Alexandra Shulman’s Notebook

Proof at last: Thin models don’t trigger anorexia

DURING my many years editing Vogue, the magazine was constantly being called out as a malign influence on women’s body image. And, in particular, for encouraging eating disorders.

So I was interested to read an excellent new book, Good Girls: A Story And Study Of Anorexia, by Hadley Freeman, who suffered extreme anorexia for decades.

In the examination of her own and fellow sufferers’ experiences, she makes the point that people do not ‘catch’, as it were, eating disorders from fashion magazines.

She explains that anorexia, specifically among eating disorders, is not triggered by somebody looking at images of bony fashion models. However, once gripped by the terrifying, destructive and psychologically demonic state that the illness causes, looking at thin models and celebrities doesn’t help.

In defending fashion imagery, I have always tried to reason that the root of anorexia is not as simple as envying how a model looks – rather that in desperation to emulate them, people are prepared to starve themselves to death. The fact is that women’s feelings about their bodies are extremely complex and embedded in each individual’s aspirations and identity.

For example, attitudes towards food, our bodies’ fuel, is intricately involved in what we feel about ourselves and the world. To see this in play, watch how different women react to food.

Over the years I have noticed how women with a more complicated relationship with food spend the most time talking about it. They’ll appear perfectly rational, until you’ve listened to them for a few minutes explaining exactly what they did or did not last eat, whether they feel stuffed, or starving, or how they couldn’t resist buying a choc ice. Over a meal they’ll urge you to have a second or third helping, and not to miss out on the pudding. In restaurants they infallibly order chips, though never eat them.

These are generally the thinnest women around, except they never acknowledge it. In my experience, it is those over 35, rather than young women the age of models, who behave this way.

Others who may be a more usual size 12/14 and probably a bit on the plump side (and, yes, that includes me) tend not to talk about what we eat. Nor are we interested in what others eat. True, we are aware of our weight, but the subject comes relatively low down the pecking order of conversational subjects.

The fascinating issue is why, for some women, the subject of food is so dangerous – sliding from the rather dull preoccupation of many of us into a lethal obsession. Freeman’s book doesn’t answer this question, and, indeed, asks more. But as an ex-editor who got fed up being blamed for causing the problem, I welcome her insights into the minds of those who have been caught up in such a pervasive and cruel illness.