Skeletal models and super-sized hypocrisy: As fashion designers insist they've turned their backs on anorexic chic, do they think we're blind?

By LIZ JONES

Matchstick: Model Martyna Budna for Mark Fast shows off her worryingly thin frame, with jaunty shoulder bones and her ribs clearly visible


At a London Fashion Week where one designer, Maria Grachvogel, was forced to take in the seams on her samples because she couldn’t find any models who were a size ten, a ghost appeared on the catwalk.

It was as though I were looking in a mirror, at me aged 18, weighing 5st, about to be drip-fed on a ward in St Barts hospital.

I sat up straight on my narrow gilt chair. I looked around me to see if anyone else had seen what I had seen. But no, it was all sycophantic smiles, or that other thing fashion folk do, just the tops of expensively highlighted heads, tap, tapping away on their iPads.

I looked over at front row guest Samantha Cameron, but even she had failed to go pale. It is the drip, drip, drip effect, you see, when so many girls swim like matchsticks before your eyes, a death mask on the face of a teen becomes unremarkable.


Skin and bones: A model for Antonio Berardi's Autumn 2011 collection shows off her shockingly thin legs (left), while model Hannah Hardy's hip bones could grate parmesan', according to Liz Jones


I was at the collection for the autumn/winter shown by Erdem, the hot Brit designer of the moment. And this was the hottest model of the season: Chloe Memisevic, who was born in Sweden in 1993, and is represented by Wilhelmina Models in New York.

This is the very agency whose managing director had come along to a debate in New York a few seasons ago about the need for more realistic models, an event where Natalia Vodianova, the face of Calvin Klein, had broken down in tears when recounting how she had been told off for not losing her baby weight fast enough, and rejected by designers for being too fat.


Worrying signs: Chloe Memisevic is this season's hottest model, but she is doing her body huge damage by being so thin - including symptoms which could lead to an early death


The fashion world is going crazy for Chloe Memisevic — she was back on the catwalk yesterday for Mary Katrantzou looking horribly emaciated. As well as Erdem, she has walked the runway for Proenza Schouler and Marc Jacobs in New York, and Roksanda Ilincic and Twenty8Twelve here in London.

She is the face of Marc Jacobs. She is 5ft 11in and measures 32, 22, 34. On a Body Mass Index scale (a way of measuring body fat that proved too problematic to introduce at fashion shows, though it was mooted by Labour’s Model Health Inquiry back in 2008), she would hover somewhere below number 15.


Unimpressed: Samantha Cameron grimaces as the stick thin Swedish model Chloe Memisevic shows off a new design during the Erdem show


A healthy BMI falls somewhere between 18.5 and 24.9. This means she is at risk of brittle bone disease later in life. And heart failure. And pneumonia. And an early, horrible death.

Just to give you an idea of how far fashion has stretched its new ideal of beauty, let me tell you about the Issa show on Saturday. Yasmin Le Bon walked the runway, and while in the Eighties she was seen as very skinny and flat-chested (her photo on the cover of the first issue of Elle prompted me to have a breast reduction), on the runway in among all these emaciated 16-year-olds she looked positively elephantine.


Weighty issue: Chloe Memisevic barely filled out the floor-length gown as she walked the runway


‘Oh God, that a***!’ said the male fashion director of a glossy weekly, sat right in front of me, clutching his man bag. This sums up our second biggest industry right now, the one that makes £20 billion a year for this country, the very one Samantha Cameron was so keen to big up (my God, if only she could!) in her heartfelt speech to launch the proceedings.

Disenchanted by what I had seen at Erdem, I turned up at the Mark Fast show on Monday night, in the hope of a breath of normality.


source: dailymail