Hailee Steinfeld, 14, is the face of the new Miu Miu campaign. (Bruce Weber)
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Flip through the newest fall ad campaigns in the fashion mags, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d picked up a Back to School catalog.
An ad for the Marc by Marc Jacobs clothing line features 13-year-old actress Elle Fanning standing vacant-eyed in front of a wall. “True Grit” actress Hailee Steinfeld, 14, is the face of Miu Miu’s new campaign. In one photo she sits by a stretch of railroad tracks, wearing high heels while rubbing her eyes like a tired child; in another, she sports a jeweled dress while eating a slice of pizza.
Meanwhile, Elle’s older sister, 17-year-old Dakota, is featured in an ad for Marc Jacobs’ new perfume “Oh Lola!” In the picture, she gazes seductively at the camera as she lounges on the floor in a pink dress — with a bottle of the scent held suggestively between her legs.
So why are all the newest fashion muses so young? And what is so high fashion about high school freshmen? Will these ad campaigns inspire grown women to wear the same clothes?
“The fact that they’re using a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old is very questionable,” says Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, a kids’ and media advocacy group.
“Just their ages alone shows poor judgment. It’s the premature oversexualization of young girls.”
Even though the ads are targeted at adults, “girls will see them, and they’ll have an impact,” he says.
“The marketers’ job is to get people to spend money, especially kids. Ten-year-olds read Teen Vogue.” (For the record, the ads featuring Elle and Dakota Fanning appear in the August issue of Teen Vogue, too.) The bottom line, he says, is that “you have to be responsible for the message you put out. This stuff is just not OK.”
Not so, says Steinfeld, who just last week defended her ad to the blog Fashionista. “The best part about [the Miu Miu] collection . . . is the fact that it’s so sophisticated — it’s timeless,” she said.
“For younger girls like me, it works. It feels appropriate.”
This isn’t the first time an advertiser has used young girls in fashion. It is, in fact, Dakota Fanning’s second stint modeling for Jacobs — she first posed for him when she was 13.
“I’m by no means a pedophile, but there’s a purity to youth,” Jacobs told New York magazine at the time. “All that is more intriguing to me than knowing, headstrong, oozing sexuality.”
And who can forget the 1980 Calvin Klein jeans campaign in which Brooke Shields, then 14, purred: “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
While the current ads are “not as egregiously sexualized as the Calvin Klein ads, there’s still an element of titillation and exploitation, because these girls are so young,” says Meenakshi Gigi Durham, author of “The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls” and an associate professor of mass communications at the University of Iowa.
The images “hold up adolescent bodies as ideals of womanhood,” she adds. “There are many women in their 20s and 30s who are beautiful, but they focus on these little girls.”
Inside the industry, though, some say it’s just a matter of fashion capitalizing on the power of celebrity. In a crowded market, you can never underestimate the simple calculation of a pretty — and recognizable — face.
Plus, it doesn’t hurt that all three have serious acting cred. “There is substance there; [Elle] isn’t just a pretty face,” adds Jane Keltner de Valle, fashion news director at Teen Vogue. “You could say that for all [three girls].”
Former model Jenna Sauers, 25, says the use of models in their early teens is not so surprising. “For models who just work as models, it’s very common that they would start around age 13,” she says. Indeed, the new fall campaign for Prada features American model Ondria Hardin, who was 13 when the ads were shot.
In poor taste? Possibly. Out of the norm? Not really. But the question remains: Will a grown woman buy a dress because she sees a teenager wearing it?
“I don’t know if there are many women in their 20s who want to look like, be compared to or dress like a 14-year-old,” says Sauers. “It’s just not a natural link from a customer’s perspective.”