A shock-tactic fashion industry ad about anorexia misses the point . Where are all the normal-sized women on the catwalk? asks Ann Marie Hourihane.
The fashion industry has always been about clothes, never about the poor beaten bodies that carry them. Whenever you see the fashion industry addressing a serious issue you have to reach for your revolver.
The fashion industry should stick to addressing the return of the hat rather than what is running around in the head beneath it. Or to guiding us through the bewildering variety of winter coats available this autumn, a complicated situation which is bound to end in tears.
So it seems unwise that, to coincide with the launch of Milan fashion week, Italian fashion label Nolita has launched an advertising campaign featuring the naked body of anorexic French actress Isabelle Caro. She weighs, we are told, 31kg, or just under five stone. "No to anorexia" is ostensibly the message.
These pictures were taken by Oliviero Toscani, who some years ago shot the Benetton advertisements which showed, among other things, a man dying of Aids and a newborn baby complete with umbilical cord.
The images were used worldwide; they seemed to stay on some hoardings for a very long time, for some reason. Of course, they had nothing to do with clothes either; we can only suppose they were designed to show what a caring bunch the Benetton people were.
However, we are in new territory with this anorexia poster, now plastered up all over Italy. Caro - who should be in hospital - is looking coquettishly over her shoulder, her eyes wide and her mouth open, in a classic model pose. There is a second picture, a front view of her, which is much more disturbing. Here we have, yet again, the fashion industry as freak show.
What effect this will have on adolescent girls - presumably the poster's target audience - is open to debate. For one thing, Caro is not an adolescent but a woman of 27. She is being interviewed widely and getting a lot of attention. She told an Italian magazine: "I've hidden myself and covered myself for too long. Now I want to show myself fearlessly, even though I know my body arouses repugnance."
Currently cinema-goers in this country are spending the first half hour of the film Atonement counting Keira Knightley's vertebrae, not a difficult task. A lovely teenage girl was with us when we went ot the film. As we left the cinema we spent quite a lot of time insisting to her that Knightley was really much, much too thin. But she already pointed out to us that Knightley had just won a multi-million euro contract to promote Chanel's Coco perfume. We knew it was true, because the advertisement had been run before the film started.
The fashion message seems to be that if you are really thin - but in just the right way - the rewards are great. No wonder young women do not listen to a word we say.
Caro, talking about wanting to show herself fearlessly, sounds like a confirmed exhibitionist, using the camera as some sort of therapy. Her pathetic statement suits the fashion industry very well, as it has come under criticism for using skeletal models and promoting images of impossible female perfection. The heavyweights of Italian fashion have come out to say revealing things.
"Anorexia has nothing to do with fashion but is a psychiatric problem," according to Dolce & Gabbana.
Giorgio Armani says: "Even people who take no notice of fashion get anorexia."
Anorexia is a serious psychiatric problem. Two women I have known who first presented with anorexia to what are laughingly called our psychiatric services were dead before they reached 40.
At one point you could have counted my vertebrae, but that was because I was smoking 25 cigarettes a day and living on carrot sandwiches. When I wrote about this, a young colleague responded warmly, in print, to say she was taking my advice and not giving up smoking until she was 40. Boy, did I feel stupid.
I know several high-achieving, perfectionist adult women with eating disorders. It is a chilling moment when you are in a friend's apartment, complimenting her on her bathroom, and she replies: "Bulimics always have clean loos."
For the sake of poor benighted parents everywhere, we should note that many adolescent girls are peculiar about food.
The old chocolate-for-breakfast- and-no-lunch regime has been running for years, but it is a different thing when you hear of the lavatories of posh English schools reeking of fresh vomit at the end of lunch break. It is a different thing, too, when you are in the changing area of an upmarket swimming pool and notice the young women have clavicles like motorways and jaw bones as their most prominent facial feature.
Only a fool would say anorexia is a middle-class disease. However it was rather striking, listening online to an old BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour discussion with mother and daughter Jo and Alice Kingsley, who had just brought out a book on the Alice's anorexia, to discover that Alice, then 19, had recently won a place at medical school.
Striking, too, that one of the women who e-mailed the programme claimed that the same perfectionism that drove her to win a double first at Cambridge drove her anorexia as well.
Anxious, focused, terrified of failure - what will the Isabelle Caro poster do for our young girls except confirm them in their idea that being skeletal will bring you fame?
It's been said before, but now is surely the time the fashion industry showed its beautiful clothes on teenagers who can keep down a hearty dinner.