Can this 26-year-old change the shape of the fashion industry?

[Duncan Grant]

Harvard student, model agent, hero to real women everywhere


Ben Barry and his models rehearsing for a runway show on March 16, 2009 in Toronto (Kathryn Gaitens/Getty Images for The Boston Globe)


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(Ben) Barry, who focused on Women's Studies as an undergraduate, is now a visiting PhD student at Harvard Business School. He is studying at Cambridge University in England, but followed an adviser to Boston to continue his research. He arrived here in February and lives in Back Bay.

For his PhD, Barry's researching how women in eight different cultures react to fashion and beauty advertising. Based on the success of the Dove's advertising campaign - sales of Dove products grew 600 percent in the first two months of the campaign's 2004 launch and the company's global sales surpassed $1 billion that year - he's creating in-depth research to show the corporate and fashion worlds that they can reach more consumers, and sell more product, by showing a wider variety of body sizes, ages, and skin colors.

For his research, Barry created mock fashion advertisements - professional looking ads that were shot with thin, young women, and then reshot in precisely the same way with models of different sizes and ages from his agency.

"The idea is to see how women react to models who represent their size, age, and cultural background versus models who represent an ideal of Western beauty in these ads," he says." When I looked in the journals of marketing there was really nothing that addressed this. Right now it's just an argument that you can reach a wider audience. I'm trying to prove that with hard numbers."
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I found this at The Boston Globe. It's an interesting read. While I'm not an advocate of techniques to better manipulate consumers, I can appreciate Ben Barry's efforts.