to work in the fashion industry.
Perhaps, suggested an agent of presumably much more delicate proportions, she could lose just another inch off her hips?
Her reply went viral, but it was the force of her response that signals that rebellion may be mounting among the professionally thin. Her only regret, she said, is that she didn’t do it sooner.
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She wrote in an open letter: “Here’s a big F*** YOU to my (now ex) model agency, for saying that at 5’ 8” tall and a UK size 6-8 (naturally), I’m ‘too big’ and ‘out of shape’ to work in the fashion industry. I will no longer allow you to dictate to me what’s wrong with my looks and what I need to change in order to be ‘beautiful’ (like losing one fu***ing inch off my hips), in the hope it might force you to find me work.
“I refuse to feel ashamed and upset on a daily basis for not meeting your ridiculous, unobtainable beauty standards, whilst you sit at a desk all day, shovelling cakes and biscuits down your throats and slagging me and my friends off about our appearance.
“The more you force us to lose weight and be small, the more designers have to make clothes to fit our sizes, and the more young girls are being made ill. It’s no longer an image I choose to represent. I cannot miraculously shave my hip bones down. Let’s face the facts: when I was 7 and a half stone, I still wasn’t thin enough for you. When I went to the gym 5 hours a week, you still weren’t finding me work. I can’t win.”
Ms Howard, 23, from southeast London, has worked for six years in the industry, modelling for Harper’s Bazaar and the fashion photographer Rankin. She did not name the agency.
She is the latest model to turn the tables on the industry insiders who help to determine which girls make it and which girls don’t.
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Last week, an Australian model, Rosie Nelson, also 23, felt compelled to do some agency-shaming of her own when a London booker told her she needed to “get down to the bone”. She had already lost a stone, and two inches from her hips, having been told four months previously that she needed to lose weight. It still wasn’t enough. They wanted her “hips to show”.
Ms Nelson launched a petition — 90,000 signatures and counting — calling for legislation to protect models. She said: “I thought, ‘I don’t want to be with an agency if they are going to say that’.
“No one ever tells you how to lose the weight; they just say, ‘Fix your measurements’. That’s where it becomes damaging because models, who are often young and living away from home, do it all themselves and think they need to not eat anything or they only eat popcorn or cotton buds to fill up.”
She realised that “models are dispensable”, recalling a friend who saw a model faint as she was about to walk for a big show. “They discarded her and grabbed another,” she told the London Evening Standard.
Caroline Nokes, who heads the all-parliamentary group on body image, is to begin an inquiry next month on whether legislation is needed.
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France has already tightened its laws so that agencies that use models whose BMIs fall below a certain figure will face a fine of €75,000 (£55,000) and staff face up to six months in prison. When Ashley Graham, a successful American lingerie model, was dropped from her agency for being too big, she and four others simply set up their own.
Ms Howard said she had been overwhelmed by the response to her letter, which ended with a vow to continue modelling. She added: “Girls like Ashley [Graham] and Gigi Hadid are quite clearly booking jobs at the size they’re at. They’ve become brands and role-models. It works, so tell me — why are other agencies not following in their footsteps?
“My mental and physical health is of more importance than a number on a scale, however much [they] wish to emphasise this. Until (and if) an agency wishes to represent me for myself, my body & the WOMAN I’ve become, give me a call.
“Until then, I’m off to Nando’s.”