The modeling industry has made great strides in recent years in terms of inclusivity, and I think it’s great. We now have models of all races and ethnicities, plus-size models, and even models with disabilities. Still, the expectation that models have to be tall has yet to be challenged. Most models, regardless of race, ethnicity, or size, stand 5’9” or taller. Most people don’t consider height variation to be part of diversity, so having a shorter model on the runway likely wouldn’t make headlines, but it would make shopping so much easier for short girls such as myself.
I’ve long believed that the world wasn’t made for people shorter than 5’7”, and nowhere is this more obvious than online shopping. I buy a lot of my clothes online because of the larger range of options and out of convenience, but I always hesitate to buy skirts and dresses online because I can’t ever really know how they will look on me. The models who wear them in online stock images are all blessed with mile-long legs, and as a short (ish) girl it’s hard to gauge how they’ll look on me. In many cases, it appears as though clothing companies categorize their skirts and dresses based on where they fall on their taller-than-average models. So what’s marketed as a mini skirt or dress falls to my knees, so-called midis are more like maxis on me, and maxis end up dragging on the floor. When I try on skirts and dresses in-store, I often don’t realize what length it is supposedly meant to be until I look at the tag, and many times the length stated on the tag doesn’t match how it looks on me.
The fact of the matter is, I’m not even exceptionally short and I still struggle with hemlines falling lower than they should. I’m 5 feet, 4 inches tall, which is average according to my doctor, but apparently the modeling and fashion industries think I’m tiny. Quite frankly, if I’m supposedly of average height, then shouldn’t skirts and dresses be the perfect length on me? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised considering that the fashion industry has decided that anyone who wears a size bigger than 8 is “plus-size”, but that’s beside the point. My point is that clothing companies need to acknowledge that most women are shorter than 5’9” and create clothes with that in mind.
Even if having a model of shorter stature being featured online, in a magazine, or the runway wouldn’t be groundbreaking, representation of any sort is a good thing. I stopped growing at 13 years old and throughout my high-school years I couldn’t help but feel awkward as many of my classmates (some of whom I towered over when we were younger) surpassed me in height. I probably would have felt a bit better about myself if more clothing was made with people like me in mind. Even today I struggle to find a skirt that looks as advertised or a pair of pants that doesn’t have extra fabric that bunches up around my ankles. I really like the direction the clothing and modeling industries are heading in, and I think that hiring models of varying stature will only make them better.