A lot of people complain (rightfully so) about the emaciated women on covers of magazines, runways, catalogs and AD campaigns-but aside from the obvious "beauty in youth" notion, there's actually an explanation.
Let's say you're a designer and you want a certain sort of silk, it's $32/yard wholesale and you need to buy 100yds. You first make a sample of a dress out of this fabric and the sample ends up taking 3 yds of fabric. Doing the math you can produce around 30 dresses, assuming they are all going to be the same size. When designers are on a budget they need to make smaller amounts and smaller sizes-unfortunate but true.
Designers, especially young or new ones don't have enough capital to make size runs of 0-24, also the stores that really hike up the prices (giving them more money to create next years collections) don't carry anything higher than 12. It's a little bit of a "what came first" scenario but the bottom line is that it is cost affective to make the first sample (the one you see down the runway) small.
Now business wise, designers like to choose models to "represent" their brand, thus that model becomes the "face" of the brand. That's why those little models get the AD campaigns, they are the face of Chanel or Dior etc.
I'm not giving an excuse to designers-it's actually more cost effective to make clothes for the masses-but, fashion, quite often is about fantasy and escapism, not practicality and mass production.
If the J.Crews and Gaps of the world would just vary their models (like the Dove AD campaign shown above), show what the clothes look like on a size 10 or maybe on a size 4 45 year old, they could stay relevant and make money in a time when I don't even want to buy new socks.
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