Nobody has an attractive word to say about skinny fashion models; the sort of women who Tom Wolfe chastised as social X-rays; women so slender you worry, when you see them walking over a grate, that they could fall between the grilles. So how come they continue to dominate the catwalks of Milan and Paris and London?
The fashion industry, stung by criticism that it breeds anorexics who lunch on lettuce in the hope of securing a catwalk commission, regularly promises to mend its ways, but does little. Now Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, has warned designers that the clothes they send to be photographed for her magazine are so teeny that the only models that can fit into them are “girls with jutting bones and no breasts or hips”.
Attempts have been made before to purge catwalks and the pages of glossy magazines of size-0 models. Madrid Fashion Week now insists that models have a minimum body mass index, and it regularly rejects those it deems underweight. It is a healthy example, but one that London has been reluctant to follow for fear that designers will show their collections elsewhere instead.
But if the marketplace is to blame for creating this appetite for spaghetti-thin models — in order to sell frocks and fashion monthlies — the market may also lead the drive to banish them.
Shulman says that her readers “really don’t want to see such thin girls”. The continuing appeal of Marilyn Monroe (and the recent swooning over the buxom secretary, Joan Holloway, in the TV drama Mad Men — she’s the one with a figure like a human Jessica Rabbit) suggest that Shulman might be right. And, in saying that you can never be too thin, Wallis Simpson was wrong.