Eating Tissues to Starve Off Hunger: The Truth About Modeling

By Beth Greenfield, Shine Staff

When former Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Kirstie Clements got unexpectedly, unceremoniously fired last year, she was offered a book deal to tell her story the very next day. Now the new memoir, “The Vogue Factor,” has folks buzzing about her decision to blow the lid off all kinds of backstage fashion-mag drama—particularly the kind relating to anorexic models. But Clements insists she was simply telling the truth.

“I’m not spilling,” she told Yahoo! Shine in an email exchange. “They are honest observations. Anyone in the industry would have heard the same things.” Things like models being barely strong enough to stand for shoots, spending more time on drips than ingesting food and eating tissues to starve off hunger. “Apparently they swelled in your stomach,” she explained about the tissue trick to Entertainment Tonight.

Clements also wrote about editors altering photos of models in unexpected ways, such as to “get rid of bones,” in an attempt to make them look less emaciated. “Most people accuse editors of [airbrushing] images for the girls to look slimmer, on occasion we had to do it the other way around,” she told ET.

One time the former editor spent a three-day gig with a model, and never saw her consume a single meal. On the third day, the woman could barely hold herself up or keep her eyes open. In another instance, she writes, a Russian model said that her “fit model” roommate (meaning extremely thin) spent frequent time on hospital drips.

“When a model who was getting good work in Australia starved herself down two sizes in order to be cast in the overseas shows … the Vogue fashion office would say she’d become ‘Paris thin,'” she writes.

“Eating disorders exist. The problem is that they are hidden,” Clements told Shine. “You can’t be sure. That’s why they are so insidious.”

“They relate to a small percentage of models, not all,” she continued. “But all the industry is complicit in varying degrees. It’s up to each person to make a judgment and call it as they see it, over the areas they have control over. Editors don’t control everything.”

As for her decision to write the book in the first place, she insisted it was not about exacting revenge. “I just wanted to capture my recollections, with honesty, and then move on,” she said.

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