Alissa Quart Quotes

I'm really tired, incredibly tired of hearing people say that fashion is behind anorexia.

The pressure to be thin, which causes guilt and obsessiveness around food, is terrible and starts so early. For me, it started at sixteen when I left home and gained weight for the first time and was told by a slightly older boy, out of the blue, that I was "too plump." The shock of that lasted a good long time.

In this business, there is an insane amount of pressure, spoken and unspoken, to be thin. If you look at some of the television shows, eating disorders become like a competitive thing.

What is this drive to be thinner, prettier, better dressed, other? Who exactly is this other and what does she look like beyond the jacket she's wearing or the food she's not eating? What might we be doing, thinking, feeling about if we didn't think about body image, ever?

In New York, if you weigh under 200 pounds and decline so much as a cookie at a co-worker's party, women will flock to your side, assuring you of your appealing physique. This is how skittish we are about the dangers of anorexia and the pressures of body image.

Fashion is killing women's body image of themselves.

As a teenager, I had big breasts for my age, and my friends cracked on me a lot.

Compared to a lot of actresses my age, I'm actually overweight.

When I was a teenager, I would have tried anything that an actress I liked was doing to get thin.

I won't allow magazines in the house. When I was younger, I wanted to have my hair cut like so-and-so in the class above me at school, not somebody in a magazine. You see young girls trying to dress like so-and-so because they've seen lots of pictures of them.

Outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in.

I was considered chubby as a teen.

Words and images deeply impact the way we view our bodies, and the consequences can be very damaging.

I was called 'fat' 200 times on shoots and had serious trouble fitting in the clothes at fashion shows. All these things break you down to a point where you look in the mirror and don't like what you see.

How much of fashion is fueled by insecurity - for better or worse?

It's sad to hear that 1 in 3 girls have an eating disorder, because they're trying to be something that they think they need to be, when it's such a lie that they believe. Meanwhile all over the world there's people that are starving or dying of something crazy that we forget, and we think we're the only ones in this world.

Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn't obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin.

We're always bombarded with images from magazines of what looks cool and sexy.

As young women, we all feel a pressure to look a certain way, and sometimes it is just too much to handle. But, there are good and bad ways to deal with this pressure. A terrible way to handle this pressure is to complain about all of our flaws and expect other girls to join in.

I used to refer to myself as a 'theoretical anorexic,' just as crazy when it came to body image, but saved by a lack of self-discipline. My daughters do everything better than I do - they're smarter, more beautiful, happier. What if they end up better at anorexia, too?

There is an epidemic right now of girls dumbing themselves down... in middle school because they think it makes them attractive.

As the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, I represent the designers. And while we can by no means take the blame for eating disorders, we can play our part in addressing this important issue.

We are being accused that some models are anorexic. But we as fashion designers cannot be blamed, because you know, when I talk to women around the world, rich and poor and young and old and intellectual and not, what they want to be is skinny. You ask them, 'What is your dream?' It's to be skinny. That's all they want.

I've always been the porky boy in my head.

I don't think I'm curvaceous. It's simply that most other actresses are really, stupidly tiny.