Last year, Australia’s Next Top Model crowned a size 10 contestant the winner. But this season, contestant Alison Boxer, a 16-year-old from Melbourne, says she was told to slim down just a week into filming. She weighed about 120 pounds (55 kilograms) at the time.
“It was a shock to the system to be told I needed to lose weight,” she said.
“At home a lot of people say I’m too skinny. I was 50kg at one stage, which I thought was a bit scary.
“So I was coming from a place where people were telling me to gain weight, to now people saying I should lose weight.”
She says she was asked to lose “centimeters from her thighs.” A scout for the show said that “at the end of the day you have to be tall and skinny to be a model.”
“Hopefully, we have a range of body shapes, faces and personalities, but tall and slim is what works,” she said.
And how does that provide a range in body shapes? Boxer — and remember she is 16 — said she has never tried to lose weight, but now goes to the gym twice a day and watches her diet. What’s worse is that the television network actually admitted they asked Alison to lose the weight, only they claim they asked her to lose centimeters from her waist, not hips and thighs. But this is a rather sick way to drum up publicity for the show, which starts airing in July.
So it’s great that Crystal Renn just walked the Chanel resort show, but super-skinny models still seem to be what the industry wants more than anything. Casting Renn in a fashion show just distracts from how thin the other models are.
Australia’s Next Top Model tells contestant she’s too fat [news.com.au]
