In honor of New York Fashion Week, ModCloth’s co-founder Susan Gregg Koger confronted the fashion industry with a letter about its skewed viewpoint. The online fashion company that uses independent designers and a wide assortment of vintage and unique pieces wants to remind their customers, and ladies everywhere, that fashion should instill confidence. “I look out, and it seems less about helping people find fashion they love to wear, and more about convincing them that they need to conform to one eerily consistent standard of beauty. A standard built on highly altered and often unrealistic images,” says Koger.
ModCloth presented a “Truth in Fashion” report recently that surveyed over 1,500 women in the United States. The report showed that 68% of women were more likely to support a company that uses models of varying sizes, and only 13% of women believe that “real women” are accurately portrayed in the fashion industry.
Along with this survey, ModCloth has signed a “Truth in Advertising Heroes Pledge” which states that ModCloth will “do [their] best not to change the shape, size, proportion, color and/or remove/enhance the physical features of people in [their] post-production.” If anything is changed ModCloth must label it so. The site also links to a Change.org petition to support the Truth in Advertising Act.
Now, ModCloth is running an open call campaign for every woman to tell their story of what fashion means to them. If you want to be involved, post a selfie with the hashtag #fashiontruth to tell your story of how the fashion world can become more inclusive and show off real ladies of every shape, size, and ethnicity.
There is hope that this campaign will urge other fashion companies to step up, make some changes, and hopefully even sign the “Truth in Advertising Pledge” as well.
Koger says, “The message we hear time and again is that only ‘aspirational’ imagery sells, and over time, the industry has converged on a very narrow definition of the word. A definition that makes many women and girls feel like they are not and cannot ever be good enough.”
Photos c/o ModCloth blog, Susan’s Letter, and ModCloth.com.
