Model's Rights
WWP is the first to admit a hatred of models. Most are everything I will never be (read: tall) and their career involves wearing dresses worth more than my life savings. Yet in the spirit of advent, perhaps it is important to see the models as more than deities of thinspo and envy, and realise that they are humans with rights. More importantly, they are usually children with rights.
Back in February, the model Sara Ziff launched the Model Alliance, a quasi-union that has produced its own 'Models' Bill of Rights.' Its aims are to undercut industry-level notions that forced nudity, child exploitation, sexual abuse and anorexia are acceptable. Now, why this story escaped WWP's radar can either say a lot about my journalistic skills circa February 2012 (apparently tragic as even the Mail Online covered it) or the conscious ignorance of the campaign by the public and media. For as Ziff herself succinctly put it, most 'probably see the industry as a privilege.' And so, incredibly, this collective jealousy has excused an entire industry's law-breaking shenanigans.
It does beg the question though, as to why one career class must instigate their own bill of rights - unless I skipped over that clause in all my sales assistant contracts. Unpaid child labour for instance must surely be covered in some form of legislation. The problem appears to be the self-circulating cycle of the modelling world; models of around the age of 14 are employed, and when the wretched exploitation of the industry comes hurtling their way they cannot/will not speak out because of their age. Those who grow up and stay on as models become desensitized to this abuse and hence do not protest due to an artificial, constructed ignorance. So as sad as the need for it is, the Model Alliance seems to have the right idea in acting as the middle man between malleable children and money-driven agencies. However to eradicate the problem completely, a dissolution of ignorance is what is needed.
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