Adventures of the Dread Pirate Emmeline May

I watched Find Me The Face - Plus Sized Girl the other day, as I was ill in bed.

'Find Me The Face' has a fairly simple premise, two model scouts are given a brief by a model agency - 'Plus size girl', or 'Urban boy', then they have a week to find people on the street to come to a casting. Based on the photos, they choose 2 each to have some pro photos and go to a go-see, and then the best one gets a modelling contract. It's one of those trashily awful shows which is utterly watchable and engaging, and you hate yourself for enjoying it, and yet enjoy it you do.

'Plus Sized Girl', however, made me rather angry. The final 4 were a mixed bag, the female model scout had 2 quite pretty but not really model material girls; the male scout had found himself one very pretty but un-outstanding looking girl, and a drop dead gorgeous girl with a super trendy hair cut, perfect skin, 6' tall, china doll face and with a really interesting personality. She looked like a model, she looked like she could be in Vogue.

And there lies her problem, and the reason why she didn't make the final two. She looked too much like an editorial model. Apparently, this is no good for plus sized models.

Plus sized models won't get work if they look like actual models, because plus sized girls work in catalogue modelling, Littlewoods, Evans, Dove adverts. Plus sized models aren't for real modelling, not for high fashion, edgy modelling.

The beautiful and perfectly proportioned young girl could have been a model if she was 6' tall and a size 8, but at 6' tall and a size 16 she was either too big to be a model, or too much like a model to be a model.

This INFURIATES me. It's no good saying 'hey, look, big girls can be beautiful too' if the big girls are limited to high street and catalogue modelling, and the pages of Vogue and the like remain full of 6' tall gazelle like women who need to avoid a strong wind in case they break. All this does in re-enforce that big girls can be pretty, but not exceptional beauties, and that big girls have no place in fashion.