France’s proposed law barring ultrathin models, which is more of an anti-anorexia campaign or an anorexia-prevention bill, if we are being optimistic, has gotten meaningfully closer to realization, winning a majority vote in the lower house of Parliament and moving on to the Senate.
This is causing, as you might imagine, a bit of an uproar even beyond France (I Googled “France skinny model law” and got 1.36 million results), because it’s not just the industry policing itself, as in Denmark and the United States; it’s the government policing the industry.
Is it possible to legislate on weight? Does this discriminate against ultrathin models? Lots of trends come out of Paris: Will this be one of them? And so on.
The bill, which can be broken down into three parts, requires models to have a body mass index (height-to-weight ratio) of 18; imposes punitive measures on pro-anorexia websites; and requires the labeling of ads that have been retouched to make their subjects look thicker or thinner.
Leaving aside the issue of the body mass index, and whether a single number can determine health in a wide variety of women and body types, it’s the assumption, widely articulated in the coverage of the proposed law, that fashion models promote excessive thinness in the general population that seems to me a flawed premise.
It takes as a given that young women receive their body image cues from models, especially at-risk models. (It is colloquially referred to as a “skinny model law” after all.) But a quick trip through the social media universe would suggest that the women with the most influence are not, in fact, models.
I mean, consider:
Karlie Kloss: 632,000 Twitter followers; 2.2 million on Instagram.
Taylor Swift: 55.6 million on Twitter; 26.3 million on Instagram.
Kendall Jenner: 10.1 million; 22.7 million.
Kim Kardashian: 30.8 million; 29.3 million
Even the former Disney star Vanessa Hudgens (5.14 million Twitter followers; 6.7 million on Instagram) trumps the globally famous supermodel Gisele Bündchen’s 2.59 million followers on Twitter and 4.5 million on Instagram.
You get the point.
This is why so many high-fashion brands use celebrities in their ads instead of models: Celebrities sell stuff because consumers relate to them, and not to models. See Dior with Jennifer Lawrence, Natalie Portman and Marion Cotillard; Miu Miu with Mia Goth and Imogen Poots; Balmain with Ms. Kardashian and Kanye West; and so on.
It is their bodies, I would argue, that trickle down into the general consciousness as the female ideal. Not, say, the bodies of Hanne Gaby Odiele or Alana Zimmer.
Who?
Exactly. But they’re both very successful models, judging by catwalk and magazine appearances.
So if the bill is intended, at least in part, to protect models from workplace pressures to starve themselves, that’s one thing. It will impose hefty fines on “agencies” that use too-thin girls, which, I guess, is meant to encourage model bookers and photographers to use healthier-looking subjects. But I also think the fact that everyone refers to them as “girls,” and not “women,” is indicative of the uneven power structure of the industry, wherein models have the least control over their fate of any member of a shoot (anorexia being a disease of control). To be really effective in helping models, I think the lawmakers would also have to address employment issues beyond weight.
But if the proposed law is about changing the incidence of eating disorders in the general population, I wonder if it will have much of an effect at all.