Angry in the Great White North

From the BBC's Deepest Desires program:

When looking for a partner people instinctively respond to a whole range of signals. The simplest of these is body shape. For women, a narrow waist and wide hips are a sign of fertility and therefore prove highly attractive to men.

And here:

Some researchers also found that men judge the female figure they found most attractive as heavier than women's ratings of the ideal body shape. In contrast, most women, including overweight women, desire men with a very low percentage of body fat, whether they be thin or muscular. This suggests that, contrary to the media focus, men are far more likely to be attracted to larger women than women are to be attracted to larger men.

Most of the top fashion designers are men:

"Who's Who in Fashion," a directory published by Fairchild Publications, is split 60-40 in favor of men, and "The Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion," published last year by Charles Scribner's Sons, included entries on 36 female and 69 male designers.

If most men find women who are not skin-and-bones to be attractive, and most fashion designers are men, why do fashion models share a body type that most men would find unattractive, even repellant?

Could it be that most male fashion designers are not like most men?

The Council of Fashion Designers of America, a trade group that vets those who apply for membership, is made up of 121 women and 156 men. Since 1986 its annual Perry Ellis awards for young talent have been given to 8 women and 29 men (20 of them openly gay).

In some quarters, the perception exists that fashion's main consumers, women, are more comfortable taking advice about how they should look from a man. "Men are often better designers for women than other women," said Tom Ford, the former creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, who more than anyone in the past decade built a brand on his own persona, that of a man whose sensual appeal is to both men and women. Whereas Bill Blass, Valentino and Oscar de la Renta founded their empires on the strength of a nonthreatening, nonsexual charisma, Mr. Ford aggressively promoted his sexually charged designs. "Of course there are many more gay male designers," Mr. Ford said. "I think we are more objective. We don't come with the baggage of hating certain parts of our bodies."

Whatever the reasons, gay men dominate the fashion industry. Is that why they design for fashion models that are undernourished to the point that their secondary sexual characteristics (hips, breasts, thighs) have atrophied to near invisibility?

On a practical side, fashion designers tend to cut their clothes for one size for a show. The reason is simple -- they can't be certain which model will wear what, and if in the chaos of the show they have to switch outfits, they want to make sure any model can wear any outfit. So the models need to be the same shape and size.

Height is easy to control. But that's only a small part of fitting clothes. Simplicity dictates, therefore, to eschew those elements of the female form that can vary widely even among women of the same height. Bust size, hips and so forth are as much, or more, a function of body fat than of bone. Two well-nourished women 5'8" might have dramatically different body shapes. The same two woman, malnourished, might be indistinguishable, especially if body fat is almost non-existent.

But then there is the gay thing. Is that the reason these female models look like effeminate men instead of healthy (and attractive) women?

Doesn't really matter to me, of course. I don't care about fashion, and if the entire industry evapourated tomorrow, I wouldn't miss it. I might even miss the news report about its disappearance. But the news from Spain is interesting, moreso the reaction:

Excessively-thin models have been barred from a major Madrid fashion show later this month for fear they could send the wrong message to young Spanish girls, local media reported last week.

Madrid's regional government, which is co-financing the Pasarela Cibeles, has vetoed around a third of the models who took part in last year's show because they weigh too little.

"That worries me," [Didier Grumbach, president of the couture federation and chamber of haute couture,] commented: "We are not going to regulate in tastes and colours."

No one is talking about colour. No one has ever died because they wore white after Labour Day:

Last month South American model Luisel Ramos died moments after stepping off the catwalk from heart failure.

The 22-year-old had been told by a model agency she could "make it big" if she lost a significant amount of weight, and for three months she ate nothing but green leaves and drank only Diet Coke.

By the time she traipsed down the catwalk at the Radisson Victoria Plaza in Montevideo, Uruguay, she had stopped eating entirely.

She was cheered and applauded by the fashionistas but collapsed two minutes after she stepped down from the catwalk.

We say that these women are adults, and that they can make their own decisions. But many have been models since their teens. For some, they have no marketable skills aside from modelling (ie, the ability to walk, turn, and walk some more). To decide to eat right and put on some weight is tantamount to professional suicide, especially if the fashion industry has, either deliberately or by accident, formed a cartel that bans healthy women from working there. If that's true, if for whatever reason a significant portion of the industry has banded together to make it impossible for healthy women to hold a job, then maybe the government does need to step in. Governments are expected to maintain the health of the free market by breaking up cartels and monopolies, since the lack of competition hurts consumers and employees. That a cartel has formed that not only limits competition but also puts the health of its workers at risk, workers who have nowhere else to go for a job, suggests a government response might be in order.

But the like I said, it's just fashion. It's not like it matters a jot what nonsense these designers think real people ought to be wearing. As long they stop hurting and killing these models, they can do whatever they want.