God, just think what people during the Renaissance would have thought of the poor girl, she looks like a total freak of nature, reminds me of those weird deformed mirrors in old amusement arcades that make you either look 3 feet high and fat or 9 feet high and skinny, would be funny, if there wasn't the really serious aspect of young girls not eating or puking everything back to attain such a figure....
Very strange , all these beauty fetishes... Fashion designers use girls who look like stick-insects because they say that they make their clothes look good. Ok. That must be why they adapted their sizes and shrunk and shrunk them over the years to make women believe they are getting smaller.
Talking about jeans sizes, I'm a size 8 at Next (aimed at youngish women), a size 10 at Marks& Spencers (aims more towards youngish-to-middleaged), a size 12 at Jack Wills (aimed at teenagers), a size 4 or 6 at GAP (what am I? 8 years old? are American clothes designers nuts?), a 38-40 in France, and a normal size 30 " waist for Levi's, if they are the low-slung ones that just sit on the hip, then probably a 32". If I wasn't the age I am and actually still gave a shit, it would freak me out.
And the global obsession with being a size zero hasn't always been like this, and isn't necessarily like this all over the world. Someone from Morocco once told me that in a lot of small villages, men like quite ample ladies. When a young bride gets ready to get married, she actually gets fattened up like a Thanksgiving turkey. She is taken away into a special bridal hut and lays on her back most of the day while she is being fed uninterrupted all day long and her skin is massaged , and allegedly she even gets oil enemas to increase the body's caloric intake and her weight gain. Go figure!
Oil enema, anyone?