Give us the skinny?

Milan Fashionistas fear Spanish skinny model ban

When I went to Spain, I barely found anything to eat and I threw up in Madrid. Apparently too many models have been doing the same thing, because Madrid has imposed a ban on overly skinny models strutting the runways during fashion week. They have created a minimum bmi (body mass index) number which all models have to be over.

Milan's mayor has stated that she is considering bringing the same ban to Milan's fashion week. This apparently is not going over well with some of the fashion industry's movers and shakers. Riccardo Gay, an agent, says that the BMI limit will disallow 80% of the models looking for work. Apparently most models are encouraged to exercise, eat right, and get plenty of sleep. Mario Boselli suggests that anorexia is a rare issue in fashion and that the answer is better education programs and for everyone in the fashion industry to spread awareness.

Now that is tough to swallow. If a person is under a certain point on the BMI scale (with a little wiggle room), then they are unhealthily skinny. So if 80% of models are in that category, than the industry is most certainly not encouraging healthy bodies, and most definitely not sending that message to young women and teenagers.

More important, the fashion industry does not show a wide range of body types, so regardless of how skinny models actually are, they encourage a very narrow idea of beauty. This means that most of the women throughout the world are receiving, at best, subliminal messages that there are parts of them that need to be fixed.

Perhaps, rather than, or perhaps in addition to, imposing a BMI lower limit, cities hosting fashion weeks should require that models fall across a wide range of heights, weights, and ethnicities.