The Advertising Standards Authority in the U.K. has been cracking down on irresponsible fashion ads of late, and the latest major house to feel their wrath is French giant Saint Laurent.
Credit: The Fashionography
In a spring 2015 ad, which you can see above, 18-year-old model Kiki Willems is laid out on the floor, eyes closed, hands on her head. She’s very skinny—unnaturally so, you could argue—and the pose only highlights that element. As the ASA report notes, you can see the bones of her rib cage, and her legs look almost pencil-thin.
The ad was published in Elle U.K., which spawned a complaint from a reader who found the model “unhealthily thin.” Saint Laurent offered very little in the way of response, and the ASA upheld the complaint and banned the ad from the U.K. in its current form.
Credit: moded
Here was the official language from the ASA:
The ASA considered that the model’s pose and the particular lighting effect in the ad drew particular focus to the model’s chest, where her rib cage was visible and appeared prominent, and to her legs, where her thighs and knees appeared a similar width, and which looked very thin, particularly in light of her positioning and the contrast between the narrowness of her legs and her platform shoes. We therefore considered that the model appeared unhealthily underweight in the image and concluded that the ad was irresponsible.
Earlier this year, the ASA banned ads by Tom Ford (degrading to women) and Miu Miu (sexualizing a child). This is part of a broader trend to make the fashion industry less exploitative, and as The Hollywood Reporter notes, the movement has spread to other European countries—France has even set a minimum BMI number a model must meet, with hefty fines handed out to violators.
Source: Paste Magazine