'Real' women feature in reformed magazine

Brigitte Magazine 02 January 2010 issue. Photo / Supplied

Normally she teaches history at a Hamburg grammar school, but elaborately made up to look like Marlene Dietrich and wearing a 480 ($950) silk dress, Sybille Zschaber was yesterday all over the fashion pages of Germany's most popular women's magazine as it began its ban on professional models.

The 29-year-old blonde teacher was among a cast of "normal women" selected by the mass circulation middle-market Brigitte to pose for its January fashion feature after an editorial pledge by the magazine to keep controversial size-zero models off its pages.

Andreas Lebert, editor of the 700,000-circulation magazine, announced the ban in October after receiving letters from hundreds of readers who complained that they had no connection with the models shown in the magazine and that they no longer wanted to see "protruding bones".

He claimed that the models Brigitte used on its fashion pages were so skinny that editors had to fatten them up using Photoshop software.

"This is disturbing and perverse and what has it got to do with our real readers?" he asked. Brigitte declared that it would in future invite "normal women" to feature as models on its pages.

"It is not a question of them suddenly becoming models," Lebert said yesterday. "They simply step out of their normal lives for a moment and present fashion for us as personalities," he insisted.

The January edition, which went on sale throughout Germany at the weekend, is the first to do so without professional models, although these still appear in advertisements.

The women photographed for its fashion feature pages are a deliberately mixed bunch, including a 21-year-old hotel receptionist, a 28-year-old restaurant owner, a 45-year-old artist and a 21-year-old economics student. The magazine says it pays its amateurs professional rates.

The campaign has already provoked controversy. Karl Lagerfeld, the veteran German fashion guru, has described those who criticise skinny models as "fat, chip-eating mummies" and claims that much of the objection to them is sheer jealousy.

- INDEPENDENT