Zero tolerance for fans of zero-sized models

‘These girls were selected by how womanly they looked’

An industry boss gives an interview to explain how she recruits employees. It involves going to schools and finding prepubescent girls who look like boys and have not developed breasts, then offering them contracts that will send them off into a world where their hips and the gaps between their thighs will be regularly measured, a world where drug abuse is rife, a world in which these children parade in front of the very wealthy in clothes as expensive as diamonds so that the very wealthy can decide what to wear next season. It sounds like something out of a dystopian novel. But it is real, and it is happening right now.

This week, the boss of a top modelling agency spoke to the London Evening Standard about her industry. Carole White, the co-founder of Premier Model Management, criticised the call for more realistic body shapes on catwalks ahead of the start of London Fashion Week. “The designers want straight up and down – no boobs,” she said. “They want their clothes to fall as they designed them. Which is unrealistic when most women have boobs. I can’t change that. It’s just how it is.

“Designers have always wanted girls who are flatchested, not developed, which is a young girl,” she continued.

White criticised a recent move by the British label Rose & Willard to make its models sign a contract promising to eat during shoots because some of them were so hungry they were “delirious”. “It was a stunt,” said White. “It was probably against the model’s human rights. To say you are going to watch them eat, that’s outrageous. What does it achieve? Nothing.”

Making sure employees are properly fed while doing their job? Scandalous! Whatever will these people dream up next? Regular loo breaks?

What is most outrageous is that these comments seem to have been met with little more than an eye roll. The concern about size-zero models is just so last decade, isn’t it? It’s as tired as putting a model out to pasture at the grand old age of 25. The financial might of the fashion industry, combined with its apparent glamour, has meant that 13-year-olds walking down catwalks is de rigueur (see 15year-old Sofia Mechetner, who was sent down a Paris runway in a see-through dress by Dior last year. In any other world the photographers taking and distributing pictures of her nipples would probably end up on a sex offenders’ register, but this is fashion, so it is excused.)

It’s tricky to compare models and sweatshop workers who are forced to work in appalling conditions on less than a dollar a day, because successful models are paid bucketloads and get to fly first class. But the fact that fashion is an industry patronised by the world’s most famous celebrities does not mean it should be unregulated.

Yet there are many people, from tiny ethical labels to fashion editors who do not want to put cadavers on their pages, who are pushing for change, and people like Carole White undermine them all. This month, MPs are due to publish a report that will call for a ban on models under the age of 18. The public, too, clearly backs a “model’s law” – last year, 113,161 people signed a petition to get one passed, and these signatures were taken to Downing Street by the MP Caroline Noakes and the girl who started it, Rosie Nelson, who as a model was told by agents that she had to get “down to the bone”. This is where people such as Ms White are hugely damaging to an industry that is on the brink of change – because as much as she protests otherwise, she can make that change happen. Yet instead she perpetuates unhealthy stereotypes, comparing modelling to athletics. “You’re not going to be obese and be a runner, are you?” But nobody is calling for obese models, just healthy looking ones.

Last year, I went to New York to cover the Victoria’s Secret show, in which supermodels parade around in their smalls. It’s acceptable within fashion to slag off Victoria’s Secret and its models because they wear underwear for a living, and wearing underwear for a living is not deemed a very feminist thing to do – the irony of having their aesthetics dictated by gay men who like their models to look like boys seemingly lost on them. But as I roamed backstage before the show, I was struck by how healthy these girls seemed. Their skin glowed. They were toned and taut, and no wonder, because these girls are selected not on how boyish they look, but how womanly.

Ed Razek, the senior creative at the brand, told me that to make the grade, Victoria’s Secret models do have to be like athletes. They have to work out and eat right, because, despite the critics who say that the show is just a way of titillating dirty old men, 98 per cent of his customers are actually young women.

Zoolander, the sequel of which is in the cinemas at the moment, plays the fashion industry for laughs. It’s just a silly thing for silly people, and the rest of us needn’t take it seriously. But any industry worth almost £30 billion to the UK economy

should be taken seriously – and the sooner that comments like those made by Carole White go out of fashion, the sooner we can love an industry that is such a part of the fabric of our nation.