At 12 Gerren Taylor was considered the ‘new Naomi Campbell”. As a 14-year-old, the industry stamped the ‘obese” sign on her size 32 waist and rendered her unhirable for fashion runway shows. At 16, you can’t help feeling sorry for her.
Taylor, who has appeared on the runway for the likes of Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY and Marc Jacobs, is a towering mix of schoolgirl naiveté and praying mantis-like beauty. At times, for a moment, you can easily forget that she is still in high school. But then she speaks. And you can’t help feeling sorry for her. Not merely because her ramp modelling career may have unravelled faster than a Donna Karen knockoff in a washing machine or that she still carries some of the scars of her experience in the fashion industry.
Taylor talks enthusiastically about the self-esteem workshops she is conducting to help young girls realise that ‘everyone is beautiful on the inside” as she travels around promoting America the Beautiful, a documentary that interrogates the United States’s obsession with a particular notion of beauty, and in which she features.
Yet she speaks equally enthusiastically about continuing to model in adverts aimed at teenage girls, seemingly oblivious to any complicity in an industry in which airbrushed, computer manipulated images of beauty — of already dangerously skinny models — have been blamed as one of the reasons for the rise in eating disorder-related deaths in the US.
She speaks too of wanting to become an actress and remain on a celebrity career course hinging unapologetically on patriarchal, capitalist-driven notions of beauty that tend to debilitate the self-esteem of ordinary, fat old you or me.
Perhaps one shouldn’t expect a 16-year-old to grasp irony, much in the same way as one shouldn’t expect a 12-year-old to strut down the runway eptomising womanhood, or Paris Hilton to release a post-prison DVD entitled Showertime. Or should we?
A 2002 study conducted by the University of Zululand together with England’s Northumbria University found startling similarities between the mental and physical attitudes to food and body image among a group of Zulu girls and those of their British counterparts. More than half showed disordered eating behaviour, while many admitted to not eating or vomiting after eating as they strove to look more like Western women, rather than their mothers.
So does Taylor see any contradiction in spouting about self-esteem emancipation, while appearing on the skinny highway during Durban Fashion Week in a country in which there seems to be a trend towards embracing the Western ideals of beauty with their attendant psychological dysfunction?
‘I was talking to a man, our driver, yesterday, and I asked him, ‘So you like the more curvy women down here?’ He said, ‘No, we like skinny girls now’ and that this was the traditional view that was changing. I was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ It must be the media,” she says, disarmingly oblivious to her role in the mass media.
About being labelled ‘obese”, Taylor says: ‘It hurt for a while, because I didn’t really understand why they were saying that. A part of me was saying that I wasn’t obese, but what they were saying was making me think twice about why I wasn’t booking jobs … whatever — so my feelings were fluctuating,” she says. Taylor seems to buy into the trite fashion excuse that runway models must be built like wire coat-hangers to save on fabric and allow the garment ‘to fall” properly.
She says her self-esteem problems started in school, where she stood out and was nicknamed ‘Giraffe’ and ‘Jolly Green Giant”. Her experiences in the fashion industry, which, at 14, led her to obsess about weight, stretch marks and whether her thighs were ‘jiggling”, exacerbated these early insecurities.
‘The industry had a lot of effect on it, because I was 14 and they were telling me that I was obese. So that really influenced me to not eat as much and do stuff to make myself skinnier. It was a big part of my life because for two years they were telling me that I was beautiful, skinny and that I was going to go far. And then to just quit on me because I gained a pound, that was really dreadful for me and really hard and I didn’t understand because I was so young,” she says.
Gerren Taylor will be appearing at the MTN Durban Fashion Week, which runs at the Sundeck at Suncoast Casino until June 30. Designers showcasing on June 29 include Karen Monk-Klijnstra, Gavin Rajah and Eastern Mosaic Star Showcase featuring Indian designers. The TN Yellow Carpet Showcase on June 30 features Gideon, Francois Vedemme, Lindiwe Kuzwayo, Kluk-CGdT, Errol Arendz and Fred Eboka. Tel: 031 204 6081