Drop Dead Gorgeous

“Size Zero, perfect!” “What’s that?”
“super-thin.”
“Are you kidding! That’s virtually skin and bones.”
“That’s what size you have to be to make it in this world.”
“That’s not reality. Most American women are size 12 and above.”
“Really. How’s that going to help sell the collections season after season? Designers sell dreams. A mother of two who’s been home all day needs to see beauty around her. That beauty could be provided in the form of a woman with a gorgeous body wearing a designer label in her favorite magazine or on a TV show.”
“Gorgeous comes in all shapes and sizes.”
“Still, a dress looks better on a shapely body.”
“You mean barely there body?”
“What can I say…?”

That’s a collage of conversations between eating disorder activists and some gurus of the fashion industry. This came about in light of the controversy surrounding the law in Madrid, Spain, which bars a woman of certain weight from walking the runway.

Things came to the forefront in 2006, during Fashion Week in South America, when 22-year-old Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos collapsed and died of a reported heart failure after stepping off the runway in Montevideo. To forestall a similar tragedy in their town, officials in Madrid came out to the runway with law enforcement officers during that city’s Fashion Week and barred models who didn’t meet the required BMI, the Body Mass Index which measures height to weight ratio. Some in the fashion industry supported the ban as long overdue. Some thought it unfair to models who were born super thin. A representative of one of the world’s top modeling agencies said it could be detrimental to the careers of naturally “gazelle-like” models.

Of course, if one were to sniff some illegal white powder occasional just to meet today’s “standard” of beauty one would be “naturally gazelle-like,” too, as evidenced by the many models who end up in rehab for cocaine addiction. It, the white stuff, helps one stay thin, not eat much, if at all, the “naturally thin” models often say.

Size zero! What would gorgeous size 14 Marilyn Monroe have made of that?
Officials and eating disorder activists in Milan didn’t buying that ‘naturally thin’ piffle, either. They pointed to the growing number of teenagers and impressionable young women who see those models and emulate them, and in the process develop eating disorders.

‘But a woman has a choice in this matter’, said one top fashion designer when asked about the controversy.

Officials in Milan thought that was bunkum. They instituted a ban similar to Madrid’s.

And the response of another major designer to this: “Politically correct Fascism,” Karl Lagerfeld retorted.

So, what do they say about the woman who upchucks her sushi dinner, or the young girl who eats a flake or two of her raisin bran for weeks, or months on end just because she looks “fat”?

Fashion designers can’t be held responsible for people’s foibles. Those people who have eating disorders have families who ought to look out for them, goes the conventional fashionista wisdom.