Newswise: Study Finds Plus Size Models Rising Presence on Social Media

Newswise: Study Finds Plus Size Models Rising Presence on Social Media. “Collectively, 144 plus-sized models had 51 million followers and 190,000 total posts. While the top 10 highest paid mainstream models averaged 38 million followers compared to the top 10 plus sized models with an average of approximately 3.8 million followers, there was no significant difference between the average likes per post, comments per post and total posts between the top mainstream models and top plus-sized models.”

Ōkawa Tatsuya: Japan’s Best-Known Unknown Face (Nippon)

Nippon: Ōkawa Tatsuya: Japan’s Best-Known Unknown Face. “Looking for a different kind of job, Ōkawa was surfing the Internet when he happened to come across Pakutaso, which was recruiting models. He got in touch and was soon hired, although this was a job with no pay. Pakutaso is an outfit run on a shoestring by a handful of people who draw no salaries themselves and who provide stock photos to anyone free of charge. No matter how many times Ōkawa’s photo was uploaded to the Internet, he stood to receive not a single yen. Despite that, Ōkawa felt that the Internet’s time had come. He innocently believed that the more he got his face out there, the better his job prospects would be.” This is one of those stories that leaves me fascinated and full of questions and melancholic and bone-aware of how many people there are in the world […]

Bloomsbury Launches New Digital Archive of Fashion Photography

Bloomsbury has launched a new digital archive of fashion photography (and the ONLY story I could easily find was in The Daily Mail.) “The work of the independent publisher Bloomsbury, the new online archive features everything from top designers’ graduate shows to candid shots of original supermodels like Naomi, Kate and Helena. Bloomsbury spent more than three years painstakingly digitising and cataloging more than 750,000 images, which date from the 1970s up to 2000, to create its new searchable fashion library.” As you might imagine, this is not a free resource.