Twice a year, the world looks to Paris and the other big fashion cities to see what we’ll be wearing next season. It’s not your imagination that the models are younger and thinner than ever before.
Top image caption: A model walks down the catwalk during the Guy Laroche Fashion Show as part of Paris Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2007 on October 7, 2006 in Paris, France.
In early April, France proposed a law to set a minimum weight for catwalk models. On April 2 and 3, the French Parliament’s lower house voted through three “anti- anorexia” amendments to a new health reform bill, proposing a ban on employing models with a Body Mass Index (height-to-weight ratio) below 18. Model agencies and fashion houses found in breach would face fines of 75,000 euros (A$105,000) and six months imprisonment.
Two other amendments seek to criminalise commercial images where a model’s body has been modified to look thinner without disclosure and an outlawing of “thinspiration” or “pro ana” websites, which glorify anorexia.
At the time of going to press, the measures had yet to go to a full vote on April 14, before moving on to the Senate.
Whether or not the laws are passed, the fashion industry is watching nervously. For the first time in history, governments may start to dictate the ideals that designers peddle to the masses.
“I think they [designers in France] will follow the rules as they are forced to, but I don’t think we are going to see a revolution in body size on the French runways,” says Wayne Sterling, co-founder of New York-based Models.com and now the Creative Director of Mix Model Management.
Yet as one international model scout noted, referring to one of their biggest international names, “Someone like ‘Juliet X’ is probably not going to pass that test. And so what does that do? It changes everything.”
Insiders say the industry has seen an influx of extremely young girls from Eastern Europe – some as young as 12 – plus a post-9/11 crash in advertising rates.
“The rates collapsed completely – girls were used to six figures before 2001,” said one New York producer. “So who would accept $10,000? The 16-year-old girl who’s just starting out. All of a sudden, clients discovered they could get the same [look] with these girls, who were just more or less like disposable mannequins. They were younger, they were thinner. There wasn’t the crucial need for the supermodel > anymore. Since then, the money hasn’t really gone back up.”
In the mid-2000s, international runway sample sizes dropped – from a US 2-4 (Australian 6-8) to US 0-2 (Australian 4-6). In 2011, the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed the average Australian woman was 71.1kg and a size 16.
LEFT: Australian model Cassi van den Dungen faced criticism in 2014 for her thin frame at Sydney Fashion Week. RIGHT: The term heroin chic was coined after 90s model Kate Moss.
If “Paris thin” becomes illegal, what impact might it have on the industry?
“You can clearly see the girls who are naturally slim and the ones who are struggling – they’re grey and pale, and black under the eyes, listless and using substances to keep themselves going. And everybody turns a blind eye,” says Chelsea Bonner, director of Sydney plus-size model agency Bella Model Management, which represents Australian Robyn Lawley, now one of the world’s most
high-profile plus-size models.
In her book The Vogue Factor, former editor Kirstie Clements points to 2004 as the time models became “Paris thin” – with one agent revealing they had four models in hospital from extreme diets, such as eating orange juice-soaked tissues.
After at least six eating disorder-related model deaths from 2006-2007 in South America and Israel hit the news, a range of mostly voluntary initiatives began, including bans on under-16 models at London and Australian Fashion Weeks. Only Madrid Fashion Week and Israel have imposed a minimum 18.5 BMI on models. There were six deaths of models in 2008 to 2009 – four of them suicides in Paris, Milan and New York, all linked at the time to the intense industry pressure.
The Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia (MBFWA) has not been immune to the pressure. In the very first week in 1996, top Australian model Christy Quilliam wore a Morrissey Edmiston olive green swimsuit – her ribs protruding through a cut-out midriff – and the ensuing headlines screamed, “Too thin!”.
Work here and overseas dried up overnight, Christy tells The Weekly, and now she’s back modelling in New Zealand. The 1.55m model says she was a size 8 at the time – at least one size bigger than many runway models today. “I was naturally that size – I was working hard and I was definitely not starving myself,” Christy says. “I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. I saw the moving footage and you can see me turn and take a breath, and that’s why my ribs became so prevalent.
“All of a sudden, I’ve gone from just being a model to [being] this spectacle,” says Christy, who travelled to New York later that year to look for work there, only to be told she needed to lose an inch from her hips. “I wasn’t prepared to lose more weight – that would have made me anorexic,” she says.
Jutting ribs and bony bodies are not just reserved for the catwalks of Paris: A model backstage changing at London Fashion Week.
Fast-forward two decades and what has changed? Internationally, runway models are thinner and Australian models have joined that circuit, following in the footsteps of Gemma Ward, considered the world’s number one model in 2007 before stepping away for six years. She was back triumphantly and healthily at this month’s MBFWA.
The Weekly has learned that to avoid controversy at this year’s Fashion Week Australia, one of the biggest Australian model agencies, Sydney’s Priscillas Model Management, had deliberately self-censored for the first time, pulling a “handful” of girls from their model line-up.
Doll Wright, head of development at Priscillas, says this was no admission that the girls were underweight. They are “naturally thin” 16- and 17-year-olds, she says, adding that she would likely have no hesitation sending them overseas to work because “they don’t get the same kind of flak there that they do here”.
Alex Perry wishes he had cancelled model Cassi van den Dungen for his show at last year’s MBFWA, as he did with another high-profile Australian model a year or so before, who had just returned from the international circuit looking gaunt. After doing Perry’s 2014 show, Cassi was widely slammed as underweight. In fact, Cassi was at one point considered too thin for the international circuit and well-placed sources said she was too small for some samples, including Balenciaga in Paris, and not booked there.
“I kind of dropped the ball [in the fittings]. I knew she was thin, but it wasn’t shocking to me,” says Alex. He also partially blames “brutal” runway lighting for highlighting Cassi’s thin frame, while other even slimmer models in the show escaped scrutiny, he said.
“The image I sent out there, I felt embarrassed about. I recoiled from it. She copped a lot of flak, I copped a lot of flak.”
Patty Huntington is a fashion journalist and Australian correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily in the US.
A version of this article first appeared in the May 2015 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
