Fat African models have slim chance in 'size zero' West

KODE PPC ANDA

Skinny African girls may get to strut on Western catwalks but the fat ones have to stay at home. This is the message being delivered to the 500 or so Ghanaians who have registered with the country’s only international modelling agency Exopa.

“A lot of them want to go. But not everyone has the chance to go because of the size the Europeans want them to be,” said Exopa’s Ghanaian director Sima Ibrahim. In Africa, rolls of flesh are usually seen as a sign of wealth and status, not of ill health. Few aspire to a skinny look, as those who look starved and ill too often are that way through misfortune, not choice.

But just as Africa’s youth find themselves choosing between Western music and clothes and those rooted in their own tradition, they are now faced with two opposing images of beauty — the Western ideal of an ever thinner frame and the African one of a buxom and well-rounded figure.

Nowhere is this debate clearer than in the African fashion industry. “Those that come here who are skinny, they know they want to go international. The others, they know they are big, they want a job here in Ghana,” said Exopa’s Ibrahim.

Few Africans want to see a superskinny model, said Sylvia Owori, who runs Uganda’s Ziper models. “I think most Ugandans would be disgusted. They’d think she’d just come out of the village and she was malnourished,” said Owori. On the street and in African clubs and bars, it is still the bigger girls who are likely to get attention.

KODE PPC ANDA