At only 25, Londoner Clementine Prendergast is on the forefront of a neoteric body neutrality movement, crusading for self-acceptance, body confidence and positive self-esteem amidst a negative body image climate. Last 12 months, Prendergast arrange her Fat Girl initiative – a web based platform which explores body politics with the aim of helping girls who struggle with eating disorders and body image issues. “Having struggled with an eating disorder for the perfect a part of a decade, I wanted to search out a solution to leverage learnings from my negative experiences in a humorous, accessible yet intelligible way,” says Prendergast. “In recent times there was a whole lot of “consciousness raising” and awareness of eating disorders and mental health issues, which is completely good, but sometimes distracts from actually doing anything about these issues.” Prendergast is currently developing materials for a series of college workshops with the aim of teaching young people, particularly girls, about digital resilience and body image, constructing on evidence-based research. She’s also working on developing a Fat Girl chatbot and exploring options combining CBT and other behavioural change techniques with analytics to create a therapy app which is targeted to body image and disordered eating.

Last month, Prendergast also launched the #FakeBodies campaign, to coincide with World Mental Health Day. “It asks the UK government to vary the laws on Photoshopping following recent laws passed in France and Israel,” she says. This could mean that each one digitally manipulated images would need to declare that they’ve been altered with a warning marker. We caught up with Clementine to debate her views on how technology is impacting the best way we see beauty, the drive behind her campaign, in addition to her aspirations on giving young women of today a healthier sense of self.

What’s the story behind Fat Girl?
Clementine Prendergast: The thought was to create something that might’ve appealed to my teenage self which was just as ‘cool’ and aspirational as the style magazines myself and plenty of other teen girls (tragically) lusted after. Fat Girl is a community in search of to create positive social change.

What was the drive behind launching Fat Girl?
Clementine Prendergast: At a basic level, as I educated myself in recovery from my eating disorder, I realised that each woman I do know has a fancy and barely unhealthy relationship to their body which channels itself through obsessive exercise (‘disciplining’ the body), strange diets and semi-religious practices around cleansing and fasting. I feel, culturally, we now have a really strange relationship to bodies, we see them as simply physical vessels, we criminalise those which might be larger and rejoice those which might be thinner. Nonetheless, the best way we use and relate to our bodies is much more nuanced than this. Within the ten years I’ve had an eating disorder, I even have not been underweight nor obese, in truth my weight has largely stayed the stay in a ‘healthy’ BMI range. Yet, I’ve spent this time obsessive about exercising, on every weight-reduction plan conceivable, abusing laxatives etc., I had a bizarre and alienating relationship to my very own body which from the surface looked totally ‘healthy’. So, Fat Girl endeavours to encourage us to query a number of the practices, attitudes and behaviours around bodies, food and sweetness we now have come to just accept as normal. I feel we spend far an excessive amount of time obsessing about thinness, spinning classes and what number of carbs we now have eaten once we could possibly be spending that point reading, writing, having sex… living – activities which might bring us much more fulfilment, joy and purpose.

What are your feelings about beauty in the fashionable day?
Clementine Prendergast: I believe very similar to our current political system, beauty in the fashionable day is increasingly polarised and reasonably confusing. On the one hand, there’s, what I find to be, a rather frightening tribe – the ‘Kardashianisation’ of beauty which is heavily constructed, homogeneous – reliant on surgeries, personal trainers, green juices and make-up to project an aesthetic which appears flawless without imperfection. Then again, there are the ‘positive’ subcultures, which some could say are only as extreme, the body positivity, skin positivity, the unconventional acceptance and celebration of fatness, of pimples, of body hair – those communities rejecting the dominant Kardashian narrative and in search of to reclaim their marginalised selves.

In some ways, given the ferocity of a lot of the pictures we’re sold in promoting, I believe it’s in some ways this acceptance of imperfect is just as unrealistic because the attainment of perfection.

Fashion is embracing ‘plus-size’ models, nevertheless it’s rare to see plus size faces in beauty, what are your thoughts on this? How can we alter this?
Clementine Prendergast: If ‘plus size” means ‘larger than the common’, that is problematic since it begs the query of what’s average? I believe it might be preferable to think about beauty beyond labels and appreciate different aesthetics for his or her uniqueness. If the query is how will we get people to acknowledge ‘plus size beauty’ as beautiful it goes back to greater diversity in fashion/ promoting. If beauty is basically a cultural construct (I’m sure the evolutionary psychologists would disagree) and psychology teaches us social norms are probably the most powerful thing in changing attitudes, we just need to change the social norm. Vogue needs to place ‘plus size’ faces on their cover for us to start out finding them beautiful.

There was a moment when talking about eating disorders was very topical, but that seems to somewhat have died down. We now discuss depression and anxiety or diversity. How can we stop these topics becoming subject to trend?
Clementine Prendergast: We are able to’t! Humans are incredibly impressionable, subject to herd mentality. Our behaviours follow our peers and this follows the ideas and pictures we’re sold in promoting and society-at-large.

Further to this, social media has heightened the speed at which we now have access to those innovations which implies information travels between us quicker than ever before. There may be an awesome irony in that while mental health and more socially inclusive issues at the moment are on the cultural agenda, given the rise of those technologies the narratives around them are also always changing –  meaning that we’re left with a confusion as as to whether having depression is the recent topic. I’m being facetious, but I believe it’s true.

While I don’t think we are able to stop these subjects becoming trends because its the character of the beast, I do imagine the more these subjects are normalised the more nuanced the conversation around mental health, eating disorders and body politics will turn out to be. What is prime though, is to maintain having conversations and heterodox debates around these issues to try our greatest to grasp them from as many perspectives as possible and from there work out what the perfect steps forward are.

Re your #FakeBodies campaign, how do you think that advances in technology have impacted body image perceptions?
Clementine Prendergast: In her book Alone Together, psychoanalyst Sherry Turkle says technology distorts our understanding of connection and enables us to flee experiencing authenticity or an actual sense of intimacy in our lives. “Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities,” she writes. I believe it is a really powerful statement which relates very closely to body image. Technology has allowed us to vary and manipulate our bodies in whatever ways we would like. While this is an excellent thing for our sense of control I find it problematic from a purely aesthetic perspective because it will possibly divorce us from many necessary psychological processes, the human vulnerabilities, our desire for love, connection, acceptance, validation, price, purpose – the entire things we all know contribute to positive body image.

Regarding the campaign, there’s a growing body of research which is illuminating the consequences of that strange phenomenon, social media, on body image and mental health (Guardian, JAMA, Children’s Society). Given the largely visual nature of those platforms, social media encourage us to turn out to be defined by our physical self – making us into our marketing machines. Research shows that is dangerous, particularly for young girls, who’re more vulnerable to social comparison, than young boys.

While we cannot eliminate these digital enhancement tools, we are able to aim to scale back the effect of their impact on young girls. The campaign follows recent laws passed in France and Israel which made it a legal requirement for photoshopped images to come back with a written warning (like those common on cigarette packets) – calling out that images have been altered. Academic papers suggest most of these warnings could have a positive effect in helping people understand what’s real and what will not be.

Do you think that there are any positive innovations on the intersection of beauty and technology straight away?
Clementine Prendergast: Absolutely!! Disclaimer: I’m a techno-optimist! I work in innovation by day and think technology is an excellent thing in enlightening us! I believe anything to do with personalisation is great – skin matching style apps. It is likely to be a curveball answer but I feel beauty is more nuanced and technology can potentially give us the tools for greater introspection and understanding of ourselves as humans. With this, we’re capable of have a more 360 degree understanding and appreciation of what beauty means for us.

What measures can we take to mitigate the bad influences of the digital age on beauty ideals?
Clementine Prendergast: Well, sign the #FakeBodies petition and take a look at to vary the law on photoshopping to get us some clarity on what’s real and what will not be! But more seriously, I believe I answer more with respect to mitigating the bad influences on the earth. The results of the digital age are probably no higher or worse than previous eras, they simply manifest in alternative ways. It’s about teaching young people critical pondering, mental resilience, emotional intelligence, introspection. Encouraging people to query what they see, encourage and teach them the set of tools to just accept their minds, their bodies, their negative feelings and experiences as quickly as possible. We’re never not going to have beauty standards – to be human is to desire beauty – we just need to be critical within the messages society feeds us and develop the resilience to the entire rubbish the world throws us!

What does the longer term of beauty appear to be to you?
Clementine Prendergast: I believe social media goes to proceed to encourage young people to self-objectify – I’m interested to see the evolution of the ‘selfie’. I fear for the rise in surgeries and pseudo-science diets – the flexibility to remodel our physical selves into any shape/ any aesthetic we would like. While I believe we are going to increasingly live in a hyper-real, hyper-happy, hyper-filtered world I also think we are going to see the rise of subcultures subverting and questions these norms (a la Dazed Beauty!).

What lies in the longer term for yourself and Fat Girl?
Clementine Prendergast: I’m planning on self-publishing a book in some unspecified time in the future in the brand new 12 months exploring the practice of embodiment – how we ingest and project and understand our emotional selves through our own bodies, with a specific emphasis in exploring this within the digital age. I’m also going to start out teaching body image and digital resilience workshops in schools to assist young people to arrange for a life lived online and proceed planning on how one can develop the Fat Girl chatbot and switch it right into a more sophisticated piece of technology which may be used as a therapy tool specifically targeted to those scuffling with body image and eating disorder issues. Then once I get to about 50, I’ll train to be a therapist.