London Diaries: Fake Plastic Teen World

by Rosa | images by TeenVouge & Seventeen

The fashion industry is the 5th largest industry in the world. Seventeen, CosmoGirl and Teen magazine are among the top 10 best selling magazines in America. This means that an incredibly large amount of increasingly younger girls are regularly reading teenage fashion magazines.

These magazines often overload their covers with text of all different colours and fonts to attract girls to them. The titles read such things as ‘what to wear now’ or ‘how to get that guy’, all hardly suitable for girls as young as 11. At that age, girls don’t need to worry about boys, beauty and body worries.

A recent survey of 2000 British teenage girls showed that 92% of them are unhappy with their body. One of the biggest causes of this is the images of stick thin models and perfectly airbrushed celebrities they see all around them in the media today. These magazines fool young girls into thinking that the ideal body is skinny, and girls then strive to become this image of perfection. What they don’t realize is that every image we see in a magazine has had hours of airbrushing until every single imperfection is removed. Bodies are altered, hips, legs and arms are slimmed, teeth are whitened and much more. Girls then wonder why they don’t look like that. These magazines, especially the ones aimed at teenagers, need to start promoting a healthy body image and encouraging girls to love what they have. Instead of dieting, boys and trends, articles should be about feeling confident in your own skin, encouraging education and choosing a great career for you, and the skinny models need to be replaced by role models and real girls. The adults writing these magazines need to know what they are responsible for as many young girls are vulnerable and some will believe anything they read.

If someone told you to shoplift, would you do it, just because they told you to? If a magazine told you the colour blue was in this season, would you wear it, just because they told you to? If a magazine told you, that this season, everybody will be wearing bin liners, would you believe them? It may seem a little extreme, but magazines are constantly telling us what is ‘in’. If somebody tried to keep up with every trend we see on the catwalks, they would have a new wardrobe every six months and be in a lot of debt. Trends are meant to be guidelines, not rules, but used for inspiration and ideas for outfits if we’re a bit stuck. Adolescence is a great time for young girls to be developing their own style, not being a sheep and following what all their friends are wearing.

I know most girls are smart enough not to believe everything they read, but for the sake of the ones that do, teenage fashion magazines need a serious rethink of the content they print.