Filippa Hamilton, Ralph Lauren's Retouched Model: I Was Fired For Being Too Fat (VIDEO)

*Scroll down for the Today Show's interview with Filippa Hamilton*

Designer Ralph Lauren apologized last week for retouching an ad using an already-skinny model, making her look entirely emaciated...but that's not the whole story. Model Filippa Hamilton told the New York Daily News that the fashion house fired her in April for being too fat.

"They fired me because they said I was overweight and I couldn't fit in their clothes anymore," she said.

The company released a statement saying that their relationship with Hamilton ended "as a result of her inability to meet the obligations under her contract with us."

Five-foot-ten, 120-pound Hamilton, who wears a size 4, had worked for Ralph Lauren since 2002, and she was caught off-guard by the photo:

"I was shocked to see that super skinny girl with my face," she told the Daily News. "It's very sad, I think, that Ralph Lauren could do something like that."

23-year-old Hamilton thinks Ralph Lauren owes an even bigger apology to the American public.

"I'm very proud of what I look like, and I think a role model should look healthy."

The timing is unfortunate as today is Ralph Lauren's 70th birthday.

Hamilton appeared on Wednesday's "Today Show" with Cosmopolitan editor Kate White to discuss the "sad" situation, saying she doesn't think she'll sue the company.

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Comments

[SkreetGil1]

I won't be buying any Ralph Loren stuff from now on! You suck Ralph!

[prairiejane]

My 8 yr old son saw the photo on TV during the Today coverage of this story and said "Man, she looks weird!" When an 8 yr old boy knows a photo has been freakishly photoshopped, you've definitely gone too far.

[rare1walking]

What I haven't heard discussed here, is how men in general still want to objectify women's bodies, as if they are entitled to do that, or actively support the value of a woman as not in her humanity, but how closely she fits a Barbie model.

I would be uncomfortable as a child, also, when the pictures of grown women get increasingly close to a waifish teen or tweenager. What strikes me is the movement towards sexy and acceptable body image moving towards child-like characteristics. Perhaps the psychological profile of these designers (movie makers and others with opportunities to shape our society) is really one of a pedophile, and their work asks the public to accept their warped reality. There certainly are thousands of men that cruise child porn sites, exercise a deluded male privilege of objectification, and go to other countries to have sexual relations with children. Men acting like dogs is nothing new, nor are women that allow that.

Sexual arousal patterns are often formed in unasked for childhood sexual encounters, which cause adults to be stuck developmentally, and even express this turmoil in their everyday work and lives.

I believe women should speak out on these posts, and refuse to buy magazines or clothing that perpetuate or promote a demeaning myth of "beauty" and thus, subservience and a societal slant not worthy of passing onto our young. FREEDOM!!! Pamela

[ObjectiveReality]

Do you blame men for the way women dress, too? Women are not objects but your point of view is not objective, either. Lastly, the majority of men in power at PRC are gay...

[fshrmn]

I ask myself why the producers did this. In advertising, nothing is done without a well thought out design. As weird as the image looks, a team of people approved the design. They approved it knowing people would think it was strange. Was it a publicity stunt?

[Rose Petal]

That's the way it is supposed to be, but I don't know how well that always works. I've seen countless photos which were obviously digitally altered to an extreme. I used to get the Victoria's Secret catalog in the mail, and there was a lot of inconsistency among the photos. On one page, a model would look like her waist had been sucked in and trimmed down, but on another page that exact same model would look a lot bigger, even bloated. When I say bloated, I mean it was obvious they have used digital retouching and they messed up big time.I remember one photo where the model even looked a little swirly. I'll have to dig out those photos. I saved some of the catalogs because the digital retouching was so bad.

[pooteh]

people making hay of this are pushing the old idea that women are mentally fragile.

they are making an issue of a bad photoshop. like it or not really bad photoshop does show up in fashion store posters. google photoshop disasters for an enlightening experience. missing body parts, only partly erased people, mismatched body parts etc. you think much care is taken? it isn't. so making hay of it can be a mistake.

making an issue over nothing is a load of nonsense.

the constant belly aching about womens body image is doing nothing but making them fatter. like it or not the reality is your FRIENDS are what make you fat. google it, your FRIENDS and who you eat with are what makes you fat according to the latest studies. jives with the reality where most women are obese, and not models who are about to blow away.

like the old self esteem thing ...the common wisdom was totally wrong. bullys have high self esteem. and women get the idea of what its ok to be from their friends.

anyways its a load of nonsense, she was hired for 8 freaking years. how long do you expect to be paid royally for a pretty face for one company? for life? 8 years is already epic, to complain about it is just silly. shes a pretty girl who made bank off her looks. cry no false tears.

[Rose Petal]

What I don't understand is why she was fired in the first place and why she is speaking out now. She waited 6 months after being fired to come out about what happened? She says she did so because of the release of the photo, but that's not the first time something like that has happened. I just looked through some of her old photos, and the variation is very noticeable. There are other photos out there in which she looks nearly as thin as the recently released photo of her being digitally altered to look thinner. Why didn't she complain about the other photos of her that made her look nearly as thin or just as thin as the one causing all this controversy?

As far as her getting fired goes, I don't understand how she can be fired for being overweight, which she clearly is not, if she has been the same weight since she first started modeling for RL. She said so herself--she weights just as she did and always has....her weight has not fluctuated. It doesn't make sense to me.

[Moonsip]

Um, bullies do NOT have high self-esteem, otherwise they wouldn't be bullies.

[Rose Petal]

And please don't get me started about the time I got my ass literally beat because a group of people felt like reminding me that of my weight. My nose was broken. I had a concussion. My white shirt wasn't white anymore; it was covered in blood. Oh, and then there's the time where I went in for a job interview,where the majority of the question were about my weight and breast size. This stupid man, the one interviewing me, kept asking me how much I weighed and what size bra I wear. The interview didn't last very long because he blatantly told me that he would not hire me because I was skinny. And then there is the time I almost got fired from another job because the general manager came in for a walk-through and said that I was too skinny to do the job.

[Rose Petal]

About a year ago, maybe a little less, I was deliberately shoved by a clerk at a clothing store. I was walking through the racks of clothing when suddenly I found myself being pushing into one of the racks. When I tried to gain my balance, it happened again. When I finally looked up at the clerk the clerk said (I'm paraphrasing here), "if you weren't so skinny, then it wouldn't have been so easy to push you." The clerk then proceeded to block me several times while I was walking through the store. I would turn to walk one way, and then clerk would be there, in my way, so I would have to turn around. When I'd pick up an article of clothing, the clerk would make comments about how I could never wear anything like that. When I finally reached the counter, to pay for my items, the clerk decided to overcharge me and then pocket the money,right in front of me. I literally watched the clerk take my money and put it in her pocket, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. Of course, the clerk, after all of this, was nice enough to tell me I should walk up to the food court and order a hamburger.

[pissdoffinohio]

what the he.ll did yuo stil BUY thngs frm that store for?! sereusly? yuo handed ovr yuor mony knowing yuo were being ovrcharjd? being handld like that invited a thret of a 911 call on yuor cell!
at the vry leest a stompng public fit demandg to speek to a manajr or a corprat fone #.

pregnansy has litrly saved my own dauter's life. she was an unbeleevbl 5'10" , not quite 115, but is now vry helthy puttng her baby frrst.

dsrgard spell, its med.

[Rose Petal]

I personally have a hard time understanding where some people are coming from here, specifically those that keep talking about how they are victims and real women have curves. Anyone who has read through all the comments on here, as well as many others on the internet, will see that the overwhelming majority does NOT prefer skinny women and finds such images appalling. They will see that pretty much everyone agrees with their standard of beauty, one that denotes skinny as unappealing. Men and women alike want women to be fuller figured, with larger breasts and all those other attributes previously described. So what are people complaining? Everyone agrees with you. Everyone thinks bigger is better, at least to a certain degree and most certainly compared to "bean-poles." Everyone loves you, prefers you, can't stop going on and on about how you are better, yet you are still complaining. I suppose some of you won't be satisfied until society pretends like these skinny women do not exist and they have become completely absent in the media.

I wish some of you had an ounce of an idea of how demeaning people can be toward skinny women and how much pain some of them, although I won't say all, have gone through.

I'll use myself as an example here.

[Moonsip]

The problem is that the media and pop culture tend to glorify an unrealistic standard that women are bombarded with on a daily basis, hence the resentment. Not only that, but men see these completely fabricated (either through plastic surgery or airbrushing) images of women with large breasts on tall skinny bodies, bodies simply not found in nature, and believe this fantasy to be possible. The standards of beauty were much different 100 years ago or so when a more voluptuous, healthy woman, one who could sustain pregnancies, was considered desirable.

[Rose Petal]

The idea that more "voluptuous" women are better able to sustain pregnancy has become an exaggeration, a borderline myth. As far as carrying a fetus goes, that boils down to many factors, one of which is the size of the pelvis. The size of a woman's pelvis is not dependent on how much "meat she has on her bones." There are actually some women who are considered underweight, for example, who have a considerably larger pelvis than some women who are more meaty. Even if a woman appears to have wider hips, it is difficult to tell if that is due to muscle and fat, which contributes to the appearance of wider hips, or if it is the actual size of the hip bones and pelvis. Furthermore, breast size being an indicator of fertility is simply false. The study of evolution shows that our female ancestors DID NOT HAVE BREASTS. Breasts were formed during pregnancy and following the birth of a female's offspring, the breasts shrank and returned to a FLATTENED STATE. The size of a woman's breasts does not affect the ability to breast feed because breasts are primarily made of fatty deposits. Fat does not produce milk; mammary glands are what produces milk.

[Rose Petal]

continued...

There have been plenty of smaller women who have had no trouble conceiving and giving birth, just as their have been some "fuller" women who have turned out to be infertile. Each and every body is different, and one cannot simply fertility and the ability to carry a fetus on weight alone. It's more complicated than that. And it's very sad that people are so narrow minded and tend to stereotype. That's one of the worst stereotypes you can place on a women: Tell her because her body doesn't look a certain way that not only does she not look like a woman,but that she is also infertile and incapable of having children. I have a distant cousin that is skinny as a rail, and yet she was able to get pregnant every year from the time she was 16 until she was in her late 20's. This distant cousin has given birth to more kids than I have personally known anyone to give birth to.

[Rose Petal]

Also, I once worked with a girl who was skinner than Filippa. I would even go as far as to say she was as skinny as the digitally altered photo of Filippa that has stirred up all this controversy---and it was all natural, btw. This really skinny girl eventually gave birth to healthy twins.

[pooteh]

mostly its manufactured outrage with a comfortable narrative of victimhood. the reality is american women and western women in general like the men are busy stuffing their mouths with food. they are fat, and getting ever fatter despite all the cries about fashion bean poles. its a misdirection of energy, and perhaps a misdirection of self loathing. this woman had 8 years of a giant paycheck for looking pretty. she was entitled to nothing, never mind a job for life. photoshoping is badly done in in many shop posters, google bad photoshop disasters, many have mismatched or missing limbs even, taking incompetence and trying to make political hay out of it is silly. and only pushes the idea of women as victims and fragile. its also patronizing, the same way conservatives characterize people as too simple to enjoy say harry potter or rock and roll without going down the slippery slope of depravity. its always about that fictional person you worry about not being able to tell fiction from reality. the "impressionable" not me that i "worry" for.

[Rose Petal]

It seems like, in American culture, it is perfectly ok to criticize a woman about her weight, as long as it is because she is skinny. If people make one comment about a larger person, people get up in arms about it and immediately call them out, accusing them of homosexuality or pedophilia. . Not when it's a skinny person being insulted.

And what about Keira Knightley's stance of digital altering of photos? She came out and told everyone her photos were digitally altered to make her look fuller, yet no one complained about how the digital altering of her photos was wrong. They turned her A-cup breasts into C-cups, but everyone is apparently all for that, right? You can't moan and whine about models' photos being digitally altered to make them look thinner and then readily accept when their photos are digitally altered to make them look fuller or even to make them look not as thin as they really are. It's hypocritical. Do you know how many pictures have been altered to make narrow hips look a little wider, to erase protruding hip bones and even a few ribs poking out?

[mark12345]

Keira Knightley's is The po-mans Winona Ryder an we don't much care for her anyhow.

[Rose Petal]

I also have to note that people's perceptions are not always correct. I read an article written by a model who was infuriated by how directly rude people were to her because of her weight. People frequently walked up to her, and, to her face, commented on her weight, telling her she needed to eat something, asking her if she was anorexic, and asking her if she was, like, a size zero. In the article, she debunked these assertions by informing people that she did in fact eat and that she WAS ACTUALLY A SIZE 6 OR 7. Even though she was a size 6, people automatically assumed she was a size zero. I can personally relate. People frequently walk up to me and go, "What are you, like a size zero?" No, actually, I am about a size 6 myself, and there is no way in hell, despite the fact you think I am that small, that I could ever fit a size zero pants halfway up my legs. If I tried to put on a size zero pants, I'd probably rip all the seams, yet people still want to think I am a size zero. People are stupid.

[Rose Petal]

If there somehow is a predominant image of beauty pervasive in the media, it is not the bean-pole model with "no shape." The closest I could come to somewhat agreeing with some of these comments is that there is an image of beauty which COMBINES TWO EXTREMES. You have a depiction of beauty that gives the women the boobs, butt, and hips of a fuller-figured or even average-sized women, but gives the women the small waist of what some would consider an underweight or anorexic model.

Women are so busy hating on each other that they don't realize that all of us women are victims here, regardless of our size. Larger or average-sized women are being pitted against skinny women when really, if we want to look at the image I described above, no one truly fits that ideal unless they have had some sort of augmentation. So basically, we have larger women wishing they had a smaller waistline because of this image, and skinner women wishing they had a larger bustline because of this image. Everyone suffers, not just larger women. I can't believe no one has ever noticed that before!

So, if there is a harmful image of beauty, I'd say the image I described would be the one.

[Rose Petal]

And if no one believes me, ask this question: How many women do you know who desperately wished they were tall, had absolutely no breasts, and wished that they had no hips and no behind? How many women do you know who have said, "I wished I looked more like a boy"?

Women do not want to look like this. Read any study on body image,and when females are asked the one thing that don't want to lose, all of them say their breasts. Most women wish they had larger breasts and a more "feminine" figure, even if they already have that figure. Don't believe me? Well, look at all the types of women men are constantly drooling over, all the women that women everywhere are constantly saying have a "knockout" body. Look at all the Playboy pinups, the posters guys have on their walls, and the women in the lingerie magazines. OK, this is the part where I admit not many of them are what one would consider overweight, but they certainly do not look like the bean-pole models people keep criticizing. Even if they have a trim waist, they still have overly large breasts, defined hips, and a shapely behind; they are not stick figures.

[Rose Petal]

And If I hear one more thing about eating disorders, I think I am going to explode. Has anyone stopped to think about how MEN GET EATING DISORDERS too? Has anyone questioned about men with eating disorders relate to this discussion? And what about the fact that it has been proposed that there might be a GENETIC LINK when it comes to developing an eating disorder? And let's not forget how loosely we are throwing around the term "eating disorder." Has anyone stopped to think about the other types of EATING DISORDERS that do not involve food deprivation or vomiting after every meal? There are eating disorders that involve OVER CONSUMPTION of food. Some people have compulsive-eating disorder or binge-eating disorder.

People are over generalizing here, assuming that all cases of anorexia and bulimia are the direct result of an extreme diet that some girl committed herself to because she wanted to lose weight. No! Eating disorders are much more complicated than that because they are PSYCHOLOGICAL disorders. I've done plenty of people who suffered from all kinds of eating disorders, and, believe it or not, there were quite a few that never wanted to lose weight in the first place. Most were already extremely underweight when they developed an eating disorder and had wished they were fuller and more curvy, yet they still developed an eating disorder. People need to stop looking at this model-thing as causal factor and start seeing it is a symptom

[Rose Petal]

I've asked some of these girls why in the world they are wearing such outfits, and their answer is most always one of two responses: 1) Because boys like it; and 2) because they are sexy. All of this "real women have curves" and "real women have breasts and meat on their bones" is seriously corrupted young girls who already are extremely vulnerable because they have yet to fully form their identities.Thus, they end up turning into over sexualized youth that want all the wrong kind of attention so they can feel better about themselves.

Why don't we try, for a change, sending the message that it is the mind and personality that makes the woman, not her size? Why don't we encourage intelligence and independent thinking, so that the next generation will be more open, accepting, tolerant, and diverse?

Claiming that models below a certain weight should be banned and constantly bashing them is discrimination. It is no different from claiming that models above a certain weight should be banned and bashing people for not being skinny enough. It's the same thing; it's just that the target of hate and discrimination is different.

[Rose Petal]

. By making such comments, people are teaching others, especially the highly impressionable youth of today, that the only way a female can feel good about herself is if she is knocking down others, insulting them, and screaming how superior and more attractive she is than all others--in this case, superior and more attractive than women who do not meet the prerequisite of femininity: a fuller, voluptuous body with extra meat in all the "right" places. Moreover, by proclaiming that a woman's worth and femininity is defined by her not looking skinny and defined instead by having a huge rack, wide hips, and a fuller behind, people are teaching young girls that they are nothing more than the sum of their body parts. In plainer words: Young girls are taught that they are defined by the size of their sexual attributes and that they should aim to become over sexualized beings.
I've personally seen young girls, as young as 12, think that because they are fuller figured that they are obligated to flaunt their cleavage and the rest of their body parts. These 12 year-old girls, some of whom by society's standards would be considered overweight, walk around wearing short, tight shirts with their stomachs exposed and their 12 year-old boobs hanging out.

[Rose Petal]

It is incredibly disappointing to read through all the comments scattered across the web in response to the model being fired and the use of digitally altered photos in advertising. I honestly don't know what to say because I really don't think anything that could be said would do any good or open other people's minds to consider other perspectives. There is so much hate and misinformation. I don't think there is room for logical thinking or understanding. Yet, I have to admit, I feel the need to speak up and point out a few things.

Reading through all the buzz on the web, all I see are messages of hate and discrimination, despite the fact that the people making such negative comments are self-proclaimed defenders of all women and want nothing more than to provide positive roles models for young girls. Bashing skinny models and claiming they are ugly, hideous, repulsing, and look like walking skeletons, 10 year-old boys, crack addicts, and concentration camp victims is not setting a good example. By making such comments, a person is doing nothing more than proving they are a hateful, intolerant hypocrite that does NOT want ALL women to be appreciated as they are and does NOT want ALL women to feel comfortable in their own skin and proud of who they are.