Editorial: Model too old at 21? Think again

Saphira Tuffery. Photo / True Colours

The idea that beauty is more than skin-deep has not escaped Douglas Watson.

The Edinburgh civil servant this week married Elaine Davidson, whose 7000 body piercings 192 of them on her face have earned her the title of the world's most-pierced woman. (What does the world's most pierced man look like, one wonders).

Many might recoil at the sight of a woman who resembles a statue in a Hindu ceremonial parade, but Watson doesn't care: People see the piercings, but I see the amazing personality underneath, he says.

Such logic would completely escape the folks at the Melbourne model agency who told ex-Aucklander Saphira Tuffery that she, at 21, was too old to be considering a career as a model.

As our story today reveals, Tuffery is plainly too tough to stand for this kind of rejection. She immediately quit her day job to concentrate on her dream and, within a month, landed a contract for a campaign whose target market, China, amounts to 20 per cent of the world's population.

Tuffery's story is more than a testament to her determination. It is also a well-deserved slap in the face for an industry that unconscionably trades in notions of female beauty that are unrealistic and damaging to women's self-image, and often their health as well.

By any reasonable judgement, Tuffery is a very good-looking young woman. But she is neither borderline anorexic nor barely post-pubescent, two qualities that seem to be compulsory for careers in modelling these days.

The fashion business depends on creating anxiety in its consumers by underlining the truth of Wallis Simpson's pronouncement that a woman can never be too rich or too thin. Campaigns that seek to highlight the beauty in "normal" women are rare and honourable exceptions.

There is faint hope that Tuffery's success will inspire a change of heart in the fashion world that would see women in advertising and modelling who do not look like sci-fi scarecrows.

But it could persuade women to take a stand, perhaps by boycotting products whose advertising employs such grotesque imagery - and encouraging their friends to do the same.