How's that for the 'longest blog post of the day' title?

Sorry...so sorry...for not being a good blogger and staying in touch more. If the truth be told, the freelance writing work has somewhat taken over my life and when I get to the end of a working day, my creativity seems somewhat depleted. But I digress.

Apparently, as we all probably know, size 12 is considered fat. When John Lewis announced it was using size 12 mannequins, the world gasped in a collective intake of breath. Size 12? What was that all about? Nobody would ever buy clothes from a shop that demonstrated its wares on such outsize mannequins, surely?

Anyway, now Leah Green is causing ripples in the fashionista's skinny lattes by beating 200 other women to be crowned Miss London - despite being rejected by model agencies and told she needed to lose weight.
Leah Green, who's 22, will be competing for the title of Miss England against regional finalists from across the country, including size 16 Chloe Marshall.

Read the full story here

Leah told the Daily Mail that she has been rejected by several model agencies.

"I have tried to get into modelling," she said. "But I've been told I'm too fat and I need to lose weight. One agent told me I would have to work hard to achieve the gaunt look he was after.

"If you have to be the size of Victoria Beckham or Girls Aloud to even get a look in, then it just isn't for me."

It makes me angry that a perfectly normal sized woman is told she has to lose weight. In fact, a woman who is smaller than most of the UK female population is still considered too big to be attractive enough to model clothes. When will these agencies realise that we don't want to see clothes modelled just on very tall, slim, children with unattainable bodies...we want to see a wide range of figures so that we'll have a vague idea of what we might look like in their clothes.

Let's face it, we've all bought clothes online or by mail order, seduced into thinking that maybe that dress will look good on us, when it actually makes us look absolutely ridiculous because it's cut for the size eight slip of a thing that's wearing it in the photographs, and not for the size 16 woman who wants to buy it. Bigger women have curves in places that most models don't even have places and it's about time that people who try to sell us their clothes actually gave a stuff about the people who want to buy them.

Except that I forgot...most catwalk designer types don't even think that women over size 10 exist.