Post by DTU - Technical University of Denmark

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹 𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝟮𝟱 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀! Postdoc Louis Boucherie and his team from DTU Compute have analysed nearly 800,000 model appearances dating back to 2000. The study is not about what bodies should look like, but about the bodies the fashion industry chooses to show. The fashion industry has run many diversity campaigns, and models have become more diverse in terms of skin tone and hair colour. But when it comes to body shape, the typical model's body looks much the same as it did 25 years ago. The team also compared the bodies of US female models with those of US women using Relative Fat Mass, a measure of body fat percentage. Models average around 18%, while women of the same age average 38%. This means that, according to the study, the two groups barely overlap. The study also shows that models labelled “plus-size” by the industry are still, on average, smaller than the average US woman. The researchers found that non-white models are 4.5 times more likely to be represented as plus-size. According to the study, this suggests that diversity is often concentrated in a limited number of model profiles, rather than broadening representation across the industry. After 25 years of diversity campaigns, the gap between bodies shown in fashion and bodies in the wider population remains.

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