H&M CEO encourages the employment of healthy and diverse models in fashion advertisements and campaigns

H&M has promised to use only healthy models in their adverts and campaigns in the hope that they can represent a broad and diverse variety of women. Their latest campaign featured the vivacious and pointedly curvy superstar Beyonce who was promoting her new swimwear range in collaboration with H&M. In addition to this, rumours that the company airbrushed the singer’s curves in the images have been quashed as the Swedish brand confirmed later on that the final images went live un-airbrushed, a sign that this particular realm of the fashion industry could be improving.

Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of H&M spoke to a representative of The Metro, “I don’t think we’ve always been good. Some of the models we’ve had have been too skinny. That’s not ok.” Persson made it clear that as a large and well-known company H&M have a responsibility to set an example, “We’ve many different kinds of models from different ethnic backgrounds. We want to show diversity in our advertising and not give people the impression that girls have to look a particular way.”

Despite H&M’s good intentions, there is still more that can be done in terms of promoting a healthy body image within the fashion industry. Using healthy and diverse models is the first step; hopefully we will see a wider variety of beautiful and realistic women promoting fashion campaigns in the future.

Elizabeth Finney

For more information on Beyonce’s collaboration with H&M, click here.