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"It is my job not to eat," a runway model told the Vogue editor adjusting the set to allow her to lie down for the final set of photographs.1 Her energy loss affected the set design, but not her ability to do her job. To the contrary, it was a qualification: a skeletal frame was essential to the look the designer had created. Indeed, the fashion industry refers to its top models as clothes hangers-the less mass within the outfit, the better the display, the better the employee. Not surprisingly, this takes a toll: models have died of starvation-related complications, sometimes just after stepping off the runway. France recently moved to criminalize this trend, prohibiting designers and agents from employing models with a body mass index (BMI; defined as weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters) under 18. Similar measures exist in Israel, Milan, and Madrid, but France may become the first to be able to affect change. For one, the law has teeth, unlike municipal regulations that impose, at most, token fines. Secondly, and critically, France is the epicenter of the fashion industry while Israel barely leaves a footprint. In fact, France is so prominent in fashion that international models are referred to as "Paris thin," a label indicating aesthetic eligibility to display haute couture.1
Being Paris thin is undeniably hazardous; the average international runway model's BMI is typically below the World Health Organization's threshold for medically dangerous thinness for adults (16). Runway models are, by definition and professional necessity, starving to death. As one fashion editor explained, "the ideal body shape used as a starting point for a [designer ' s] collection [is] a female on the brink of hospitalization from starvation."1 Not only does this threaten the livelihood of models, but it also perpetuates unrealistic-even deadly- expectations of what women and adolescent girls should look like to achieve the "perfect body."
The workplace is often hazardous to health; the US government regulates the extent to which any other industry can expose employees to significant harm (e.g., mining, shipping, production lines). That it does not do the same for runway models is reflective of the idealization of skeletal women, which has detrimental effects beyond the workplace: anorexia nervosa has...