Worldwide clothing store, Topshop, has recently been receiving an arguably large amount of harsh comments from those of the public.
Laura Kate Berry, a women who resides near Bristol, England, noticed that the mannequins in her local Topshop where not to what anyone should expect. Berry took a photograph of the mannequin and decided to share it to Topshops’s public Facebook page, where she sparked an uproar in the community.
The picture Berry took, which can be seen above, is a very good example of how skinny these mannequins actually are. Berry, who is dictated as being furious at the time, included a huge public message to Topshop along with the above photo, Berry went on to write, “We come in all shapes and sizes. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being the size you naturally are,” going on to describing herself as a U.K. size 10/12. “Having said that, this mannequin is quite frankly ridiculously shaped. Young women aspire to the somewhat cult image your store offers.”, Berry also describes the mannequins as being “ridiculously tiny” and “unrealistic.”
The comment did not go unnoticed, she managed to rack up hundreds of shares as well as thousands more in views, the comment also gained a response from the British Fashion Retailer. Topshop also decided to respond, announcing that they would stop purchasing these types of mannequins to avoid any future complaints. However, it is still unclear whether Topshop will change its purchasing routine for all of its stores.
“As the mannequins are solid fibreglass, their form needs to be of certain dimensions to allow clothing to be put on and removed easily; this is therefore not meant to be a representation of the average female body,” Topshop replied in a statement.
The Girlscouts of the USA convicted a nationwide survey in 2010, asking teenage girls whether they feel pressured into being skinny by the media/industry outlets, the results where shocking! – 90% of all the teenage girls who were surveyed stated that they feel pressured. A majority of the teens who were asked, also agreed that the fashion industry images their bodies to be too “skinny”, “unhealthy” and “unrealistic” – A mannequin is of course used to show off what clothes would look like on a ‘realistic’ person, these mannequins do not achieve this goal.
Around 75% of the girls who were surveyed also stated that they would be more likely to purchase clothes from a store that advertises them with more realistic looking mannequins. Research carried out at Cambridge university in 2012 also returned with similar results, women are more likely to buy clothes when they’re displayed on models that more closely represent their own size.
This is not the first time that Topshop has been accused of using super-skinny sized mannequins, during late 2014, another woman named Becky Hopper shared an image of her friend, who is a U.K size 8/10, comparing her leg to one of these super-skinny mannequins. Hopper’s image also gathered a lot of attention, gaining over 10,000 retweets and again, even more in views.
As you can see in Hopper’s image above, there is a very clear difference between the two leg sizes, the right being very unrealistic and a bad example to youths, which the above statistics allege that teens are taken this image (on the right) as being “pressuring”.
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Slenderman’s daughter is doing well for herself, modeling and all.
Being a skinny girl myself, I find this sort of thing insulting. This article is basically telling me that my body is unrealistic. They make it sound like being skinny is a bad thing.