Fashion Shows: Do's and Don'ts
The first time I watched America’s Next Top Model I was ten years old. My then very moldable mind tucked away almost all memories of competition winners, meme-worthy fight scenes and judges panels— but what I won’t forget is how ashamed I felt about my body in comparison to the contestants I saw through my screen.
The show was released in 2003, so the bar was set very low in the first place. Even though it debuted over 18 years ago, the harmful aspects of fashion shows similar to ANTM continue to perpetuate dangerous stereotypes, tokenism, and overt misrepresentation of queerness, racial identity, and positive body image.
The conversation around misrepresentation in the media is nothing new, and I’d be remiss to ignore the progress made in the fashion industry to celebrate bodies, orientations, and identities of all sorts. But representation in shows like ANTM, Project Runway, and Netflix’s new fashion competition show Next In Fashion seems unfathomably performative and often very poorly executed.
I am and always have been let down by the obvious (and almost hard to watch) misrepresentation of plus-sized, queer, or non-white contestants on ANTM. In 2011, Isis King, a transgender model, was eliminated from season ten. Throughout the arguably short duration of King’s time, she was forced to withstand transphobic comments from judges, other models, and producers. Not only did the panel continually ask her invasive questions about her identity and past, but King endured a handful of blatantly transphobic comments; all grounded in the gut-wrenchingly common perception of her being that she was “not a ‘real’ woman.”
Although the show has made strides in representation since— with Holland’s Next Top Model crowning the franchise’s first-ever trans model as its 2015 winner — the lack of understanding around an entity as important as gender identity leads me to see the show as nothing but a perpetuated misrepresentation of misunderstood minority groups.
On the same coin, although King’s androgynous style and physical attributes were frowned upon and dissected, bringing ‘masculinity or ‘fluidity’ into the photoshoots of her counter-part cishet contestants was celebrated and highlighted, as it continues to be in the fashion industry. It’s as though representation sounds and looks good on paper, but is approached with little accuracy or genuine celebration of difference when put into practice.
Airing just a year after ANTM, Project Runway aired, continuing the modeling contestants I’d seen before: thin, often white, tall, and overtly feminine. I’ll admit that I was almost too quick to watch Tim and Heidi host the show’s reboot Making the Cut when it aired in early 2020, but unsurprised to say I was disappointed with the accuracy in which they used to portray the ‘diverse’ contestants or models that joined. Although the reboot includes plus-sized models — a stark comparison to the show’s lack of consistent body representation— and therefore has made some type of evolutionary progression towards betterness, the fact that more than 15 years had to pass for producers and casting agents to even consider using a “different” type of model leads me to believe that this “representation” is nothing but an answer to societal pressure and corporate performative wokeness.
Art by Rebekah Czukoski
Often, any model or contestant of televised fashion shows that presents other than the usual aforementioned archetype morphs into some sort of tokenism defined by those ‘different’ characteristics. Although Netflix’s newest competition Next In Fashion does cast an array of contestants from different backgrounds, countries, orientations, and identities, the aura of celebrating differences, instead of beating them into the ground and allowing them to define everything about the individual, is what makes these issues worth mentioning.
NIF features a number of queer contestants, yet being queer seems to make up their entire character arc. Likewise, if a contestant is from a different country, that’s all the show frames their technique, creative characteristics, and storyline around. And although each challenge within the show features a variety of model sizes that the designers adapt to, the conversation around body expectations in the fashion industry is completely ignored and never elaborated upon— meaning that simply showing bigger bodies is representation enough for television networks.
The industry at large and its media depiction to the general public, even having evolved exponentially within the last fifteen years, feels tired and inaccurate. We cannot continue to take “any type of representation as good representation” because of the dangerous perpetuation of misinformation and harmful ideals surrounding marginalized subgroups.
We find ourselves in this divide of being happy to see some sort of representation and being upset with the inaccuracies within our own identities that are being broadcasted. Until fashion shows begin effectively and accurately depicting and tackling real-life issues, we will find ourselves stuck in a cycle of misinformation and harm.