Fashion industry takes step in right direction

What is the ideal female physique? That depends on several factors.

The old saying "You can never be too rich or too thin," unfortunately, applies too comfortably in the world.

A model displays an outfit as part of Versace's Spring/Summer 2007 women's collections during Milan Fashion Week September 29, 2006. [Reuters]

For the past 100 years, the female physique has followed the thinner-is-better lead with disastrous consequences, particularly in the fashion industry.

Fashion models are notoriously thin. This, of course, is a problem for models who regularly do stupid and unhealthy things to stay so thin. Starvation diets, purging (eating, then vomiting), chain smoking and metabolism-boosting drugs are common in this industry.

But models are not the only victims. Women and girls in our society in general are victimized as well, but in a more subtle way.

The fashion model and magazine cover girl have been held up to us as the ideal.

Not only are such body proportions not ideal, they are completely unrealistic for the vast majority of women.

How, then, can such ideals be sustained over decades if so few attain this goal?

The answer is American industry and the power of its advertising dollars. What better way to get you to buy products than to keep you obsessing about the fact that you don't measure up?

Keeping you dissatisfied and eager to improve makes you the perfect customer for all sorts of products that appeal to this need.

Time for change

I was delighted to read an article recently about steps the fashion industry is taking to discourage unhealthy weight-management practices among its models.

Admittedly, the steps to be taken are at best window dressing, but at least the industry is announcing publicly for the first time that it is recognizing the problem as a serious one.

A criticism of the proposed actions is that there is no reference point for models. In other words, how thin is too thin?

Experts suggest that a minimal BMI (body mass index — a weight-to-height ratio) be imposed on models and that a modest BMI of 18.5-19 be enforced. That means a 5-foot-9-inch model would have to weigh more than 126 pounds.

Such a weight-to-height ratio hardly seems too demanding or restrictive for models.

But many current models likely would balk at such a generous poundage, still believing that 100-105 pounds at that height is better suited for the runway.

(Note: Many online sites will compute BMI for you — just plug "compute body mass index" into your search engine.)

Plenty of irony

Female weight issues are rife with irony. Too-thin models cause the rest of us to think we are too fat.

This leads to crash dieting and roller-coaster ups and downs, which cause us to get fatter and fatter.

Incredibly ironic, isn't it, that our fashion models have kept getting thinner over the years, reaching skeletal proportions today, while the average adult American woman has gotten progressively fatter?

A too-fat body is an unhealthy body, especially if there is too much fat around the waistline. But ironically, the pursuit of excessive thinness ruins health just as effectively.

Ironic, too, is the fact that while American women have made so much progress in terms of independence and assertiveness, they continue to allow themselves to be manipulated by the media and advertising gurus who know exactly what buttons to push to promote the thinness-at-any-cost issue.

Am I suggesting that we return to the good old days when Lillian Russell, a stage sensation in the early 1900s, showed off with pride her 200-pound physique? No. But going back in time may provide a reasonable reference point.

In the 1950s, movie stars like Marilyn Monroe were fleshy and curvy, but no one looking back on her movies would consider her too fat. And Miss America from the same era was on average 5 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed about 150 pounds. Imagine that!

The bottom line

For far too long, no matter how thin they were, women have continued to see themselves as not thin enough.

Thankfully, these tiny steps taken by the fashion industry may turn out to be the impetus required to get us moving forward by moving back to an earlier vision of what the ideal female physique should be.