Skeletal models and super-sized hypocrisy: As fashion designers insist they've turned their backs on anorexic chic, do they think we're blind?
By LIZ JONES
Last updated at 12:26 PM on 23rd February 2011
Matchstick: Model Martyna Budna for Mark Fast shows off her worryingly thin frame, with jaunty shoulder bones and her ribs clearly visible
At a London Fashion Week where one designer, Maria Grachvogel, was forced to take in the seams on her samples because she couldn’t find any models who were a size ten, a ghost appeared on the catwalk.
It was as though I were looking in a mirror, at me aged 18, weighing 5st, about to be drip-fed on a ward in St Barts hospital.
I sat up straight on my narrow gilt chair. I looked around me to see if anyone else had seen what I had seen. But no, it was all sycophantic smiles, or that other thing fashion folk do, just the tops of expensively highlighted heads, tap, tapping away on their iPads.
I looked over at front row guest Samantha Cameron, but even she had failed to go pale. It is the drip, drip, drip effect, you see, when so many girls swim like matchsticks before your eyes, a death mask on the face of a teen becomes unremarkable.
I was at the collection for the autumn/winter shown by Erdem, the hot Brit designer of the moment. And this was the hottest model of the season: Chloe Memisevic, who was born in Sweden in 1993, and is represented by Wilhelmina Models in New York.
This is the very agency whose managing director had come along to a debate in New York a few seasons ago about the need for more realistic models, an event where Natalia Vodianova, the face of Calvin Klein, had broken down in tears when recounting how she had been told off for not losing her baby weight fast enough, and rejected by designers for being too fat.
The fashion world is going crazy for Chloe Memisevic — she was back on the catwalk yesterday for Mary Katrantzou looking horribly emaciated. As well as Erdem, she has walked the runway for Proenza Schouler and Marc Jacobs in New York, and Roksanda Ilincic and Twenty8Twelve here in London.
She is the face of Marc Jacobs. She is 5ft 11in and measures 32, 22, 34. On a Body Mass Index scale (a way of measuring body fat that proved too problematic to introduce at fashion shows, though it was mooted by Labour’s Model Health Inquiry back in 2008), she would hover somewhere below number 15.
A healthy BMI falls somewhere between 18.5 and 24.9. This means she is at risk of brittle bone disease later in life. And heart failure. And pneumonia. And an early, horrible death.
Just to give you an idea of how far fashion has stretched its new ideal of beauty, let me tell you about the Issa show on Saturday. Yasmin Le Bon walked the runway, and while in the Eighties she was seen as very skinny and flat-chested (her photo on the cover of the first issue of Elle prompted me to have a breast reduction), on the runway in among all these emaciated 16-year-olds she looked positively elephantine.
‘Oh God, that a***!’ said the male fashion director of a glossy weekly, sat right in front of me, clutching his man bag. This sums up our second biggest industry right now, the one that makes £20 billion a year for this country, the very one Samantha Cameron was so keen to big up (my God, if only she could!) in her heartfelt speech to launch the proceedings.
Disenchanted by what I had seen at Erdem, I turned up at the Mark Fast show on Monday night, in the hope of a breath of normality.
Skin and bones: A model for Antonio Berardi's Autumn 2011 collection shows off her shockingly thin legs (left), while model Hannah Hardy's hip bones could grate parmesan', according to Liz Jones
After all, it was this knitwear designer who had caused such a storm a few seasons ago by using bigger girls on his catwalk, a decision that caused his stylist, a woman who is probably so starved herself she has started to consume her own organs, to storm out.
But while there were bigger girls on his runway, notably Gwyneth Harrison and Laura Catterall, who are both size 14, there were two of the thinnest girls I saw all week: Hannah Hardy, whose hip bones could grate parmesan; and Martyna Budna, who helpfully appeared in just a bra top, so we could break the boredom by counting her ribs.
Worrying signs: Chloe Memisevic is this season's hottest model, but she is doing her body huge damage by being so thin - including symptoms which could lead to an early death
On the Friday before London Fashion Week kicked off, I had gone along to a packed debate on this very topic held at the National Portrait Gallery in London. On the panel were Erin O’Connor, model and founder of All Walks Beyond The Catwalk, a campaign for diversity in fashion, Kiki Kendrick, a former advertising executive, Dr Linda Papadopoulos, a psychologist, Lynne Featherstone MP, Minister for Equalities, and Lorraine Candy, editor of Elle.
The most sense all evening was talked by Erin O’Connor, who described going backstage at a show, trying to get into a pair of trousers and finding she couldn’t get them on. This woman has the dimensions of a reed.
‘Make the trousers bigger!’ she yelled. ‘Make them bigger.’ We all cheered.
Kiki Kendrick, who came up with an award-winning self-esteem campaign for The Body Shop in 1997, featuring a size 16 cartoon doll called Ruby, explained that a woman is like an onion. If she has layers of love, family and self-esteem around her, the negative images in the media will not be able to penetrate. But if she does not have those protective layers, and so many of us don’t, then she is very vulnerable indeed to images telling her to buy stuff and to change herself.
And while I thought Featherstone, the Lib Dem MP who gained headlines by calling for an airbrushing code of conduct, was ill informed and naive when she thought anyone in Milan or Paris would listen to her, it was Lorraine Candy who made me see red. Asked about the airbrushing used by her magazine, she said: ‘My readers want amazing and beautiful . . . Are women so stupid to believe the image is real?’
Well, yes, I am sorry, we are. When I saw the airbrushed photos of Britney Spears released to promote her latest album, my brain told my body: ‘Hmmm, why do you have cellulite and she doesn’t?’ Only when the pop star released the unairbrushed photos (in the industry, these are called ‘raw’) did I realise the sleight of hand that had taken place. And if I — as a former glossy magazine editor — fall into this trap, of course other women will.
I’m sorry, Lorraine (a fellow columnist at the Mail), but you sounded like the Mubarak of the fashion world, unwilling to change due to fear — in your case of losing advertisers and therefore your job. You’ve just put Keira Knightley on your cover and even by this actress’s standards, she looks skeletal.
Unimpressed: Samantha Cameron grimaces as the stick thin Swedish model Chloe Memisevic shows off a new design during the Erdem show
After the debate, we were all invited to view an exhibition of photographs of women supposedly of all ages and shapes and sizes, taken by celebrity fashion photographer Rankin (like most male fashion photographers, it is quite acceptable for him to be short and overweight). It purported to be a celebration of ordinary women’s bodies, but it was nothing of the sort.
First, these supposedly realistic images were airbrushed to look lovely, but, second, what I cannot countenance is that the models chosen to depict plus size were a size 12! This is not plus size, this is
'She was so skinny you could count her ribs'
normal!
Just before London Fashion Week, I asked Carole White, the boss of Premier Model Management and one of the most influential agents in the world, why she thinks nothing has changed and why models on the catwalk are still so tiny.
I’ve campaigned on this issue since 1999, when I became editor of Marie Claire, and I told White my belief is this arrogant industry has merely been paying lip service.
As if to back up my point, in the new fly-on-the-wall TV documentary about her agency, which will air on Channel 4 tonight, one of White’s model bookers rejects an obviously beautiful young girl for having ‘big bones’.
Weighty issue: Chloe Memisevic barely filled out the floor-length gown as she walked the runway
White again passed the buck, saying she thinks it is down to the demands of the industry in New York, Paris and Milan. There, everyone has ignored the age limit of 16, using underage and underweight girls on shoots and in shows, champagne on tap backstage.
Every designer I spoke to this week, from Erdem to Christopher Kane, weakly protested they had changed.
Look at Daisy Lowe, they say. I met the 22-year-old model backstage at Vivienne Westwood, and she, too, would be considered tiny in any milieu other than this one.
I met Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, British Vogue cover star and ostensibly the leader of the new pack of curvy, sexy supermodels. She is minuscule!
Lara Stone, that other poster girl for curves, is just one inch bigger than her skinny rivals!
Crystal Renn, photographed so memorably in her voluptuous curves by Glamour magazine in September 2009, when her spare tyres (shock! horror!) provoked headlines, and who wrote a memoir about her recovery from anorexia and the fact she once weighed 6st 8lb, is rapidly returning to that fighting weight.
According to her agency calling card, she is now a U.S. size two, which is a British size six!
These girls have been used as a smokescreen, so that the gay men who run the industry can continue to peddle the idea that women should look like adolescent boys (it was no coincidence that nerdy, weedy boys walked the runway in womenswear this season). This is their dream, not ours.
Unrealistic expectations: The Mental Health Foundation believe using such thin models on the catwalk is irresponsible and dangerous
Why does what goes on in this elite bubble, this hall of mirrors, matter? Because even though Renn enjoyed fame as a plus-size model, the fact she is now a size six reveals that, deep down, women want to be tiny, no matter how much we protest.
It confirms the fact that once anorexia nervosa or even yoyo dieting has you in its grip, it is hard to ever be free of it.
Renn has explained her weight loss by saying she has ‘got into hiking’, but then anorexics and those with body image issues always say things like that. The week Chloe and Martyna and Hannah were allowed to tread the London catwalk was a sad one indeed. Sad for all those women out there who are easy prey to these overpaid idiots. Who will go on a diet, and fail, and binge. Who will worry about fitting into that bikini come summer. Who will look at these impossible, clearly harmful images and find they just don’t measure up, and never will.
I wish Erdem had come along on that Friday night and met one of the women in the audience, Nita Dickson. She is the mother of Sophie, who died in her 40s from anorexia-related illness. I had become friends with Sophie — who in the end weighed 3st — while working with her on a documentary. I remember sitting talking to her, in her South London terrace house, and gasping when two of her teeth clattered to the floor.
This is what these beautiful fashion shows don’t show you, the ugly side of being thin. Nita had come along to hear the debate, hopeful that a decade after her daughter’s death, something had changed. I watched her leave the building that night, shoulders stooped, impossibly sad and alone.
How many more mothers have to go through what Nita has gone through before someone, somewhere, says: ‘Enough!’
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