America’s Next Top Model—Only Coat Hangers Need Apply

America’s Next Top Model—Only Coat Hangers Need Apply by Roxanne McDonald

As if one of the most beautiful, Anchal, doesn’t have low enough self-esteem, she has to worry (unnecessarily) about weight, too?

It’s a well known given that fashion designers typically need/prefer coat hangers instead of humans for showing off their creations. You can read about it in sociological studies of the fashion and modeling world and you can occasionally hear a top designer admit it.

You can also tap into the numerous studies that emphasize a connection between cut-throat competitiveness and eating disorders, weight issues, and [distorted] body image disorders.

Tyra even has at least one session each season with the girls regarding eating habits, self-esteem, and how to reconcile the lot of issues associated with being a top model.

Ah, but there’s the contradiction. The industry mandates a body that can usually only be had by beating the hell out of healthy, curvaceous frames, but the most gorgeous of women—looking like real women with real tummy protuberances, full breasts, and thicker rumps and thighs—must undergo the lectures, criticisms, and continuous scrutiny that deems them unfit for the modeling world.

I love Tyra. She is of course gorgeous, and she has shape and heft that defies the Kate Mosses and Twiggys of yore. She is sharp, industrious, creative, friendly, and fun. I also love the show, America’s Next Top Model (for reasons I amplified last week), despite how the only round members on the show are the token contestants who last only a couple of weeks and a rational guest judge or two who gets that a weight the body wants to be is the weight to stay at.

But I get so blasted by the hypocrisy—the mixed messages that are about to deprogram and reprogram yet another lovely young woman.

Anchal is absolutely stunning. Breath-taking. In the October 25th episode of America’s Next Top Model, titled “Tyra’s Bringing Sexy or Sleazy Back,” Anchal gets the praise: In the photos taken by Tyra, wherein the girls wear psycho Halloween contact lenses and are done in kind of tintype/daguerreotype meets Max Factor shots, Anchal’s best shot elicits responses that speak to the absolutely perfect symmetry, etc.. And in the first award challenge, when Anchal steps into the room and up on the table at a private dinner hosted by Elite Model Management director Cathy Gould, guests are heard to comment on what a spectacularly stunning face she has.

But what Anchal hears is a guest saying she does not have a “model’s figure”.

Further, what the audience later hears when the judge’s panel is deliberating is the same thing: she (Anchal) is “too pretty” (whatever the hell that means) and does not have a model’s bod.

Pullleeease!

You have been hammering the hell out of this kid to get confidence, show confidence, be confident. You tell her that this week (episode 7) she is all confident but can’t be weak last week and confident next week (not realizing, judges, that this is called emotional progress, duh, that she is growing from the lessons learned thus far), and on top of that you tell her or suggest to her or can be overheard saying to her or about her that she is not good enough for the fashion industry, though, again, “good” is sick-looking, bones protruding, and head light enough to have one falling down or sleeping away the weakness.

Men don’t want to bang bones (last I heard). Take a hint from Fabio, who, when posed with Anchal for a romance cover (with Anchal as Cleopatra in a bare-midriff costume), was all smiles and joy and was heard to say how he couldn’t believe he actually gets paid to work with such beauties.

And look at the other most gorgeous model contestant, Caridee: she aint no Halloween corpse brought back to highlight clothes that only the very rich and very equally skeletal will be able to afford or will get away with wearing on the streets, anyway.

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