New York – Fashion models are used to having their bodies scrutinized, but now they’re under the microscope – or telephoto lens – as never before.
The girls strolling the runways here during Fashion Week, stick-thin as ever, are finding their eating habits and health regimens as hot a topic as the minidresses and fur coats they’re wearing.
Following last year’s death of anorexic Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston, fashion industry forces here and abroad have mobilized to try to make sure other models don’t suffer similar fates.
“You can’t blame the industry for eating disorders, but by being aware and sensitive to it we can change a lot of things,” said designer Diane von Furstenberg, who is president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. The organization has formed a health initiative to address concerns that models are too skinny and that the industry’s obsession with thinness may be contributing to eating disorders.
By being informed, everyone from designers to model agents can play a part in ensuring their health, she said at a Monday event where the initiative and a panel of health, nutrition and exercise experts who will conduct seminars for the industry and work individually with models were introduced.
The CFDA is offering recommendations and guidelines but stops short of requiring models to get health examinations or meet body mass index standards, as is now required in Spain.
“It’s important that we promote health as part of beauty,” said von Furstenberg, who recently met with fashion industry officials in the United Kingdom, France and Italy on the issue.
Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova, who is featured in Calvin Klein fashion and fragrance ads, said she was just 17 in 2000, when she first went to work in Paris. The pressure to stay thin mounted quickly, and within two years, her weight had dropped to 106 pounds, she began losing hair and began to feel “overly nervous” and sensitive. “I thought it was normal,” she said.
With a doctor’s help, Vodianova began eating better and got up to 115 pounds, at which point she received some complaints from a fashion house. “At any age you can be a success,” she says. “But at what age can you handle failure?”
“It was difficult for some girls to handle” the pressure, Vodianova said. “Ana Reston was only 13 years old when she started (modeling). I hope this will help young girls like her.”
Nian Fish, the creative director at KCD Worldwide, which produces fashion shows and events, said she knows all too well the pressures of staying thin. Before getting into the fashion industry 30 years ago, she was a dancer.
Fish chairs the CFDA’s health initiative but says it isn’t her job to tell designers what to do. “It is their aesthetic,” she said, noting that the fashion world produced Twiggy in the 1960s and the waif models of the early 1990s to wear the clothes of those eras.
What the industry must do, Fish said, is give models support early in their careers, keep them off the runway until they’re 16, not let them work past midnight until they are 18 and promote a backstage environment free of cigarette smoke and alcohol, and stocked with healthful food.
But with no means of enforcement, whose to say the CFDA’s guidelines will be followed? “Education and awareness is the first step,” said Steven Kolb,
CDFA’s executive director.
Suzanne S. Brown can be reached at sbrown@denverpost.com or at 303-954-1697.
