Curves resurge

Modeling agency builds its image with thicker women

At Celebrity Models, the talent is getting thicker. The Atlanta-based agency casts models for videos and magazines. Vansilk, Celebrity Models' one-named owner, says he started the growing business two years ago to take aim at the lack of voluptuous female images in hip-hop. Now he has some of the hottest and shapeliest models -- including Buffie the Body and Jacksonville's Esther Baxter -- on his roster.

He's happy to fill the void.

"The girls have been only thin because the Caucasian market required that. ... Our women have hips, curves," Vansilk says.

"That's why Buffie has become so marketable. There's been a big void in the urban eye candy game ... we had to make it to the point where a black woman didn't have to be thin to be a model."

Fifteen years ago, Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" burst onto the scene, a crass ode to the shape of black women. With lyrics such as "I'm tired of magazines/Sayin' flat butts are the thing/Take the average black man and ask him that/She gotta pack much back" and a video with thicker images, it represented one of the first times a generation of African-Americans heard a song dedicated to black standards of beauty.

But as hip-hop became more corporate and mainstream, images of women in rap videos changed to thinner women with more mass appeal. The multiracial Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps," featured aerobicized singer Fergie as its mildly humpy seductress. Multimillion selling rap artist T.I's video "Let's Get Away" features very thin women almost exclusively.

While it may seem two sides of the same objectification of women, the shift seems to have meaning: It coincides with the introduction of eating disorders in the African-American community.

"The biggest issue when you think about adolescents looking at the images that are portrayed, most of the images aren't realistic at all. They're not even true to the model," says Diane Gill, professor and head of UNC-Greensboro's Department of Exercise and Sport Science.

Until recently, little research had been done on African-American women and eating disorders; the assumption was that only young white women were affected, scientists and researchers say. But a recent study by Wesleyan University psychology chair Ruth Striegel-Moore shows that African-American women are now bingeing, and bingeing and purging. A study published by the Renfrew Center Foundation found that about 25 percent of college-age women use bingeing and purging, but that study didn't track by race.

Striegel-Moore says her study didn't focus on a link between hip-hop images and black women's self-concept, but she says the two seem to go hand-in-hand.

"It's reasonable to make the assumption that being exposed to particular images of women does affect women's attitudes about their bodies and their eating behavior," says Striegel-Moore.

"If [black women] are more influenced by cultural variables, such as the beauty ideal or pressure to be thin, the emergence of increasingly thin African-American [media images] very likely is contributing to the number of African-American women who are experiencing those kinds of eating problems."

According to the National Institutes of Health, an estimated 1.1 percent to 4.2 percent of women will suffer from bulimia in their lifetime.

Noting the change

Women who aren't experts noticed the shift to thin bodies, too.

"I see a lot of almost naturally impossible people [in videos] now. A lot of black women look at it like it's real when it's really not normal to have a waist that small on a frame that size," says Carmel Martin-Fairey, a 33-year-old zoology graduate student at N.C. State University. "God didn't make it that way."

Martin-Fairey says she can see the difference in the way many young black women view themselves now from when she was an undergraduate at Tuskegee University in the mid-1990s. Then, she says, it was considered a good thing to be thicker. Now, many young girls want to look like the thinner models they see in videos.

There are signs, though, of change. Men's magazines like King and Smooth are showcasing curvy women, and videos like Tony Yayo's "So Seductive" -- featuring Buffie -- and T-Pain's "Buy You a Drank Shawty" could be ushering in a thicker era in hip-hop videos.

Laila Shahid-el, a happily curvy 22-year-old who is African-American, says she hopes the images do shift to what women look like in the community and even revert to what black men typically like.

"There has been a shift in the video girl, what women want to look like now. It's the long-hair thin girls now. It has an effect on the black community, because we're seeing our culture transformed into the pop culture. That's driven a shift as to what black women want to be. It's telling us what we should look like as black women, and I think younger women are taking heed," says Shahid-el, a recent State graduate.

Vansilk says the success of models like Baxter, Ki Toy and Buffie will shift hip-hop images back to thicker women. Perhaps, he suggests, that will help give young black women a better sense of self-concept.

"Who's to say we can't have our own version of what a model is?" Vansilk asks. "Personally, I don't see anything sexy about Paris Hilton."