Thin line for skinny models
Teenage girls shrug off the health dangers to aspire to the super-thin images of female beauty portrayed in western society, specialists warn, amid a heated debate on skinny models.
As a catwalk ban in Spain on fashion models deemed too thin stokes controversy in the world’s fashion capitals, a French endocrinologist warned that 15 to 20-year-olds were “a generation formatted in thinness”.
“The young population of today has only seen thin people on the front page of magazines, on posters at the bus stops,” Annie Lacuisse-Chabot said.
She welcomed the move by the Madrid organisers of the Pasarela Cibeles fashion week, to bar five models whose body mass index, calculated on a height-weight ratio, was too low.
But fashion professionals in Paris have defended the trend for super-slim.
“Weight has nothing to do” with the choice of a model, said one official from a large model agency, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“One looks at a girl as a whole, one never looks at the weight.”
But he conceded: “They are asked to respect their body, to not gain too much weight.”
Karen Pfrunder, casting director at Reflex Event, which specialises in organising catwalk shows, reiterated that a model’s weight did not come into the equation. Rather, she said, the criteria was for 90cm hips.
“When you are 1.8m it’s harder to have 90cm hips,” she acknowledged, adding, however, that “fashion is like that, it always has been like that”.
The issue cast a shadow over last week’s London fashion week, the second stop after New York and ahead of Milan and Paris, of a whirlwind month-long fashion festival.
French magazine Elle took the initiative two years ago to keep extremely thin models off its front cover, also applying the body mass index (BMI) defined by the World Health Organisation.
BMI measures body fat based on height and weight; it is thought that a model measuring 1.75m in height would have to weigh at least 55kg to comply with the stipulation.
The restrictions have triggered media speculation about whether models like Kate Moss, reportedly 1.68m and 49kg, could be affected.
While it is possible to be very thin and healthy, others are simply under-nourished, Lacuisse-Chabot said, pointing to nutritional deficiencies, notably in protein that can lead to fatigue, as well as problems with periods and fertility.
But psychological problems, such as less resistance to stress, depression, the onset of eating disorders, even anorexia and suicide, can also be sparked, she warned.
For about 20 years, women and girls with a perfectly normal body mass index have been consulting doctors on slimming, but the trend is now a social phenomenon and affects ever-younger girls, a Paris symposium heard in 2003.
A study published at the time showed how women tended to believe themselves to be fatter than they actually were.
At the start of the 1980s, winter editions of women’s magazines already showed very thin models on their covers but swathed in coats or hats, according to the study by the Paris-based Institute of Political Sciences.
Since 1985, models have stripped right down, regardless of the season.
“In our western societies, we have moved from a latent anguish, deep, very old, of a lack of food, of fear of famine, which valued the body enveloped in reassuring fat, to an ideal model of almost skinniness, while never have we had so much to eat and such security,” anthropologist Annie Hubert, research director of France’s national centre of scientific research, said.
But thin looks set to remain a la mode.
“Thinness remains synonymous with elegance, and that is not anywhere near changing,” said Sylvie Fabregon, of the Contrebande model agency.
Agencies “pick very tall girls, very thin, so that clothing falls better”, she said.
She added that “if the agencies take rounder girls, the designers are going to look for models elsewhere.
“Thinner people will no longer buy.”
Nevertheless a ban would change nothing, Fabregon conceded.
She suggested instead “daring to say ‘look how ugly it is’ in magazines referring to a photo of an overly-skinny model, rather than stating ‘before summer, lose three to five kilos’.” This approach would work better, she said - Sapa-AFP
