Not so Pretty: Discourses About Models' Rights

In this essay, we propose a linguistic analysis of the press articles dealing with the foundation of the Model Alliance and reported in the “press” section of the Model Alliance website. The articles date from 2010 to 2013 and are taken from different newspapers and magazines including The New York Observer, The New York Times, The Grindstone, The Cut, Today, Elle, The Guardian, The Huffington Post. The links in the “press” section also include some video-interviews with Model Alliance’s founder Sara Ziff, but for the purposes of this paper we have decided to focus exclusively on written texts. The texts present most of the typical features of journalistic language. They are even, in some cases, examples of metajournalism. Indeed, the articles do not only report the problems related to modeling and to the lack of norms regulating the world of fashion, but also discuss the ways in which these issues can effectively be reported and expressed through language. If the claim of the Models’ Alliance is “Giving a voice to the faces of the fashion industry,” a similar endeavour has to be undertaken by the journalists who want to discuss models’ rights. Therefore, the articles represent an interesting object of analysis for the linguist who intends to investigate how language is used to build up semantically and syntactically coherent forms of discourse about social and cultural issues that are perceived as yet “unexplored.”