100 signatures reached
To: Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP, Secretary of State for Health
Ban skinny catwalk models!
Please introduce legislation to make it illegal for modelling agencies to employ or promote models who are excessively thin, and for fashion magazines to show pictures of malnourished models.
Why is this important?
France’s National Assembly has made it a criminal offence to employ dangerously skinny women on the catwalk. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32987228.
Under the new law, anyone running an agency employing undernourished models below an as-yet undefined Body Mass Index risks a six-month prison term and a €75,000 (£55,000) fine. Magazines will also have to indicate when a photograph of a model has been digitally ‘touched up’ to make her look skinnier or bulkier or face a €37,500 fine or up to 30 per cent of the sums spent on advertising.
Spain bars models below a certain BMI from featuring in Madrid fashion shows, and Italy insists on health certificates for models. Brazil is considering demands to ban under-age or underweight models from its catwalks.
The World Health Organization considers people with a BMI below 18.5 to be underweight and at risk of being malnourished. Presenting anorexic or malnourished models as fashionable figures encourages young women to adopt unhealthy eating patterns, and wrongly categorises natural feminine curvaceousness as 'fat' and unfashionable.
For the truth about the modelling industry see http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2013/jul/05/vogue-truth-size-zero-kirstie-clements.
