First in Italy and Spain, and now in Britain, super skinny models are buzzing through headlines once again. The talk is about whether or not to ban models with frighteningly low Body Mass Indexes (BMI) from participating in London Fashion Week 2008.
So far, skeletal gets to stay -- as long as a doctor signs off, that is. Based on “The Model Health Inquiry,” commissioned by the British Fashion Council, models need only provide "good health" certificates from eating disorder specialists. And then it’s business as usual.
Apart from what this move signifies about our current ideals of beauty, I’m most skeptical about logistics.
Who issues the certificates and how do these experts judge “good health?”
If it means a model goes into a doctor, gets weighed, and asked a series of questions, we’re doomed. Detecting eating disorders in models is not like conducting a drug test for athletes. Models cannot pee in a cup or offer a vein for a blood draw and wait for the lab to come back with positive or negative result. What we have for eating disorders is BMI. And that is a notoriously bad indicator of health in all but the most serious cases of anorexia nervosa.
Consider that eating disorders are mental illnesses. They are internal problems as much as readings on a bathroom scale. We simply cannot measure the thoughts ricocheting around the brain of an 88-pound girl with anorexia. She thinks: Everyone can see my belly is sticking out. But that distorted thought, and many others, are hidden.
Outside, the doctors can only scribble down her weight, going up or down over time, or ask her questions, which she answers with lies. Those afflicted with anorexia resort to all kinds of ingenious tricks at weigh-ins, including drinking gallons of water beforehand or taping weights to the bottoms of their feet.
Bulimia nervosa is even harder to diagnose. Those with the illness are often normal, even overweight. And lying about purging comes with the territory, given the shamefulness of the act. The best illustration of the secrecy came from interview I conducted for Lying in Weight: the Hidden Epidemic of Eating Disorders in Adult Women. One woman with raging bulimia hid the disease from her husband for 35 years. And he was a detective.
So let’s get real. The fashion industry isn’t ready to shift to a curvier representation of beauty. Nor is the general public. We buy the images we're handed in the name of “art.” By devouring these stories with such interest, we’re colluding with the fashion icons and regulators. And young people continue to die to be thin.