Britain's Missing Top Model

So I went onto YouTube and watched the trailer and some interviews with some of the Britain's Missing Top Models, and "missing" as in missing something is one interpretation of the title. But while listening to what people were saying in the trailer, what I heard was that the title is more about what’s missing in the fashion industry. There are the skinny, size 2-4 models, there are plus-sized models, but what all of them have in common is that they can see the clothes, listen to instructions, and use their legs to walk down the runway. As a man in the trailer remarks, “It’s become part of athletics, it’s become part of walking down the street, it should be part of fashion.”

While I think the idea of this show is great in helping to give women with disabilities a place in the fashion industry, by creating a show that is only women with disabilities it gives off the feeling that they individually wouldn’t be able to succeed if they were surrounded by women without disabilities. In Cycle 11 of America’s Top Model one of the contestants, Isis, identifies as transgendered and I appreciated both the fact that she was a contestant and that she was on a fashion show not catered towards people who are not the fashion “norm”- 6’, 110 lbs, long think legs, very much female and hypersexualized that way. Heather has Asperger’s and won CoverGirl of the Week eight times in a row on Cycle 9. Amanda from Cycle 3 was legally blind.

I guess where this is all going is that disability consistently focuses on what someone can’t do rather than what they can do. I volunteered at a therapeutic horseback riding program in high school where I worked with a boy named Garrett who had Autism. He talked to me about how he wanted to be a mounted police officer, and that he wanted to do what I was doing when he was older (helping out in the program). Whenever his mother heard him saying that to me she would discourage him and tell him not to talk about that. I thought it was great that he wanted to do that and was shocked that she discouraged him- he was great with horses and with more training and experience it was definitely something that he could do. Disabilities don’t mean that you can’t be a full person- while Garrett will probably never be in the NBA, I will probably never be in the WNBA. Just because someone can’t do one thing does not mean that they cannot excel at another.