The weekend’s Vogue festival was remarkable – among other things – for Natalia Vodianova’s outpourings on eating habits, shape and weight. They stirred up so many fuming comments that Vodianova had to end up writing an explanatory response on her Facebook page.
Falling back on the old lines of misconstruing the true meaning of her remarks pulled out of the context and read without regard to the general atmosphere, the 30-year-old model stated that the whole discussion was hilarious. She and other fellow-model panelists – Eva Herzigova, Lily Cole, and Jourdan Dunn – were cracking jokes, and any of her remarks shouldn’t be taken seriously. It wasn’t something like a speech, she insists – nevertheless, she sticks to her ideas on the subjects raised.
The gist of Vodianova’s post is that the modeling industry is unjustly held responsible for people’s problems with their shape and body. She writes that it makes her incensed to see how models are constantly under fire for setting criteria of personal image and beauty which leads to people developing eating disorders. And all the time there are others who ought to take the blame for it – for one, the food industry that keeps playing up food and tasty goodies. It looks, she goes on, as if the whole world’s economy battens on food, books on how to eat, pills, beauty products, and then on searching for clothes to make one seem slimmer.
Vodianova, “a bad client” for economy, reminds that her family used to be too poor to have three meals a day, so she stands for doing more and eating less and supports the “eat to survive” way of living. In order to prove her point she puts forward her assumption that anorexia and bulimia problems should be rare in China, Russia and African countries.
While impoverishment can hardly qualify as an answer to the eating disorders problem, we are happy to have the model’s opinion on the matter, even if it doesn’t get us any nearer to gaining healthy eating habits.
