Crystal Renn: a Cautionary Tale, or just stretched too thin?

If you're not familiar with Crystal Renn, allow me to give a bit of background information first.

Crystal Renn started modeling at the age of 14, and very quickly fell into the abyss that is Body Dysmorphia Disorder (the self-perception of an imperfect body).

At the beginning of her caeer, her management famously told her to lose a third of her body weight, which she did. This drastic weight loss wreaked havoc on her physical and emotional health. Eventually, the stress of maintaining a model thin physique wore her down. She snapped and gained 70 lbs, remarketing herself as a "plus-size model" (a dirty word when the average plus-size model is still only a very average size 10) and wrote a book entitled Hungry: A Young Model's Appetite, Ambition, and Embrace of Curves.



She made a killing for herself as a plus-size model, posing in campaigns for Mango, Torrid, Heatherette, and Lane Bryant, as well as walking the runway for Jean-Paul Gaultier and Chanel. She even did four stints in Vogue (a magazine famous for it's campaign to eradicate the idea of average sized women). She was happy, successful in an industry that prizes thinness above everything else, and raking in the dough. This is a woman who knew how to market and capitalize on her curves.

Until this.

And very recently, Crystal Renn appeared in a photoshoot for photographer Nicholas Routzen's campaign for children and the arts.

Looking like this:

Photo: Nicholas Routzen

I could offer my own opinions on Crystal's drastic weight loss, but this quote from the article says it better than I could:

"Normally stories about a famous woman's weight fluctuations — damned if they lose, damned if they gain — just seem unfair. It's unsettling to read the same kind of things about Crystal Renn, too, but sadly, a model's career is so traditionally tied to her size and shape that if she is losing weight, it might affect her bookings. While Renn's curves are what made her successful, models are traditionally rewarded for being thin. It's unclear whether a plus-size model as famous as Renn would likewise be rewarded for weight loss, but hopefully she has no reason to try. It would be nice for any model's weight fluctuations, no matter what size she makes it big at, to not dramatically affect her work, and for stories like these not to be stories."

Looking at these photos, I do worry that Crystal Renn is actively destroying the causes of her success. It's normal for weight to fluctuate, and obviously it's good for your health to lose some weight when you're a bigger person. But to alter your body so drastically, in so short a period of time, when it's the reason why you've gained so much cred and clout, calls into question not only your intentions, but the state of your health as well.

Clearly, I don't know Crystal Renn personally, so it's a bit unfair of me to call her judgment into question. I don't know what caused this drastic weight loss. I just find it disconcerting.