Beth Ditto continues to have a Pop

The latest edition of Pop is embarking on a plan to subvert the idea of size zero models.

Not really, of course - that would involve hiring models for their magazine which reflects more accurately what real women look like. Instead, they're just going to lob in a photospread with Beth Ditto and hope that everyone mistakes tokenism for activism:

Katie Grand, fashion stylist and editor-in-chief of POP, said: "Beth Ditto has become an accidental size hero for the size-zero age ... She has become a generational icon, confounding the tedious stereotypes of what it is to be a wonderful 21st-century woman."

Grand's decision to feature Ditto is significant because it goes against the grain in a fashion industry where size still rules. "She is a very good, positive role model. There is something about her that makes everybody say, 'I'd like to be like that,'" Grand adds.

Apparently that quote took the Independent on Sunday's Susie Mesure five goes to transcribe, because it was hard to make out the words against the sounds of backs soundly being slapped.

Mesure doesn't ask Grand in what way Ditto's position has been "accidental" rather than calculated, thereby removing one of Ditto's saving graces: she hasn't just wandered into this by mistake, she's clearly playing the game two moves ahead of everyone else.

Nor does Mesure ask Grand why, if the usual, wafer-thin models are so "tedious", does she fill Pop with them? This issue does have more "real women", to be fair: Yoko Ono, Lily Allen and Lindsay Lohan. All women you might meet down the local chip shop, then. It's actually quite amusing when you stop battering your head on the table long enough to think about it: Pop Magazine's idea of what people in the real world are like is Lindsay Lohan.

Sorry, did we say amusing? We meant something more akin to the noise of a long, damaged howl.

Ditto, for her part, pops up for an interview:

"I'm afraid of being naked!" she says in the POP interview. "I was scared to death of being in a bikini for POP. I grew up poor white trash. I have hairy armpits. I'm fat."

This might be more convincing if Ditto hadn't already done the cover of NME naked, nor had a reputation for stripping down while playing live. And - since she's always maintained, correctly, that it's the choice of the individual to depilate or not, why would she be "afraid" of showing hairy armpits?