Style: Seeking acceptance in fashion

2009/12/19

New reality show Britain’s Missing Top Model tries to bolster self-esteem yet revels in the piquancy of disabled women competing in a profession that demands physical perfection, writes ALESSANDRA STANLEY

THE fashion world may be the last bastion of prejudice, a field that overtly discriminates against people because of their looks.

So there is something both bold and troubling about Britain’s Missing Top Model, a reality show which began recently on BBC America that pits disabled women against one another to compete for a photo spread in the United Kingdom edition of Marie Claire magazine.

One thing never changes in the beauty industry, however: a gramme of fat is a greater hurdle than a missing limb.

“Rebecca’s disability didn’t cause me any problems,” a photographer says after shooting Rebecca Le’gon, 27, a stunning brunette who was born with a deformed hip and wears a prosthetic leg.

“It was just the fact she’s not really in shape. Most models are pretty toned, slimmer, more agile.”

In other words, this is pretty much like any season of America’s Next Top Model, except when it’s not.

This series comes with a paradoxical premise: it’s a contest designed to raise the profile and confidence of disabled women but makes a spectacle of their hunger for acceptance.

Missing Top Model tries to bolster self-esteem yet revels in the piquancy of physically imperfect women competing in a profession that demands physical perfection, which one judge defines this way: “It’s what 99 per cent of the population do not have and never will.”

The show wants to enlighten viewers and also keep them amused; it tries to be considerate yet reality shows are by definition cruel.

These conflicts pop up in almost every scene and are captured best not by the judges or the aspiring models but by two passers-by in London who stare through a lingerie store’s window at a disabled model posing in a lacy bra and thong.

A young man in a fleece cap says he is impressed by the fact that she is not scared to show her stump, “because she’s beautiful at the same time, so she’s got nothing to hide.”

A middle-aged woman agrees but worries about using amputees to appeal to prurient tastes.

“Personally I think it should be emphasised,” she says. “But if it’s to sell something like lingerie, I think people are going to be troubled.”

The women themselves, though, are delighted by the exposure.

“I don’t know if people were looking only at my arm,” Debbie va der Putten, a 22-year-old who lost an arm in a bus crash, says, noting jubilantly that everyone was looking at her breasts instead.

(From left) Sophie Morgan, Debbie va der Putten, Kelly Knox, Jessica Kellgren-Hayes, Kellie Moody and Rebecca Le’gon in Missing Top Model.

Whatever initial shock there is at seeing pretty young women who are missing an arm or a leg wears off quickly.

All eight aspiring models are good-looking and likable, at ease with their disabilities and the camera. They are told by their mentor and coach, Jonathan Phang, a fashion consultant, that they were not chosen to make a political statement but to prove themselves as models: the one with the best chance of actually having a career will win.

The contestants’ desire to be desired, not pitied or patronised, makes sense. But the show adds an extra layer of contention by including deaf contestants — hearing loss is a disadvantage that disappears in front of the camera.

Kellie Moody, 24, relies on signers for even trivial conversation but she has no visible impairment in photographs, and that upsets Sophie Morgan, 23, who was paralysed in a car accident and uses a wheelchair.

“The chance to meet a designer who is willing to put a disabled girl in his show is such an opportunity but I want someone to choose a girl with a really obvious disability,” Morgan says after Moody wins an audition.

“So that it makes a change. And choosing someone like (Moody) is not really the same — it's the same as just picking a girl that speaks French.”

(If anything, the absence of communication may even be an asset in the modelling world. Phang says to a photographer, “It’s kind of nice working with deaf girls because there’s not those sort of

irritating questions.”)

Even the judges, and one uses a wheelchair, are torn about their mandate.

“I can’t imagine her making a career out of modelling; if we're supposed to choose a model, she isn’t it,” another one says of Morgan.

“But I could see her making a career as a role model.”

Modelling is a bruising, brutal profession, and the few who succeed are enviable, perhaps, but rarely admirable. And role models do need a role.

One of the best known, Heather Mills, gave up modelling after losing a leg and became a spokeswoman for animal rights and the banning of land mines.

After a costly, tempestuous divorce from Paul McCartney, Mills isn’t exactly a beloved figure in Britain but she proved her fitness and gumption in the United States by dancing gracefully with a prosthetic leg on Dancing With the Stars.

Britain's Missing Top Model portrays its heroines as role models merely because they want to become models, and that may be its biggest handicap. — NYT

From left: Rebecca Le’gon, Jessica Kellgren-Hayes and Kellie Moody.