FASHION

More model meat

Will runway sizes affect red carpet sizes?

By Elizabeth Snead, The Envelope

September 22, 2006

The international fashion world was rocked this week by news that skinny models would be banned from the runways at Madrid Fashion Week.

"My god! Who knew there were fashions shows in Madrid?" exclaimed an exec from a prestigious French fashion house at the Premiere Women in Hollywood Awards on Thursday evening.

She's got a point.

Not surprisingly, after the "ban skinny models" headlines, all eyes – and a lot more cameras - were on Madrid to see those huge heifer-sized mannequins come clomping down the catwalks.

But hey, wait a minute. The Madrid models that met the accepted "healthy" Body Mass Index (BMI) measurements sure didn't look any beefier to me. In fact, several British models in the London shows, held a few days later, outweighed the Madrid babes by a couple of kilos.

So is this "skinny model ban" a serious attempt to stop anorexia-inciting images or was it an intricate ploy to make headlines, a ruse to manipulate the media into covering obscure designer runways outside of Paris and New York? . Possibly, it was both.

Quickly after Madrid's announcement, Milan's mayor announced that she wanted to talk with designers about using ditching the skinny broads for heavier models for their shows from Sept 23-25. Yeah, not gonna happen.

"The only reason it worked in Madrid is because the Spanish government funds the shows there and could force the designers to comply," explains Tom Julian, trend forecaster for the international ad agency McCann Erickson. "Besides, all the clothes were already made to fit a sample size 2. Designers showing in Milan cannot remake their entire collections for size 6s. There's no time and it would be very expensive for the designers."

In another shocking move, India's health minister announced this week that he doesn't want waif models parading down runways in his country either.

And according to Reuters, several top Israeli retail companies have agreed to use the BMI scale and not employ emaciated models in their ad campaigns.

Okay, doesn't India have larger problems than skinny models? One would think the health minister would be happy if models weren't eating all they should. More food for the millions of starving people who'd quite enjoy a light lunch from time to time.

As for Israel, isn't there a war going on? How about working on a peace pact, fellas. Then worry about those horrible skinny models in ads.

Despite the groundswell of international support for bigger models, organizers of London Fashion Week refused to restrict underweight models because it would restrict the "creativity" of the designers.

Yeah, right.

And according to a startling University of Bath study, a majority of women surveyed actually prefer ads which feature models thinner than normal women. The slimmer the model, the higher the approval rating for everything from salads to burgers. I'm shocked, simply shocked.

So now we know what advertising world has known for a very long time: when it comes to buying dreams, people want fantasy, not reality.

For better or worse, for larger or smaller models, that's probably what they'll continue to get.