As you may have read on the Internet, Carrie Fisher was asked to lose weight to resume her role as Princess Leia in the film Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The actress stated in an interview that in the movie industry "the only thing that matters is weight and appearance". Yet Hollywood is not the only place regulated by such laws. The fashion industry has a dark side as well and is unofficially controlled by the same norms, so it's not rare to see on the runway skeleton-looking young men and women.
The stories about the different ways fashion models keep their weight down or reduce themselves to human skeletons to fit in sample sizes are in some cases devastatingly horrid, but there are a few countries that have tried doing something to counter-act these trends.
Spain bars models with a body-mass index (BMI) below 18 (according to the World Health Organisation guidelines an adult with a BMI below 18 is considered malnourished; 17 indicates a severely malnourished person) from taking part in Madrid fashion shows; in Italy a self-regulation code states that models should have a health certificate to take part in a runway show (though in some cases this doesn't happen…).
Conceived along the same lines, a health bill passed on Thursday this week by French MPs states that models will need a medical certificate to prove they do have a healthy weight, on the basis of a criteria that considers age, gender and body shape. The certificate will have to confirm that "the state of health of the model, assessed with regard to her body mass index (BMI), is compatible with the exercise of her profession". An earlier draft of the bill actually included a clause imposing a minimum BMI (based on height and weight) a suggestion that French MPs rejected.
The new legislation hopes to fight the problem of anorexia among models and establishes punishments up to six months in jail and a fine of €75,000 for those who do not respect it.
Magazines will also have to indicate if an image of a model has been Photoshopped, and label it as "photograph touched up". Publications failing to comply with such regulations will have to pay fines up to €37,500, or 30% of the value of the advert featuring the model.
The draft for this new legislation also considered encouraging extreme thinness as an offence punishable with up to a year's imprisonment, but was not included in the final bill.
Calling for new laws for health standards in the fashion industry is not wrong in the same way as it is right to call attention to specific adverts that may promote unhealthy images. A few months ago for example the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned a Saint Laurent ad featuring a young female model with "very thin" legs and a "visible" and "prominent" rib cage, stating the young woman looked "unhealthily underweight" and calling the advert "irresponsible".
Yet, despite laws and bills may be a good idea, a greater way to improve the situation would be to change our views on body image.
We live indeed in a world that in theory encourages and promotes diversity in beauty ideals, but in practice only accepts distorted beauty canons and even establishes inequalities, justifying discrimination (plus-size models are paid less than regular models and usually work on shoots destined to catalogues and not to editorials in magazines).
The digital world we have built around ourselves spreads very fake visions of fabulous bodies, but very rarely we are told they are artificial and fabricated: while in the past we would only have glossy magazines promoting such perfect images (and we knew that they were unachievable…), now we also have millions of Instagram accounts in which celebrities, models and ordinary people put on display flawlessly perfect bodies, too often the result of clever software manipulations.
The illusionary world becomes therefore real, and we are collectively prompted to believe that what's manufactured is acceptable and what's fake is achievable. Time to change things not just with laws: in the last few months there have been perfectly healthy models who have bravely denounced pressures received from fashion agencies to lose weight; this is one tactic from fashion insiders who are willing to bring a serious issue to the collective attention, but boycotting some fashion brands may be another option. We do indeed need some strong messages that can help people (especially the youngest ones) leaving behind the obsessive dysmorphophobia generated by a society revolving around the importance of the body image over anything else.
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