Fashion models in France will need to provide medical certificates proving they are healthy in order to work, after a new law was introduced banning those considered to be excessively thin.
A further measure, to come into force on 1 October, will require magazines, adverts and websites to mark images in which a model’s appearance has been manipulated with the words photographie retouchée (retouched photograph).
Doctors are urged to pay special attention to the model’s body mass index (BMI), a calculation taking into account age, height and weight. However, unlike similar legislation passed in Italy and Spain, models will not have to reach a minimum BMI.
Under World Health Organisation guidelines an adult with a BMI below 18.5 is considered underweight, 18 malnourished, and 17 severely malnourished. The average model measuring 1.75m (5ft 9in) and weighing 50kg (7st 12lb) has a BMI of 16.
Announcing the introduction of the new rules on Friday, France’s health minister said they were aimed at preventing anorexia by stopping the promotion of inaccessible ideals of beauty.
“Exposing young people to normative and unrealistic images of bodies leads to a sense of self-depreciation and poor self-esteem that can impact health-related behaviour,” the health and social affairs minister, Marisol Touraine, said.
Given Paris’s iconic role in the fashion industry, the measures – passed in 2015 but only just coming into effect – are likely to have a symbolic impact around the world.
The proposals had originally suggested a minimum BMI for models but, following an outcry from fashion executives and modelling agencies, this was ditched in favour of allowing doctors to decide whether a model is too thin.
Agencies who use models without valid medical certificates will face a fine of €75,000 (£54,000) and staff face up to six months in prison. Failing to flag-up retouched images will incur a fine of €37,500, or up to 30% of the amount spent on the advert.
Fashion models in France will need to provide medical certificates proving they are healthy in order to work, after a new law was introduced banning those considered to be excessively thin.
A further measure, to come into force on 1 October, will require magazines, adverts and websites to mark images in which a model’s appearance has been manipulated with the words photographie retouchée (retouched photograph).
Doctors are urged to pay special attention to the model’s body mass index (BMI), a calculation taking into account age, height and weight. However, unlike similar legislation passed in Italy and Spain, models will not have to reach a minimum BMI.
Under World Health Organisation guidelines an adult with a BMI below 18.5 is considered underweight, 18 malnourished, and 17 severely malnourished. The average model measuring 1.75m (5ft 9in) and weighing 50kg (7st 12lb) has a BMI of 16.
Announcing the introduction of the new rules on Friday, France’s health minister said they were aimed at preventing anorexia by stopping the promotion of inaccessible ideals of beauty.
“Exposing young people to normative and unrealistic images of bodies leads to a sense of self-depreciation and poor self-esteem that can impact health-related behaviour,” the health and social affairs minister, Marisol Touraine, said.
Given Paris’s iconic role in the fashion industry, the measures – passed in 2015 but only just coming into effect – are likely to have a symbolic impact around the world.
The proposals had originally suggested a minimum BMI for models but, following an outcry from fashion executives and modelling agencies, this was ditched in favour of allowing doctors to decide whether a model is too thin.
Agencies who use models without valid medical certificates will face a fine of €75,000 (£54,000) and staff face up to six months in prison. Failing to flag-up retouched images will incur a fine of €37,500, or up to 30% of the amount spent on the advert.
The new issue of British Vogue is to be a “model-free zone” after editors decided to use only “real” women to showcase the designer clothes featured in the magazine.
Among the women included in the issue are the architectural historian Shumi Bose, the charity director Brita Fernandez Schmidt, Hello Love Studio creative director and Hello Beautiful founder Jane Hutchison, and ice-cream brand creator Kitty Travers, as well as some of the women behind London’s Crossrail project.
Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, said she commissioned the project because she felt strongly that professional women, or women in positions of authority or power, should be able to indulge their interest in fashion without it seeming frivolous. “In this country, there is still a stigma attached to clearly enjoying how you look and experimenting with it if you are a woman in the public eye and not in the fashion or entertainment business,” she told the Telegraph.
Shulman has edited British Vogue since 1992 and is venerated for her egalitarian attitude to body image. She does not publish stories about diets or cosmetic surgery, and in 2009 wrote a letter to all major designers arguing that the tiny sample sizes they offered for shoots encouraged models to be unhealthily thin. “I was also frustrated by a few designers’ PRs choosing only to lend their clothes if they approved of the appearance of the subject to be photographed rather than what they did,” she said.
The cover of the new Vogue issue, out on 6 October, may been seen to contradict Shulman’s previous claims that readers do not want a “real person” on the front of the magazine. In an interview for BBC Radio 2 in 2014, the editor told guest presenter Lily Allen: “People always say, ‘Why do you have thin models? That’s not what real people look like,’ but nobody really wants to see a real person looking like a real person on the cover of Vogue.
“I think Vogue is a magazine that’s about fantasy to some extent, and dreams, and an escape from real life. People don’t want to buy a magazine like Vogue to see what they see when they look in a mirror. They can do that for free.”
Shulman defended the choice of the actor Emily Blunt as the cover star of the “real” issue by pointing out that she plays an everyday woman in her new film, The Girl on the Train. According to Vogue, Blunt joked about appearing on her first cover: “It took three hours of hair and makeup to get me looking this real!”
The issue comes after H&M used the 60-year-old Scottish stylist Gillean McLeod as the face of its swimwear range and US brand J Crew used staff members and their friends instead of models to showcase its clothes at New York fashion week.
Women’s Equality party leader Sophie Walker has spoken out against ‘systematic malnutrition’ in the fashion industry. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer
The Women’s Equality party, meanwhile, is campaigning to change the fashion industry’s approach to body image by calling for designers showing in London to display at least two sample sizes, one of which must be more than a UK size 12.
Sophie Walker, the party’s leader, told the Guardian last month that these “tiny, tiny little clothes are such that normal-sized women have to starve themselves to fit into them. And we’re not talking a three-day soup diet here, which would be bad enough; we’re talking weeks and weeks of systematic malnutrition, for which young women are paid to fit into these tiny little sizes.”
Last week, four US Vogue editors were branded “jealous and hypocritical” after complaining about the presence of “pathetic” and “desperate” fashion bloggers at Milan fashion week.
Shulman distanced herself from the row, tweeting:
Alexandra Shulman (@AShulman2)
Can I just be CLEAR. The current Bloggersgate furore is via American Vogue not @BritishVogue.
Grains for breakfast, vegetables for lunch, smoked salmon for dinner. No wheat, no dairy, no sugar; 45 minutes of exercise every day. It’s a draconian and unbalanced regime even for someone with a sensible reason to lose excess weight. If you’re a 21-year-old who weighs eight stone, it’s clearly both unnecessary and profoundly unhealthy. And yet this was Rosie Nelson’s daily intake and expenditure of energy for four months back in 2014, as a result of a visit to one of the country’s most powerful modelling agencies.
Nelson had started modelling work at the age of 18, when her body was still developing. When she moved from her native Australia to Britain, her intention was to continue. And the agency in question liked her look – except for the fact that she was, they said, too big. Specifically her hips, which were around the 37- or 38-inch mark, but needed to shrink to 35.
I ask Nelson, now 24 and still modelling, what that moment felt like. “You get sucked into thinking that what they say is the only way to be,” she replies. “They control your life. They’re getting you your jobs, they’re providing you with your income, and you become like a slave to it. The industry’s so consuming that you forget about the real world. In the real world I’m incredibly thin, but in the modelling world I’m still too big. So when they asked me to lose weight, I accepted it.” But worse was to come. Grains consumed, exercise taken, social life shunned, she slimmed her hips down to 35 inches and went back to the agency.
“They said, just lose more weight – get down to the bone,” remembers Nelson. “They pressed on my hips and I just sat there thinking, no, I can’t. I can’t physically lose more weight. I was in shock. I didn’t know what to say.”
It turned out to be a pivotal moment. In its aftermath, Nelson decided she couldn’t return to her previous weight-loss programme, which she describes as “a horrible routine of essentially killing myself”.
She started working with smaller agencies, where she was encouraged to remain at a healthy weight. At the same time she began to speak and write about her experiences, committed to raising awareness of the potentially destructive power the fashion industry wields. That’s why, after a day’s work, she has joined Sophie Walker, leader of the Women’s Equality party (WEP), and Jada Sezer, a plus-size model on the verge of launching her own clothing range, to talk about WEP’s forthcoming campaign, which will operate on social media under the hashtag #NoSizeFitsAll.
Jada Sezer, pictured in 2013, was the face of London Fashion Week’s first plus-size show. Right, Rosie Nelson in her ultra-thin days. Composite: Rio Romaine and courtesy Rosie Nelson
For Walker, whose organisation has existed for a little over a year and is committed to change through cross-party collaboration, we are in the middle of a public health crisis that includes 1.6 million sufferers of eating disorders, 89% of them women and girls, and brings with it an economic cost of £1.3bn a year in lost productivity and healthcare bills. WEP’s campaign, which is backed by industry commentator and professor of diversity in fashion Caryn Franklin, will focus on what Walker believes is at the root of the problem: the sample sizes used by the fashion industry.
These “tiny, tiny little clothes”, says Walker, “are such that normal-sized women have to starve themselves to fit into them. And we’re not talking a three-day soup diet here, which would be bad enough; we’re talking weeks and weeks and weeks of systematic malnutrition, for which young women are paid to fit into these tiny little sizes. And so the first part of this campaign is to say that we think that by this time next year, when London Fashion week kicks off, the British Fashion Council should have in place a system whereby the designers showing in London must show at least two sample sizes, one of which must be more than a UK size 12.”
In addition, WEP is calling for legislation that will require all models hired or rehired by agencies to have a minimum body mass index (BMI) of 18.5; any lower, and they will have to see a doctor from a list of accredited medical experts to be signed off as healthy. This, says Walker, would bring the UK into line with law in France, Spain and Italy. She deems it “frankly embarrassing that we haven’t done this yet”. Her party’s campaign also calls on UK fashion magazines to feature at least one editorial piece per issue that includes plus-size models, and for body image to become a compulsory part of personal, social and health education at school.
Sophie Walker, head of the Women’s Equality party, is leading the campaign against ‘tiny, tiny little clothes’. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer
How likely does Walker think a change in legislation really is? She points to the fact that her party is the only one to work across political divides to achieve change, and to what happened when she ran in the London mayoral race, suggesting that it led “proud feminist” Sadiq Khan to launch a gender pay audit in City Hall. “He stole the policy because he was worried about losing the votes.” Her party, she argues, can bring its thousands of members and registered supporters to the table – the campaign will mobilise them to write to the British Fashion Council in support.
Does she worry that one plank of their demands – the insistence that models’ BMIs be monitored – will seem to some as if women are once again being medicalised or placed under enforced scrutiny? “You think that’s not already happening?” says Walker. “What we’re doing is the first step towards liberating women from that scrutiny. We have all lived with that pressure all of our lives.
“I have been everything from a size eight to a size 18, and I can tell you at every point in my life which size I’ve been and when. We live with this. And I am 45 years old. I have been living with it for 30 years and I’m tired of it. I’m seeing it happen to my children, I’m seeing my daughters – my seven-year-old and my 14-year-old – under the same pressures.” She adds that there are girls in her younger daughter’s class who talk about their “thigh gap” – the crucial space that indicates one’s legs are thin enough to be considered attractive. “What we are doing here is about removing that scrutiny, not adding to it. We are creating a situation where women can be healthy and work, rather than being paid to be unhealthy and contribute to this awful public health issue.”
The images that bombard women and girls are nothing new. For as long as there has been mass media, idealised pictures of the human body (generally, thin women and muscled men) have permeated cinema, television, newspapers and magazines – sometimes attempting to sell consumers products, sometimes simply illustrating a story. But in the age of the internet, says Sezer, an additional layer of imagery has appeared – not courtesy of businesses advertising their wares, but produced instead by the individual, via such platforms as Instagram or YouTube. Often, she says, such images are Photoshopped, or highly selective – and yet they are presented as authentic everyday life. In that category one might put extreme “clean eating” and hardcore exercise regimes.
Mark Fast Catwalk show at London fashion week in 2010. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
Yet Sezer also believes that social media has brought much that is positive, and can be utilised as a force for good. Now 27, she was doing a master’s degree in child psychotherapy when she realised that she was drawn to finding out the root causes of people’s lack of confidence and “flipping it on its head and saying, you can do anything you want”. The immense popularity of her own Instagram feed led to her being signed to agency Models 1 and becoming the face of London Fashion week’s first ever plus-size show.
She stuck to modelling for the following two and a half years, including a stint in New York. It was there, she says, “I became really flat, and stripped back of everything. I felt like I’d hit a glass ceiling, and I felt like they weren’t pushing the boundaries fast enough, they weren’t seeing a gap could be broken into.” She was also segregated, a plus-size model restricted to working with plus-size brands. “I felt, surely that’s not right? When I got into modelling, I didn’t even know I was a plus-size model. I had no perception of what my body looked like.” Returning to live in London, she began to develop other strings to her bow, working as an ambassador for the charity Young Minds, and designing her own range of clothes, Sezer, which will launch online this month.
Both Sezer and Nelson are realistic about the fashion industry, and the paths they’ve pursued. Sezer accepts that, in New York, “I didn’t feel like I could be as much of an activist. I didn’t feel like I had much control. You’re a model. You do as you’re told… you’re being hired to look beautiful on set, and that’s it.” Nelson acknowledges that the bigger agencies “are the ones that get you the greater jobs – the high fashion, the Top Shop, the H&M”. Does she feel that she’s lost out? “Definitely. I definitely would have had better clients being with a bigger agency, because they have the contacts for it. So I have potentially ruined my career by not being a slave to the industry. But I chose my own health and happiness over my career, which is the best decision I could have made.”
Sezer ascribes the continuing power of such agencies to the ingrained idea that they can make would-be models’ dreams come true. But, she says, it’s a flawed idea, because the agencies themselves are always chopping and changing, telling their charges to alter their appearance according to their latest guess of what will appeal. And, as she points out, “agents have a role to play, but they’re the middle man between the designer and the model. If a designer is producing such a small size, then agents can only give them the models that fit into their sizes.”
Which brings the argument back to the issue of the sample size, which all agree trickles down into the wider fashion and retail culture. Given that women’s bodies are so various, why has its dominance persisted for so long? Walker argues that we’ve collectively bought into “the myth that creative integrity is dependent on the fantasy of a tiny woman. Which to me is like saying that the tobacco industries were presenting a myth of the wild west, and that actually it was nothing to do with them that we all got lung cancer”.
And, adds Sezer: “If you look back at the history of fashion, the majority [of designers] were men, and it was their ideal of what beauty was. And that seeped down into being these frail, almost boy-like figures.”
What does Walker hope will happen now? Her ambition is that the landscape will have changed by next year’s London fashion week. She is soon to approach Sadiq Khan to ask that, if it doesn’t, he should be withdrawing LFW funding. She’s also writing to Maria Miller, chair of the women and equalities select committee, to consider holding a public hearing “with those fashion designers to explore why they believe that their success is so intrinsically linked to an unattainable level of thinness in women”.
And underlying all this activity is her belief that the fashion industry, quite apart from its ethical responsibilities, has allowed itself to be constrained by its own rules, and is thereby marginalising a potentially huge market.
She is determined that the campaign represent a step change, in which the onus is no longer on women and girls to resist the messages that surround them, but on the disappearance of the messages themselves.
“The previous work that’s been done to contest this has been a very gentle, softly-softly approach, and there was a lot that had to be done in terms of raising awareness,” she says. “All of those campaigns are valid and important, but now we’re at the point where we’ve got to say, enough: this has got to stop.”
The Sun has challenged the growing anti-Web page 3 campaign by linking the use of its topless models to a breast cancer awareness charity.
It has joined forces with CoppaFeel! in purchase to inspire women to verify their breasts on a normal basis.
3 pages of today’s Sun, which includes the total front page, plus a foremost report, are devoted to the initiative.
Today’s Sun front web page
The paper programs to make it a typical weekly characteristic with Webpage three versions involved in “check out ‘em Tuesday” reminders.
In a video on its website, Sun editor David Dinsmore says: “I’m truly proud to be part of this and to be joining up with Coppafeel! We considered we could do some genuine great with web page three.”
And the charity’s founder, Kris Hallenga, talks of page 3 currently being “a brilliant platform to get across a life-saving message. They are the most popular boobs in Britain. And for us to be hopping on the back of that web page and The Sun as a complete is a huge opportunity.”
Hallenga founded CoppaFeel! in 2009 with her twin sister right after she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 23. But the late diagnosis meant the cancer spread to her spine and is now incurable.
She launched the charity due to the fact she realised that there was no organisation at the time urging younger girls to be breast aware.
In its editorial, The Sun factors out that 12,000 ladies in Britain die of breast cancer each 12 months. “It is a nationwide result in for concern that the numbers who often check out their boobs for lumps are so reduced.
“Only 18% do so as frequently as as soon as a fortnight. And which is only element of the dilemma. Practically half of Britain’s girls would not check out the GP even if they considered some thing was wrong. Youthful ladies are the worst offenders.”
‘Perhaps my sorrow at their going relates to a secret hankering for this previous-fashioned togetherness.’
Stan and Eva, my neighbours, moved in to our street far more than 60 years ago. Often, soon after an early morning trip to the industry, I knock on their door and hand in excess of a couple of turnips – something they use in soup and can’t get at the regional store. They usually insist on paying out, regardless of the reality that they give me tomatoes from their greenhouse in summertime and drop the magazine that comes with their Sunday newspaper through my door every week. “Eva cannot study small print and I’m not into ladies’ fashion,” says Stan.
This time, when he opens the door and appears inside the brown paper bag, he says, “Still never know the difference among a turnip and a swede?” I sheepishly confess that I never, but he thanks me even now, saying that he’ll steam it and serve it with steak for dinner.
When I request how he is, Stan tells me he does not really feel any worse than usual but he was recently diagnosed with cancer. A nurse visits often to drain the extra fluid from his lungs. “In no way smoked although,” he says, matter-of-factly.
He invites me in and I accept, keen to prolong my time away from the inevitable Saturday morning chaos at residence. Within, I perch on the sofa following to Eva, who wears Karl Lagerfeld-style dark glasses at all times. She is almost totally blind, but her standards are high. She keeps her hair in a sharp, silver Mary Quant bob and serves biscuits on Edwardian painted plates.
Stan and Eva are moving. Ruddy-cheeked estate agents have been pulling up outside their property all week in logoed cars, attempting to charm the couple to sign up with them. They talk excitedly about parquet flooring, plump with hope for the huge commission that a swift sale from an elderly couple could supply.
I have only acknowledged Stan and Eva for a quick time and nevertheless I’m sorry that they are leaving. They are the oldest people on the street and I often view them out of my bedroom window as they stroll slowly, carefully – arms linked – up the road collectively. In the couple of years I’ve lived here, the places they travel to have become a lot more and more constrained. But they nonetheless get out, nonetheless wrap up warm and appreciate their occasional day journeys to the numerous supermarkets. They know in which the scorching deals are. “Of program, it utilized to be the images, the opera, and Regent Street,” Eva says.
Even though I regret that they are going, I discover they are not overly sentimental. They see their slow exit from the street – and at some point from this world – as something wholly unsurprising, an inevitable occasion in the last chapter of their daily life collectively.
Perhaps what I’m selfishly lamenting is not basically the fact that the street will lose them, the stalwarts, the originals, but the loss of Stan and Eva as real-lifestyle part versions, an illustration of men and women in a marriage that is reliable, sound and for life. They need to bicker, get annoyed with each other and disagree – I’m sure of that. Up till retirement they earned their living as marketplace stall-holders in south London. ”Eva usually wore the trousers,” Stan says.
“But he got away with a lot since he was so handsome,” says Eva.
Existence has not spared them hardship, but they have endured the tough instances with each other: the death of one of their adult daughters from cancer, which led to the loss of their once powerful Jewish faith Stan’s two heart attacks Eva’s sight deteriorating whilst the rest of her entire body even now worked properly well. They are even now side-by-side, however: still planning their evening meal, placing their coats on each day to fetch the newspaper.
Probably my sorrow at their going relates to a secret hankering for this outdated-fashioned togetherness. It is distinct to how my parents are – not that they are in a miserable marriage. But they have often fought against togetherness and sometimes I want they’d be a bit more accepting of it and every single other, because absolutely acceptance and enjoy isn’t going to suggest there is no area for ache, disappointment and differing views.
As I depart, I guarantee Stan a salt beef bagel from the greatest store in London, a area he used to frequent. Final time they had been out of salt beef, so I settled for the bagel alone, which is by no means very the exact same. At property, I flip to R, who arrived early to watch the young children even though I went to the industry. He seems decidedly keen to depart for his afternoon shift at function, but before he goes I tell him that Stan and Eva are leaving. I say jokingly, but with a specific, apparent longing, that perhaps one particular day we’ll be the oldest individuals on the street.
