At the height of fashion week in Milan, Italy this week a billboard showing the naked 68-pound anorexic French actress Isabelle Caro is causing a visual shock. The campaign is creating a stir in the fashion industry, but designers take issue with the advertisement -- one that links the disease to the fashion industry.
Oliviero Toscani, famous for his controversial Benetton campaigns, created the images for No-Lita - No Anorexia.
Credit: NoLita
There should be little question as to the power of the image to construct imagined and ideal realities. The truth, however, is that the fashion industry with its emphasis on "thinness" as an ideal for young women must come to terms with its role in creating a cultural pathology that may lead to disease and death. In the No Anorexia campaign, the visual shock that comes with the explicitness of the photographs signifies an attempt to bring into focus a culture of consumption and objectification.
Susie Orbach in her blog comments:
Bodies today are rarely where we live from. They become our production. Our personal statement about who we are. We work on them. We spend a fortune on them. We decorate, transform and manipulate them. Cosmetic surgery is worth $14 billion this year, and expected to increase by a $1 billion for next. The number of girls and women (and increasingly men) who suffer with severe eating and body difficulties, sometimes obvious like bulimia and obesity, sometimes hidden in bulimia or binge eating, is rising and reaching into earlier and earlier age groups.