Last week, Farmers posted a photo on their Facebook page to promote dresses from the new Andrea Moore collection. The models were twins and 21 year old students at Auckland University students.
Unfortunately, as internet commentators are want to do, the post had a bunch of negative comments calling the models all sorts of cruel things for being too skinny and claiming that the image promoted anorexia.
In a perfectly logical move, Farmers took the photos down. They’re a business, and they obviously didn’t want to be at the centre of social media backlash. They posted a pretty generic non-apology saying “We in no way meant to promote an image for women in NZ to follow that could be regarded as unhealthy.” A spokesperson for Farmers did confirm that they intend to work with the models in question going forward.
And that would have been all, but for the fact that Newshub decided that people being dicks on the internet is apparently a valid news story, and suddenly two women who had never asked to be thrown into the middle of a body image controversy were all over the national media.
The first article to go up was titled “Farmers advert compared to The Walking Dead”, which entirely consisted of harsh insults plucked from the comment section. As soon as Farmers sent a media response, a follow up was published titled “Farmers deletes ‘gaunt and unhealthy’ model photo.”
Just off that headline alone, there’s some pretty shitty journalism going on. The title of that second article would appear to imply that a spokesperson for Farmers or at least some medical professional qualified to determine someone as ‘unhealthy’ was being quoted. It wasn’t, it was just some random angry internet stranger.
Newshub collected and collated the most creative and brutal comments, and published them on their hugely influential website, thereby giving the statements legitimacy but nowhere either explicitly or implicitly criticising those who made them.
However, at least Newshub refrained from naming names. Unfortunately, less than a day later Stuff.co.nz jumped on the bandwagon and released a near-identical article, except for the fact that it published the two models' names. Two women that had done absolutely nothing to deserve these headlines but dare to appear in photos while being thin.
The designer who commissioned the photo shoot was eager to come to the models' defense, calling them “healthy, fun models… they have a great sense of who they are and what they want to achieve in life. We love working with them because of their sense of self-worth and uniqueness.” The designer described the women as being “most upset by the whole thing.” According to the brand, the campaign was about “preppy grunge, not promoting unhealthy body types or anything else.”
Colin Mathura-Jeffree (NZ’s Next Top Model) got pretty barred up, saying “It seems alright to attack thin people for being thin… These girls, it’s just their body type.” As someone who has known the models in question since we were in year 9, I can personally attest that they have always been naturally thin and it is an extremely unfair assumption that their body type is the result of an eating disorder. To accuse someone of anorexia is to brand them as mentally ill without a shred of proof.
The women themselves did not wish to comment or have their names appear in the media, and expressed a hope that the whole thing would blow over soon, though their agency did confirm that they “received a lot of support from their peers.”
In an opinion piece from March this year, Newshub described online commenters who had called Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett a "pig" as “disgusting”, “hugely unkind” and “childish”. That they would then turn around be complicit in promoting the ugly ridicule of two women who dare to be thin is not only shameful, it’s highly hypocritical.