Zara - is this the shape women should aspire to be?

Wow. She is very thin. My dd is a size 6 and doesn’t look like that.

I'm not actually interested in exactly where you live, but the fact that you don't know one single thin woman is a shocking indictment of obesity in this country

I agree. I don't know where the OP lives. It is certainly not the case for me.

That model looks perfectly healthy, I'm in my early twenties and know plenty of women closer to her look than the UK average.

What's really wrong with Zara is now instead of a normal size chart with measurements for bust/waist/hips they ask you to put in your age, height and weight for them to determine the size you need, didn't work for me at all and ended up with a whole order of stuff that wouldn't fit.

OP you’re being a bit ridiculous. Of course they are going to use models to sell clothes.

As for bust, as a PP pointed out it is much harder to design for large busts as you need to actually tailor plus every woman is still different. I am guessing you still want to pay sweat shop high st prices for these new mythical clothes?!

What a load of nonsense OP.

Hmmnnnn...I'm touchy because I was certainly as thin as that until I was in my thirties
Me too. At age 18 despite eating the traditional Scottish diet of chips and chocolate I was under 7 stone.

I don’t know any adult women who look even close to that
At work to name just a few , my assistant, who is in her mid 30s . Our department clerk in her eatly 20s . 1 of my partners in her early 50s and plenty of others.

Are you saying that all the women you know have "a good bust"?

I had nothing resembling a "good bust "(except when I was pregnant) until I started putting weight on in my mid 50s.

I actually love that dress and if I wasn’t 7 months pregnant would buy and wear it

But yes am tall with a small bust and skinny arms and legs so this sort of thing is right up my alley.

Weirdly as someone with narrow hips I find Zara to be too bulky for me - I guess grass is always greener when it comes to this sort of thing!

Juells - I am not criticising anyone for being thin. It isn't polite to try and shut people down with that knee-jerk reaction. There are of course naturally thin and very tall women in the general population (I wonder what it is maybe 1 in a thousand? I don't think I've ever met someone with fashion model statistics) but meanwhile nearly all clothing is advertised on remarkably thin models.The teenage girl I know who is modelling and was hospitalised with a stomach complaint ... it was anxiety.

I find more shops now online are showing their clothes on different sized women.

I LOVE it when companies use more representative models.
So for brands aimed at women over 40 I want to see some older women and more women who are size 14-16 and 5'4".
It's 100% unhelpful to me to see what something looks like on a 6ft 16 year old at Size 8. Not aspirational, I don't aspire to be a child or to be 6ft tall which is a good thing as impossible.

What I'm seeing with that dress is a complete lack of cut (my Gran used to be in the garment trade). It's been made as cheaply as possible to what appears to be a t-shirt pattern (as you'd expect given that it's selling for 30 quid), with no attempt to shape the waist or bust. Quite fortuitously for Zara's photographer, it looks good on a small busted model with no curves, which happens to be typical model shape, so that's who they've photographed it on.

In effect what you're seeing is the common phenomenon in the fashion industry of picking a model who would look good in a bin bag - then using that model to attempt to sell bin bags (albeit sequinned ones in this instance).

She doesn't look unhealthily thin, but unfortunately if one has curves, one needs clothes that are properly shaped, and "cutting" is the most challenging and skilled bit of clothes design and whacks the price up. (That's one of the problems with M&S clothes - they're always badly cut and pull under the arms/round the crotch, or baggy over the bottom - they're never quite the same shape you are! Again I think this is why M&S brought Twiggy out of retirement a few years back -a model in their target demographic who can make a bin bag look good).

My teenage daughter is a size 6 and a lot of shops only start at a size 8.

I don't think it's a feminist issue, it's a commercial issue for the shops in question to decide to whom they want to sell clothes.

Apart from underwear models, I honestly can’t think of any mainstream fashion stores that use models with boobage.

Maybe there have been one or two in the last few years as they trumpet inclusivity but clothes hang better on models with tiny or no boobs so they are used 99% of the time

Clothes look better on tall people in general. And if you are slim most people would say clothes look better. Whether the majority of the population looks like this is fairly irrelevant. Zara are there to sell clothes that look good.
I agree it would be nice to see some normal looking models but they like don’t sell as much.

I'm a size 14, aged 43, and Zara large, or size 14, fits me perfectly. Bra size is 34E so I hardly lack curves.

What I do object to is their size guide asks you to put your weight in. I find this bears no relationship to size at all.

and the UK is typically NOT pipecleaner thin you know?

Let's think of some insults for fat people now.

“Smaller boobs seem to be de rigour”

About bloody time.

I once read on MN that all men like big boobs.

I think the Zara model looks great. In my teens I was skinny. My teenage sons are very skinny and are very self conscious about it.

She looks fine to me. Slim, yes, but her legs look normal and strong and she does not appear emaciated at all. It's like you've just discovered that there is a model body type and are hanging it on this one girl...?

And yeah, this dress won't look good on a girl/woman with large breasts. Other clothes will look better on a woman with breasts. So? Teen girls often have small breasts.

The entire M&S limited collection range is modelled by this very thin model

A580Hojas

But, hey, she doesn't have an officially diagnosed eating disorder and does have the sort of body Zara like to hang their clothes on so it's all good right?

Just because one person you know has an eating disorder - although it sounds more like she has a problem with her digestive system - that doesn't mean that there's something wrong with all thin people.

If it's not OK to criticise people for being overweight, then it's not OK to criticise people for being thin.

alltop10.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Twiggi.jpg

Models rarely have reasonable sized boobs - the clothes don’t hang as well

As pp said this dress isn’t great for a girl w boobs, V neck better

Zara is a slimmer fashion brand more suited for Spanish/french figures, I would say. It's always been more for no curves at all/no hips kind of clothing, and the UK is typically NOT pipecleaner thin you know? When I lived in Europe it was far more popular than over here simply because more women could actually WEAR the clothing over there than here.

Are you saying that all the women you know have "a good bust"? I am pear-shaped, an a-cup. Should I be feeling weird?

Also that model looks like many others (their shape makes the clothes look unattractive IMO). Not sure why Zara are being singled out?