Looks can kill: why heroin-chic isn’t

The hiring of perilously thin models does not cause eating disorders in the general population. But there is no doubt that the circulation of entirely warped images of the female body hinders a process of recovery for  eating-disordered people and normalises starvation by lauding the product of it. The reproduction of these images at once lowers the natural inclination against entry into these self-harming behaviours and makes their escalation more likely.

Even for the majority with esteem healthy enough to resist the temptation to imitate these catwalk waifs, their presence is harmful. Fashion designers select these women by their body type, they are made famous on the covers of fashion magazines and the growing disparity between the average woman and those presented as aspirational is perpetuated.

Fashion, in addition to being an artistic medium is, of course, functional. In that sense, the representations of “normal” or “ideal” women by the fashion industry are perhaps even more important than those on film or canvas.

At this year’s Australian Fashion Week MaraJora swimwear designer Leesa Fogarty paraded her clothes on the bodies of size 14 women. This apparent faux pas sent the Australian fashion world reeling and prompted Vogue Australia to swiftly erase all photographic evidence from their website. The fashion industry will truly have come of age when a gesture such as Fogarty’s is entirely unremarkable.

It is a rare woman, even among the modelling set, who can healthfully sustain the Twiggy-esque proportions demanded by mainstream fashion. Cultural messages matter. Connecting anorectic women almost exclusively to the world of haute couture is an implicit statement about how women earn entry to worlds of luxury and privilege. They provide a point of entirely unrealistic comparison, with the power to spur those disposed to image disorders into competition with the catwalk’s androgynous forms. They enforce a gulf in media representations of who the average woman is and who she should want to be.

The violence that these images of emaciation do to women’s healthy self-image is reason enough for the government to slap a classification warning on these parades and to tear up the contracts of the super-slim.