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We had a Skype Interview with Ashley Graham!
We had a phone interview with IMG Modeling director, Mina White.
We met with and interviewed Amy Smilovic, the founder of Tibi. We also took a brief tour of the Tibi offices.
We had a skype interview with Becca Mccharen-Tran, founder of Chromat (https://chromat.co/) and designer. Chromat is devoted to celebrating everyone’s differences and providing clothing for all women.
We interviewed MJ Day and her team of women who work on Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition. We talked about modeling and how Sports Illustrated tries to give every woman an equal chance to model. They try to make sure it is not just the outward appearance that gets casted but also the model’s personality.
My group and I went to Brookfield Place to meet with MJ Day, the editor of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. A little more about MJ Day is, she travels all over the world for photoshoots, including places like Antarctica and Madagascar. When we sat down with Mj Day, my group and I pulled out our computers where we had a list of questions we had come up with beforehand. Before we started we asked permission if we could record the interview and she said it was perfectly fine to. As we asked questions we got incredibly helpful answers-we wrote down a lot of notes… Mj Day’s whole team was there to listen in on the conversation and add bits in. Two members from her team brought in different magazine covers so we could compare one and another. We got to see how the magazine covers have changed or stayed the same throughout the years. For example, we saw a cover of a maganize that was published in the 2002 and a magazine cover that was published recently – we got to see see differences, similarities, etc.
My group and I went to The Paley Center for Media: formerly the Museum of Television & Radio and the Museum of Broadcasting. When we got there we met Caroline Quigley which was the woman that was going to be leading our fieldwork. She brought us into the room where we would discuss everything. She started off asking questions about our social justice topic and how we chose it. After discussing our project, Caroline put on some videos that either had women being sexualized or girls doing certian things to get a boys attention/getting boys to like them. For example, in one video, this girl got a nose job because she wanted a boy to like her. The girl didn’t get the nose job for herself, she just did it for the boy. When the videos ended we would discuss what we had watched and how it made us feel. We started off watching videos that were taken a long time ago to videos that were taken present day. Caroline wanted us to compare the old videos to the recent videos and if we as a country have made progress. Back and forth we discussed and shared our ideas, concerns, questions, etc.
We went to the Paley Center for Media’s workshop called Girls, Body Image, and the media. We were the only people in the class so we had many opportunities to discuss and ask questions.
Our group is dedicated to researching and fighting against the incredibly unrealistic beauty standards in the fashion industry. Many models fight against sexualization and body shaming in the modeling industry. This is not only uncomfortable and rude to the models it also creates unrealistic images for anyone who sees these ads. This leads to unhealthy…