The Skinny On Skinny Models, London Edition, Pt. 2

My skinny, pretty friend Helen Kirwan-Taylor interviewed the skinny, pretty, New Zealander in charge of the UK Model Health Inquiry, Baroness Denise Kingsmill, in yesterday's Evening Standard. I wrote before that the recommendation that got the most attention was the one banning girls under 16 from the catwalk. Children have protection in other, similar, fields. Child actors are not allowed to play adults for instance.

I would love to think that Denise Kingsmill had been reading my posts. She certainly championed the same ideas. It's not the models that are sick -- it is the modeling agencies. She describes girls being asked to work all day without food or drink (except alcohol) and routinely exploited. She said:

It's like the Victorian age. Everything is hidden from view under the stairs.

The treatment of models is shocking. They are girls blessed with bizarre features -- bizarrely symmetrical so they look good on camera -- but that doesn't make them any smarter than the average small town girl from Tennessee or Romania. It makes them more vulnerable. They are uprooted from their families at a young age, stuck in over-priced apartments in big cities, told what to wear, where to go, and what to eat all in the hopes that they might become Kate Moss or at the very least, Melania Knauss, Donald Trump's wife. Kingsmill is also recommending that the girls are regularly checked by doctors and is recommending giving them avenues to complain.

What I am not convinced of, and Kingsmill doesn't convince me of in this interview, is the link between skinny girls on the catwalk and anorexia amongst normal teens. Yes, there are problems in the modeling business. But if a poor girl is starving herself so she can work is it anorexia or survival? If a middle-classed girl is starving herself because she's a perfectionist, does it have anything to do with the images she sees from runway shows? Anorexia is a disease and shouldn't be confused with run of the mill eating disorders or with girls knowingly watching what they eat so they can work. At least that's what I think. But I'm not a doctor. So I'm going to ask my skinny, pretty friend who is a doctor what she thinks and get back to you.