Fat chance for ‘fat’ models! Fuller figure a fashion plus in Milan…

Posted by mija on Feb 20, 2007 in Insider, Scandals | 0 comments

Super-sized models sashayed down the catwalk as Milan launched its fashion week yesterday with a fuss over fashion’s role in anorexia. Italian designer Elena Miro – who specialises in fashions for full-figured women – opened the autumn-winter 2007-08 collections, which will feature 103 fashion shows this week. Showing European size 46 (Australian size 14), Miro’s models looked curvier than the industry’s standard slim 38 (size 6).
But other Italian designers are railing against the new directive by the Italian Chamber of Fashion to use fuller-figured models with a healthy and sunny Mediterranean look.
The Government is threatening to legislate unless Italian designers abide by the voluntary industry code, which says thin models should have to show a medical certificate proving they are not dangerously underweight.
The new code bans models younger than 16 from the catwalk – a move that would have nipped top Australian model Gemma Ward’s career in the bud, as she shot to stardom modelling for Prada in Milan at the age of 15.
Designer Stefano Gabbana, of the label Dolce & Gabbana – which does not belong to the fashion chamber – branded the scheme ridiculous. “I’ve heard all the designers oppose this, and I’m prepared to bet we will see the same skinny models on the catwalks as always,” he told this week’s issue of Italian Vanity Fair. “Models have always been thin … Why don’t they also introduce drug testing to see which models are using cocaine?”
Gabbana, 44, said it was unfair to blame the fashion industry for anorexia. “Women have to understand that the models on the catwalk or in the magazines are aspirational models of beauty and youth, who give us an incentive to take care of ourselves, to better ourselves – but not examples to copy.”
However, Gabbana admitted if he had a teenage daughter, “I would never let her model”.
Italy’s directive stops well short of Spain’s rules banning models with a body mass index below the World Health Organisation limit of 18.5. Italian Youth Minister Giovanna Melandri said the Government would look at legislating unless the industry changed its image. It was worrying, she said, that nearly two-thirds of Italian girls aged 11 to 15 wanted to be thinner. Fashion model Eliana Ramos died from malnutrition last week – six months after her 180cm, 40kg older sister Luisel died after a catwalk show following a three-month lettuce diet.