by Mia Freedman
How ironic that the cover of this issue was retouched half to death. The model in the shot I chose was rather masculine looking and we shaped her jaw to make her look less like a transvestite. I also changed the colour of her dress. None of this struck me as remotely hypocritical at the time, although in hindsight I’m mortified. While I recognised the impact wall-to-wall skinny models could have on a reader’s psyche, details of face, hair and dress colour didn’t worry me. In the years to come, I would regularly alter the cover image in a bid to make it as appealing as possible—although I never made cover models thinner. In fact, I often fattened them up.
The next thing I did was ban diets. I thought I was being terribly brave. A maverick even. Women’s magazines had always survived on a diet of diets. So I was slightly deflated when my grand gesture went unnoticed. No one really cared. Or more to the point, no one was going to buy a magazine because of something I’d taken out of it. Diets had never been a huge feature of Cosmo. It was far less of a body-focused magazine than Cleo whose heritage was all about the beach and that Aussie outdoor sexiness.
I slept better at night knowing I’d abolished crash diets from Cosmo but if I wanted to make a difference—to women or to circulation—I needed to be proactive about promoting a more positive body image. Articles urging women to ‘Love Your Body!’ just weren’t going to cut it. I’d always found those kinds of stories tokenistic, hypocritical and condescending, especially since they were invariably sandwiched between pages of size six Amazons and usually illustrated with a skinny model jumping in the air.
My first significant step into new territory came after I picked up an issue of UK Vogue. They’d published a fashion shoot that had attracted quite a lot of media attention. The model was an art student who’d been scouted by a fashion photographer at McDonald’s. She was about size sixteen to eighteen and the pictures were striking.
I won’t pretend I was the first to feature a larger model in an Australian magazine. Others had before, usually once a year in a token ‘Big Girl’ story designed to generate some ad revenue from plus-size fashion labels. Unfortunately, it seemed most magazine editors thought there was only one acceptable way to shoot a model larger than a size eight: drape her in ugly cardigans, sensible shoes and shapeless separates.
The UK Vogue shoot was a revelation because the model was portrayed as a sexy woman. The clothes were tight—black dresses mostly—and the hair and make-up was vampy. It was the first time I had seen a larger model do sexy. She was someone to aspire to instead of someone to pity.
You certainly couldn’t just flick past these pages on your way to the standard slimline fashion stories. These images demanded your attention. And because they were so different to anything else in the magazine—and anything else in any other magazine I’d ever seen—they were a visual jolt in an endless sea of skinny. As a reader I knew this was rare and unexpected as you flicked through the pages. As a feminist I felt it was a wonderful thing for women.
And as an editor? Well, I’d love to say I always knew featuring larger women in Cosmo would lead to higher sales. But I didn’t. I hoped it would but I wasn’t sure. What I did know was that it would start people talking. And this was my first priority.
In the early nineties, Cosmo and Cleo had lost their edge. Publishing a sealed section was no longer daring, it was predictable. All the allegedly risqué sex advice, angst and insecurity upon which the magazines had traded so successfully had started to feel old school. Everyone knew what they were getting when they picked up Cleo or Cosmo and that was not conducive to repeat sales, let alone new ones. I wanted Cosmo to be surprising. Unexpected.
I was looking for the ‘pass-around factor’. Something that would make the reader say to a friend, ‘Hey, look at this.’ I wanted to generate new buzz around an established brand that was decades old. This drove me creatively for those first few years as I tried desperately to jolt people out of the idea that Cosmo was tired and formulaic.
So I ripped off the UK Vogue story immediately and unashamedly I found a larger model through an agency called, appropriately, Big Gals, because they were the only ones who had larger models on their books. I handed my fashion editor a copy of the Vogue story and instructed her to dress the model in similar sexy clothes, including one shot in lingerie.
Was this plagiarism? Stealing someone else’s intellectual property? Staggeringly unoriginal? I didn’t care. My job was to make Australian Cosmo the best magazine I could and if that meant ‘borrowing’ ideas, well, I could live with that. An editor once told me ‘There’s no copyright on ideas’ and I’ve never forgotten that. Provided you did your own version, I saw nothing wrong with being ‘inspired’ by other sources. Most Cosmo readers didn’t have access to foreign magazines so what we were doing, in effect, was cherry-picking some of the best ideas in the world and reinventing them locally.
Editors get many of their best ideas from other magazines. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. One of my favourite parts of the job was being paid to read magazines. Hundreds of them every month. To stay on top of what was going on in Australia and overseas, Cosmo subscribed to around sixty titles, some monthly and some weekly, which meant I had at least 150 magazines plop into my in-tray each month. That’s a lot of ‘inspiration’.
I think it would be fair to say there’s not an editor alive who’s never given a staff member a copy of another magazine’s story and said, ‘Here, do this.’ What the editor means, of course, is ‘Do your own version of this’, but more than one editor has been caught out by a writer who took her instructions to mean ‘Plagiarise this’—which she certainly didn’t intend the writer to do.
Anyway, the big-girl shoot hit a roadblock almost instantly. ‘No one wants to give me clothes,’ announced my fashion editor, slightly smugly, one afternoon.
‘What do you mean? Don’t they have clothes big enough?’
‘Oh no, that’s not it; they all go up to size sixteen or bigger,’ she replied. ‘They just don’t want their labels appearing on a large model in Cosmo. Or anywhere in the media.’
I was stunned. ‘So they’re happy to take money from size-sixteen customers but they want their public face to be a size-eight one.’
‘Yep,’ she nodded. ‘And did I tell you that the photographer I want to use has finally agreed to do it? But he doesn’t want his name on the story.’
Unbelievable. Eventually, the story went ahead and the uncredited photos turned out beautifully. My boss wasn’t sure that it was very Cosmo but she let me do it. I called the story something unintentionally condescending like ‘Modern Curves’ and was very proud of the result.
Encouraged by the positive reader reaction when the issue came out, I gaily made plans for more big-girl shoots. My fashion editor was horrified and told me so. At length. Fashion editors are not bad people, they are just pure aesthetes. They don’t really see models as people; they see them literally as coat hangers. And coat hangers are best without padding because those pesky female lumps, bumps and curves ‘spoil the line’. That’s the exact phrase fashion people use. I’ve heard it a hundred times. They are oblivious to how a woman might feel about herself when she looks at a photo of a six-foot-tall, size-zero, sixteen-year-old model and automatically compares the image with her own body.
By asking my fashion team to shoot bigger models, I was making their jobs much harder. For one thing, there were very few large models to choose from. Modelling is generally not high on a list of jobs you’d choose for its security or stable income, even if you are as skinny as a stalk of asparagus. Hardly any Australian models of any size are able to make a full-time living from modelling.
The editorial day rate for a model working for a magazine—whether she’s shooting a fashion story or even a cover—is $190 per day or $120 for a half day. From this, the model has to pay twenty per cent to her agent, leaving her with about $150 for a long day’s work. Out of this money she must also spend a significant amount on maintenance—haircuts and colour, man
icures and pedicures, facials and fake tans.
The work itself can be hard. Not compared to, say, being down a mineshaft, admittedly, but it’s not as absolutely fabulous as you might imagine.
The average day on an editorial shoot starts at 5 am for a weather check and doesn’t finish until you lose light at the end of the day—even later if you’re shooting in a studio. Because of long magazine lead times, magazines shoot bikinis in July and winter coats in December. A model may be sent home unpaid if she turns up with pimples or doesn’t fit into the clothes. She’ll have to hold uncomfortable positions for hours, and to make the clothes look better they’ll probably be pinned and held together with bulldog clips down the back. All for less than fifteen dollars an hour.
The real bucks only kick in for advertising jobs when a model’s day rate can be anything from $500 to $5000. Even $10,000 if you’re ‘super’. But there aren’t very many of those jobs. Not nearly enough for all the girls who call themselves models.
The market for larger models is even smaller and more specialised. The only advertising work available is for plus-size fashion labels—of which, in Australia, there aren’t many. Sadly, no campaigns for food products or cosmetic products are ever fronted by models larger than size ten because advertisers believe that women won’t buy products if they see them on non-skinny models. I’d be shocked to meet even one Australian plus-sized model who could support herself purely from modelling.
If clothes and models weren’t hard enough to find, photographers are notoriously negative about shooting pictures of bigger girls, as Cosmo’s fashion shoot had proved. They believe it’s simply not cool. Even make-up artists have been known to ask for their credits to be removed when the photos are published.
Still, I persevered, ignoring the eye-rolling from some of my staff who thought I was insane for being so enthusiastic about shooting bigger models.
But the images in the fashion stories weren’t the only thing I had to change. I wanted Cosmo to feature more articles about body image and to become a strong voice of advocacy for non-model-sized women. This was new territory and straight away I stumbled. My intentions were good but the way I went about executing them was clumsy.
So eager was I to atone for the past sins of magazines like Cosmo in featuring only skinny models, I went too far the other way. I accidentally started skinny bashing.
Intros to fashion stories and features enthused that ‘real women have curves’ and declared ‘men prefer some meat on your bones’. We made many references to skinny vs ‘normal-sized’ bodies. Big mistake. Don’t piss off the skinny chicks. Dozens of furious letters arrived from thin women saying how insulted they were at the implication they weren’t ‘real women’ because they had no curves. Skinny can be normal too, they harrumphed.
In my haste to make some women feel better about themselves, I’d made other women feel lousy. So I quickly modified my approach. All sizes could be sexy, Cosmo now preached. Diversity was something to be celebrated. ‘Real women’ came in all shapes and sizes and no one type of woman was better or worse than any other. ‘Healthy’ was a better pursuit than ‘skinny’.
After about a year the regular inclusion of larger models in fashion shoots was being well received and had begun to generate the buzz I’d hoped for. Sales were starting to climb. But we still weren’t reflecting enough diversity on the pages for my liking. Frustratingly, there was, and still is, a big hole in the modelling market for girls who are size ten to sixteen. The models represented by major agencies are overwhelmingly sizes six to eight. Meanwhile, plus-sized models are usually around size sixteen. Given that the average Australian woman tends to hover around size fourteen, this hole in the market is rather ridiculous, since it covers the majority of the Cosmo demographic.
So after a few months, I realised I had to broaden my strategy. As a reader, I’d always loved looking at images of ‘real women’ in magazines—that is, women who weren’t models. So we started shooting lots of them. We found them in the street and via callouts in the magazine. We shot them in lingerie and swimsuits in line-ups that preceded the famous Dove ‘real women’ campaign by several years but looked virtually identical.
Perhaps Dove ripped us off? Oh well. That would be karma. There’s no copyright on ideas.
There was no body type, shape, size or nationality we didn’t shoot. If you wanted to be in Cosmo and could get yourself to Sydney to be photographed, you could appear in the magazine. No problem.
We still used professional models in fashion shoots in most issues but we always balanced this with plenty of diversity elsewhere. So you could pretty much be guaranteed to see a body that looked like your own somewhere when you flicked through the magazine.
Gradually, I formalised this into Cosmo’s Body Love policy. ‘Cosmo will guarantee that we’ll feature women size six to sixteen every single month.’
I felt passionately that this was the right thing to do from a socially responsible point of view, but to me it also made business sense. I knew from experience that flicking through a magazine filled with models who looked nothing like me left me feeling hopelessly inadequate. Fat, short and ugly. I didn’t want my readers to feel that way after reading Cosmo because I genuinely didn’t believe it would make them want to buy the next issue. Why would they? For more punishment?
When they’re asked about why they don’t use larger models in their magazines, I often hear editors claim one of two things. Usually, they ramble on about ‘aspiration and fantasy’, claiming that a magazine is meant to be about glamour and not real life. Frankly, this is insulting. Who said only skinny white woman can be aspirational and glamorous? Sometimes they’ll say that ‘Women don’t want to see bigger women—we’re our own worst enemies.’ Again, bullshit.
How can they possibly know what women do or don’t want when they serve them the same diet of tall, skinny, white models month after month with little alternative?
For the record, when Cosmo began to feature women of different shapes, sizes and skin colours throughout every issue of the magazine, sales went up. Readership went up. And advertising revenue went up. Dramatically. It was my proudest career achievement and a pie in the face to anyone who said it couldn’t—or shouldn’t—be done.
THE BIG BABY FREAK-OUT
Voicemail to Jen from me:
‘Ugh. I feel like shit. How is it possible that I felt fine yesterday and today I feel like a hundred-year-old swamp creature? Everyone who warned me that the last four weeks of this pregnancy would be tough was right. Anyway, thanks so much for organising the baby shower yesterday. Thank God I hadn’t yet hit the wall and could actually enjoy it.’
Like so many first-time mums, I’d been to birth classes with my partner and read seven hundred books about pregnancy and birth but knew approximately nothing about What Happens Next. A couple of weeks before my due date, I realised there was a small gap in my knowledge. Namely, WHAT THE HELL YOU DO WITH A BABY.
All the classes and books and magazines know this will happen to you so they all sneak in a token amount of info at the end to cover the basics of that first six weeks.
Of course I’d resolutely ignored all of it. Baby? What baby? I wasn’t having a baby. I was having a pregnancy and then I was having a birth.
One night, at about week thirty-eight and counting, I sat in my new feeding chair and dared to turn to the ‘Afterwards’ chapter in What To Expect When You’re Expecting.
I became upset very quickly.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Jason.
‘I don’t understand any of this!’ I wailed.
‘What do you mean? What don’t you understand?’ he asked carefully, like a hostage negotiator talking to a crazed gunman.
‘This BABY STUFF! All about feeding and sleeping and changing nappies and something called swallowing or swaddling or something!’
I was working my way towards hysteria, rocking faster in my chair.’ It’s like a whole other language I don’t understand!’
/> Jason took a breath. ‘But you didn’t understand pregnancy at first and you learned about that and now you could do a whole PowerPoint presentation on the subject.’
‘This is DIFFERENT! This involves an actual person OUTSIDE MY BODY and if I don’t care for it properly IT MIGHT DIE!’
‘Cup of tea?’
He retreated from the crazy lady into the safety of the kitchen to find emergency chocolate, momentarily diverting me with a king-size Crunchie. A few bites and I was ready to resume my rant. Slightly calmer but still impassioned.
‘It’s like my brain is FULL. Everything I’ve had to learn about pregnancy and birth has taken up every available brain cell and there are none left to learn anything about what to do with an ACTUAL BABY.’
I was overwhelmed. And scared. I didn’t like doing new things unless I knew I would be really good at them. A mature approach to life that would no doubt be a terrific lesson to pass on to my future child. Once I worked out how to change its nappy.
I’d not had any exposure to babies in my life. I had no younger siblings or cousins. No nieces or nephews. No godchildren. And my close friends were years away from having babies. They were still dancing on tables in nightclubs and dating inappropriate men.
At my baby shower, one girl who’d had a baby five weeks earlier brought him along and there was that awful moment I always dread when a mother asks, ‘Would you like to hold him?’
My head screamed ‘NO! I would not! I don’t know how! He will cry!’ My crap maternal skills will be on public display and everyone will shake their heads and take their presents back and then call DOCS to warn them about the impending danger to my unborn child!