The Canadian clothing company, La Maison Simons, agreed to pull its new 36-page catalog after complaints from the public poured in. Their complaints? The catalog featured "photographs of thin, young women, who display more bone than flesh."


Company CEO, Peter Simons, had this to say about the catalog:


Those images are "destructive to a more vulnerable portion of the population which is exposed to anorexia," Simons told The Gazette from his office in Quebec City..."We are into social responsibility here. I'm fully aware of what it is and I'm taking full responsibility for (the catalogue). It's my job to ensure that we are a constructive actor in the community," Simons said. "I should have done better. I should have seen it."


I am happy that Simons recognized the error of his ways, and acknowledged it publically- though it would have been nice if he didn't need public complaint letters to make him do so. I think it sends a powerful message to the clothing industry that people aren't going to just sit back and take in the unrealistic images of women and men.


However, I don't know how much this will do to prevent eating disorders. The fact of the matter is that we don't know what causes eating disorders. We know it takes both a genetic predisposition and an environmental trigger to develop an eating disorder. Does living in a thin-idolizing society make things worse? Perhaps. It certainly doesn't help. But almost unknown research from the late 1990s on the island of Curacao found the rates of anorexia on a fat-is-beautiful island are essentially the same as those found in Europe and the US.


Of course, this is countered by research from an increase in eating disorder behaviors on the island of Fiji after the introduction of American television.


So why don't we say what we do know: this is a good thing to do regardless of its effects on eating disorders. That this kind of advertising is toxic, to women and men, regardless of their potentials of developin an eating disorder. That it doesn't need to cause a clinical disorder before becoming evil. That we don't know how to prevent eating disorders. And that eating disorders have nothing to do with fashion and "looking good."

Image courtesy of Indexed

Part I: A Zero-Sum Problem

I've shied away from speaking directly about models and the whole "size-zero" phenomenon. Partly because I think it gets away from the ultimate cause of eating disorders: genetics, biology, neurochemistry. Eating disorders date back hundreds of years- long before fashion models. Even in the 1600s, where the ideal body type was far more realistic to what Nature had intended, people had anorexia. Women. And men.

This happened without fashion models, without a diet culture.

And yet.

Yet at the same time, disordered eating is essentially more prevalant than a relaxed attitude around food and body weight. It's The Media, we say. Hollywood. The Fashion Industry. The Patriarchy. All of these are true, in a sense. It certainly normalizes these food and body obsessions of ours. It allows eating disorders to fester and hide.

And, given that dieting is the "gateway drug" to eating disorders, this obsession can trigger (but not cause) EDs.

A lot of the impetus on banning Size Zero models is that it will prevent eating disorders. Or help to prevent them. Which is all well and good, and I certainly don't think it will hurt, but I'm not sure this will do a whole lot to prevent eating disorders on a large scale. It will send a message, and that's the important part. It is a start to ending this body obsession of ours.

Part II: A model of what?

Maybe what we need to be asking ourselves first is: what is a model, anyway? Are they supposed to be models of "good behavior"? Of what clothes to wear and how to look in them? Of what a young child should aspire to one day? Of something else entirely?

It's no secret that eating disorders are rampant in the fashion industry. Most of those body weights are unnatural. I won't go as far to say "all" models are starving, because I really just don't know. But the weights are unrealistic for basically all young men and women out there.

Study after study (the most famous of which was the Minnesota Starvation Study by Ancel Keys) has shown that restricting your diet and forcing your weight below its natural setpoint makes you, in less scientific terms, utterly batshit crazy. Your hair falls out. Your nails stop growing. Your skin gets scaly. You have so many bruises it looks like someone hammered you with a baseball bat.* Your period stops. You can't think of anything but food.

This isn't healthy.

The personal antics and behaviors of those in the fashion industry aside (Kate Moss, anyone?), the ideal woman in this society is fundamentally unhealthy. This is a model? Something that's held up as the highest form of beauty and flattery and achievement?

And if models are supposed to be displaying how clothes are "supposed" to look on people, why are they using people who don't look like almost anyone else in the population? I'm not willowy and 5 foot 9; I'm about 5 foot 5 and muscular and athletic.

On the other hand, what about the models?

Part III: The Fashion Police

Here is the one, over-arching reason I think there should be a regulation of models' body weights: for their own health and safety.

I've read comments on newspaper articles about this issue (most recently in Fashion Week in Madrid), who say that this type of regulation is overly paternalistic. Intrusive.

Yet I had an N-95 mask given to me when I worked at the health department to prevent me from breathing in germs during an outbreak. The lawnmower guy my dad hired last summer had ear plugs. Welders use goggles. These are required by law.

Why? Most companies aren't willing to shell out the money to protect their workers. So the government had to step in and make sure that companies were doing what they were supposed to be doing.

It's the same thing here. We think of models as these independent entities, figures strutting on catwalks, images on magazines. Most of them are employees- of a modeling agency, of a clothing company. If eating disorders are an inherent danger in the industry (as infectious disease is in public health), then there need to be measures to protect the workers.

The public is apt to blame the models. "Stupid girls, being such an unhealthy model for my little girl." Or, "They should just stop."

And that last reason adds fuel to the need for these regulations. People with eating disorders, people whose cognitive abilities are comprimised by starvation, don't realize they're sick. It's called anogosnia- a lack of insight into disease, which is common in many neurological disorders, such as brain injury and stroke. Semantics aside, eating disorders, strokes, and Alzheimers are all brain diseases. Pancreatic cancer and diabetes are diseases of the pancreas. Totally different cause and etiology, yet they are not treated as two totally different entities with totally different insurance coverage.**

Are models victims? Well I don't know.

Are they in need of protection? You better believe it.

*It took me about 8 doctors to figure out that I wasn't bruised up because of medication or klutziness (though I'm sure that didn't help). I took Vitamin C supplements, which helped somewhat. Then my psychiatrist took one look at my battered legs and told me I had a Vitamin K deficiency. Vitamin K is a fat-soluble vitamin and is crucial to helping blood clot. So my fat intake was upped and within a week, the bruises were essentially gone.

**Don't. Start. Me. On. This.

I was horrified to find this little article on the newsfeed on the side of this blog. It's about an "Uncle Karl" from the fashion industry giving out weight loss tips. Written by "Stavros" on the website Australian website Frillr, it showed how to shape up for the upcoming beach season. The article was short, but it really was so offensive and disgusting in three short paragraphs that it really didn't need to be any longer.