Friday 21 September 2007

Jen Hunter loses battle against fashion industry

Jen Hunter won the hearts of the British public in the television series 'Make Me A Supermodel' when she refused to lose weight for the judges even after constant pressure to do so.

Miss Hunter, who is 5ft 11in and weighs 11 stone was shocked by judges, including model Rachel Hunter, who described her as 'fat, lazy and greedy' while competing in the 2006 reality show.

Despite being voted the leading female by the public, Jen was not given a contract by chosen agency Select, who instead booked sub-zero Marianne Berglund - known as the 'walking skeleton'.

Cape Management, a mainstream agency who were impressed by her attitude and the impression she had on the public then stepped in to offer Miss Hunter work - the first size 12 on their books.

A happy ending? Unfortunately not.

Repeated knock-backs at catwalk castings have forced Jen to quit the mainstream agency to join one for plus size women - despite being below the average size.

Jen said: 'I'm grateful to the Cape Model agency for taking me on when other agencies wouldn't. They secured me some great contracts. However, they are a mainstream agency and when I went into castings I saw very few size 12 models and came up against the same old prejudice. I just didn't feel comfortable so I decided to change to Excel Models which is a plus size agency.'

Her decision to quit the agency proves yet again that the sector has some real work to do in order to accurately reflect the UK population. Despite increasing pressure to ban size-zero models for creating a bad impression for younger women, the average model size is still a size six to eight. In contrast to the average size of the UK woman, which is between a 14 to 16. Although models have always been thinner than average, 25 years ago the size difference was 8% compared to a current 23%, a very unrealistic figure.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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