With @diesagar.bsky.social, @Katharina Ledebur, @August Lohse, @Karolina Sliwa!
Link ot the paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Super excited about our new paper on mobility that's out in Nature Human Behavior www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I love this paper for many reasons, but one is that we find beautiful 1/x power-law that spans 6 orders of magnitude hidden within the "ugly" distribution raw mobility data.
Louis Boucherie
The reason is that most of the change is happening on the tails of the distribution, at the extremes.
The increase in body measurement diversity comes from the introduction of a few plus-size models, not from a structural change in who is deemed fit to be a model.
Finally, we find that non-white models are 4.5 times more likely to also be plus-size.
The increase in diversity is carried across dimensions by the same group of individuals.
This pattern aligns with decades of intersectionality scholarship. What we add is large-scale empirical evidence from the fashion industry.
There is more in the paper: past attempts to regulate the industry (when they succeeded and when they failed), and a network analysis of industry prestige.
Even more striking: when we compare the Relative Fat Mass (think BMI) between the US population (NHANES data) and US models, the gap has not changed at all.
There is almost no overlap between models and the general population.
Models are getting more diverse on almost every dimension we measured: ethnicity, body size, nationality, eye color, hair color...
But the mean and interquartile range for body measurements are stable.
How can both be true? Things are getting more diverse, but they don't really change?
Is the fashion industry actually becoming more inclusive?
We analyzed 793,199 records over 25 years to find out. Our results are published today in PNAS.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Louis Boucherie
Louis Boucherie
Sune Lehmann
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
