While Spain and Italy have now established minimum weight requirements relative to models’ heights, the U.S. designers are doing as expected – fighting for far more lenient guildelines. Their arguments are as follows:

1) Weight-height ratios are an unfair standard because they vary naturally with age.

2) We can’t tell each designer what to do.

3) Don’t make models jump through a lot of hoops.

4) Thinness isn’t our fault; it’s growing among celebrities generally.

5) It’s a problem only for models who aren’t “emotionally stable.”

6) Fashion will eventually solve the problem by shifting back toward curvier women.

As to Justification #4, yes, considerably. It’s a weighty topic that has endured through the past few decades, but critics are always looking for someone to lay the “blame” upon. Any attempts to logically explain the existence of anorexia within modern society by correlating the illness with the occupation of modelling results in a prototypical Catch-22.

Without the anorexic models to act as clothes hangers, the gay fashion designers could never subsist, and without the gay fashion designers to foist their definition of ideal beauty upon fashion monsters, the anorexic model could never subsist. Figuratively speaking, of course.

Source: Slate

Images: Storm