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Paris Fashion Week: Size Zero Models Outlawed
A shocking new ad campaign in France has sparked a move to bring in an anti-anorexia law.
A billboard at Paris Fashion Week featuring anorexic model Isabelle Caro has incited French authorities to attempt to bring in an anti-anorexia law, making it a criminal offence to encourage another person to seek excessive thinness which could expose them to a risk of death or endanger their health.
The law could end up costing magazine bosses, fashion editors and even skinny models two years in prison or a £24,000 fine.
But experts are debating whether outlawing images of overly thin women will actually reduce anorexia.
“We see images of models all the time that make us frustrated with the way we look – the result is extreme thinness on the street,” says Valerie Boyer, the Marseilles deputy responsible for suggesting the law.
Most women with anorexia don’t blame pictures of thin models for their condition. Isabella Caro, the anorexic featured in the campaign, says the disease is “a result of a difficult childhood”.
But Professor Janet Treasure of the Eating Disorders Research Unit at Kings College London says that the media’s constant bombardment of teenage girls with images of stick-thin, size-zero models, tiny-waisted pop princesses and actresses is putting young girls’ health at risk and fuelling the rise in eating disorders.
Unrelenting exposure to pictures of thin women reduces self-esteem, especially among teenage girls. Professor Treasure says that evidence from 25 research studies shows that this effect was strongest in adolescents – and in people who valued thinness.
Being underweight has serious repercussions, disrupting growth and brain development and leading to fertility problems and brittle bone disease, while eating disorders are often fatal and can lead to other addictions such as drugs and alcohol, said Treasure.
Dr Peter Rowan, a consultant who specialises in eating disorders at Cygnet Healthcare, agrees that the growing obsession with being ultra-thin - fuelled by catwalk stars such as Lily Cole and Kate Moss - is having a "dangerous influence on the public" leading to reduced self esteem, especially among girls, however he says that it is more a continuation of a process that has been going on for some time.
“It is certainly true that the repeated images of these sort of models and the airbrushing of everyone to impossibly idealised body shapes makes women extremely self critical,” he said.
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Deanne Jade, founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders, says that it’s difficult to say how much effect the media has.
“It’s very persuasive and the media is in our life all the time, probably from the moment we get up to the moment we go to bed. And the media does give us images of how we have to be in order to be attractive to ourselves and other people,” she said. “But yet the media only really has the most influence on people who already lack confidence or have low self esteem. Women have always valued themselves more for how they look than for what they do, which is not the case for men. And we can’t blame the media for the fact that women’s self esteem is very heavily connected to how they look. But the media does have a role to play, and people who are directing the media and setting trends in the media need to have some responsibility for the effect that this will have on the more vulnerable members of society.”
To read the rest of this interview, click here: Eating Disorders and the Media
To find out more about anorexia, its causes, health risks and treatment, click here: Anorexia Information