At 5’10 and 120 pounds, Filippa Hamilton is a far cry from fat, but she says she was fired by Ralph Lauren for that very reason after eight years of working with him.
“They said I couldn’t fit in their clothes anymore,” Hamilton told TODAY. She said Lauren wrote a letter to her agent saying her services were terminated because she couldn’t fit into the sample clothes she needed to wear.
Lauren, however, denied Hamilton’s claims.
“We consider her an important part of our imaging and branding,” the designer said in a statement to the media. “We regret that our relationship has ended as a result of her inability to meet the obligations under her contract with us.”
Hamilton told TODAY she was fired in April but didn’t intend to go public with her complaint. That changed when a photoshopped image of her in a Japanese mall popped up on the Web. The image also caused her to speak out on body image.
“It’s not a good example when you see this picture, every young woman is going to look at it and think that it is normal to look like that. It’s not,” she told Ann Curry. “I saw my face on this super-extremely skinny girl, which is not me. It makes me sad. It makes me think that Ralph Lauren wants to have this kind of image. It’s an American brand … and it’s not healthy, and it’s not right.”
Check out the full story here.
Photo from examiner.com.
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Jamie
This is ridiculous! 120 lbs at 5’10 is definitely small enough for clothes to hang on a person. Personally, I think she could stand to gain a few pounds.
This photoshopped pic is ridiculous! I really thought that the industry had grown beyond this unhealthiness. I really thought that Beyonce, J-Lo and others had helped to break this crazy idea. Unfortunately, I see little has changed.