Someone like you - but thinner. Lagerfeld insults Adele

 
Veteran designer Karl Lagerfeld is right about one thing. Our Royal Family is “totally unnecessary”. But he should have left it there. Instead, he decided to go one step further while guest editing a French newspaper, and hit out at another British institution – 23-year-old award-winning singer Adele, the hometown girl who’s won our simple British hearts.

Having described her as “a little too fat”, the head designer for Chanel caused E-outrage last night as Adele’s fans rallied round with cries of: “As long as she’s happy, who cares if she’s a size 16!” Who cares, indeed? Well, Adele it seems.

While telling the world in interviews that her weight “has never been an issue”, Adele herself has successively succumbed to the current wave of body fascism.

Posing for the 300th edition of Q Magazine last year, her image was airbrushed within an inch of its life. At least Q managed to show a full length picture of the curvaceous popster inside, which is more than Vogue did. In an article where, in a feisty female moment, Adele admits that she’s seen people who want to be thinner or have bigger boobs and how it ruins their life, there’s rarely a picture of her below the neckline. Gone is the double chin, the shapely bottom and there’s not a blemish in sight.

While perhaps even Adele would not choose to be the poster girl for the larger lady, there is a delicious irony in her rhetoric and how she is pictorially portrayed.

It’s the kind of topsy-turvy logic that MPs Jo Swinson and Lynne Featherstone have been addressing through their Campaign for Body Confidence. Shockingly, in a recent survey of 14- to 15-year-old girls in the UK, 56% said losing weight was a priority.

It doesn’t take a genius to join the dots. Computer-generated body images – widely used in online retail marketing – along with airbrushing and the constant media saturation of the size-zero models who Lagerfeld presumably thinks are “normal”, have undoubtedly added to this phenomenon.

Public figures like Adele have my sympathy. They’re not famous for their size – they’re famous for their talent. They need to do the rounds of publicity and the cover shoots to promote that talent. And, while Lagerfeld is clearly a body bully, it would be nice – just for once – if people like Adele, who talk the talk of being happy with their body image, also insist that our image-obsessed media walk the walk.