by Jayne Clarkson

Created on: May 14, 2009   Last Updated: November 05, 2009

We live in an incredibly image conscious age. We cannot grow old gracefully.Each grey hair must be plucked out or dyed.We cannot (god forbid!) allow our bodies to sprout hair in unseemly places, if we are women (hell, even men are beginning to wax themselves!). We cannot be too pale or have unwhitened teeth. Yet the worst crime of all is to be , FAT. Now I'm not advocating being morbidly obese or unhealthy but I am against the promotion of unrealistic body fascism.

Now I don't want you to think that I hate supermodels on principle or that I think that slim people shouldn't be represented in the media.During the 1990's when I was a teenager , I absolutely loved the supers. Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington,Eva Herzigova. Those women were glamorous and healthy looking. Yes,they were slim but their bones didn't jut out at oblique angles. They looked like amazons not anorexics. Since then , throughout the naughties , it seems that the mantra , "The skinnier the better, " has taken hold and sadly with deadly consequences.

During the past couple of years , a number of model deaths have been recorded , namely Ana Carolina Reston and Luisel and Eliana Ramos . Each of these women died of anorexia nervosa . Of course , you could argue that their deaths were coincidences. Nothing to do with the fashion industry at all. Yet when the testamonies of other former "straight size" , models are considered, such as Crystal Renn or Kate Dillon it is easy to see , how rigid dieting , is endemic within the fashion industry.

It would be pernicious enough , if this attitude merely pervaded the rarefied world of the fashion industry itself. It doesn't. With reports regularly in the press of girls, sometimes as young as seven, developing some form of eating disorder, surely it is time for the fashion industry to take some responsibility for the images they peddle. Models are , like it or not , seen by many youngsters as the pinnacle of beauty within modern society. It is pictures of models and celebrities, who find themselves emblazoned on pro anorexia sites as idols. Many of those featured on these sites are rightly appalled , yet it does show the far reaching influence of these images on the psyche of young girls.

So why ban underweight models from catwalk shows? It's an old fashioned thing , called setting an example. Like it or not the influence of the media is enormous in our society. With the advent of the Internet, pictures are more readily accessible than ever before. Added to this picture technology is so advanced, that images seem more and more flawless. We look at pictures that are impossibly perfect and feel that we fall short. We are ugly. For youngsters , this is even more so . They are often not aware that retouching or excessive dieting has taken place to achieve the image. So they find it even harder to achieve a healthy body image.

I don't want any one body type sashaying down the catwalk. I want many types. Tall, short, slim, curvy , old and young , so we are all represented. After all beauty comes in many guises. Kate Moss is beautiful, but so is Helen Mirren and Crystal Renn, Dawn French, Queen Latifa , J lo and Tilda Swinton. Let's have fashion shows that celebrate beauty instead of opressing as all with unrealistic images.

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