October 15, 2009

Ralph Lauren Model Fired: Too Fat

The digitally altered image

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Holy haute couture! Ralph Lauren really doesn’t get it. First the clothier sicced its lawyers on Boing Boing, one of the Web’s most popular blogs, after a Boing Boing writer reproduced an ad photoshopped by the company’s graphic artists to make its model look bizarrely skinny. An indignant Boing Boing declared a culture war against the attempted censorship, and the company eventually admitted that it had done a regrettable job on the ad.

Now, just when you thought this couldn’t get worse, it comes out that Polo Ralph Lauren had terminated its contract with the model, Filippa Hamilton, back in April because she was too fat. (Hamilton is 5-foot-10 and weighs 120 pounds.) “They fired me because they said I was overweight and I couldn’t fit in their clothes anymore,” she told the New York Daily News on Tuesday. (See Hamilton’s photo on the Daily News website to see what Ralph Lauren considers “overweight.”)

According to the report, the 23-year-old model has worked for Lauren since 2002 and was distraught at being fired by an employer she’d come to see as “a second family.” When the altered ad blew up online, she was surprised—and not pleasantly so—to see how her image had been distorted. “I think they owe American women an apology, a big apology,” she told the paper. “I’m very proud of what I look like, and I think a role model should look healthy.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

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