The great weight debate

Planet Fashion recently landed itself in hot water, re-igniting, as it does periodically, the debate about when skinny becomes too skinny.

Firstly, a furore broke out over the extreme photoshopping of a Ralph Lauren model, Filippa Hamilton, for a Japanese department store advertising campaign.

Hamilton, normally an utterly acceptable size 8-10, had been so drastically slimmed down via digital image manipulation that her head appeared to be twice the size, and virtually twice the width, of her body.

Not even Japanese girls, traditionally petite in body shape, could realistically have believed that this was an acceptable body shape to aspire to. If ever there is an argument to be made that the fashion industry subconsciously (or even overtly) encourages anorexia, this ultimate fashion faux pas was surely it.

Not long after that debacle created worldwide headlines, German designer Karl Lagerfeld declared, in his typically peremptory way, that no-one wants to see "curvy" women on the catwalk. "Curvy", in fashion-speak, is a euphemism for bigger or so-called "plus size models", and plus-sized generally refers, believe it or not, to anyone size 10 or over.

The final nail in the coffin of this fashion trilogy of disasters was the uproar over recent pictures of Miranda Kerr modelling for Grazia magazine, looking painfully thin after an invitation to model for Balenciaga in Paris reportedly had her going on a crash-course diet to fit into designer Nicholas Ghesquiere's famously miniscule sample sizes.

None of this has done the reputation of the fashion industry any good. Kerr, supposedly the healthy Australian beauty who is fully capable of filling out a bikini, now looks gaunt and stick-like. Hamilton, who complained about the extent to which her body image was altered, was then fired by Ralph Lauren. Lagerfeld, with one quip of his famously dismissive tongue, managed to offend a significant portion of the female population.

I, for one, do want to see curvy women on the catwalk, and in the pages of fashion magazines. There is a Dutch model by the name of Lara Stone who is one of the most in-demand models of the moment, appearing everywhere from Vogue to i-D and everything in between. In comparison to the waif-like, mind-numbingly similar Eastern European models who have dominated the catwalks in recent years, Stone's voluptuous breasts, noticeable hips and thighs seem like a throwback to another era - the 1950s, perhaps, when "curvy" women like Gina Lollobrigida, Elizabeth Taylor and Brigitte Bardot were considered the height of female beauty.

Someone must want to see curvy women, despite what Lagerfeld says, because Stone appears with stunning regularity in the pages of some of the world's most influential fashion magazines (French Vogue even devoted an entire edition to her).

It's sad to say, though, that Stone is still considered an anomaly in the fashion industry. Because fashion designers tend to make their sample sizes so small - presumably as a cost-cutting measure - it has become a requirement for the average catwalk model to be unnaturally tall, and mind-bogglingly thin.

What always surprises me about models when they walk into the studio for the first time is just how tiny their limbs are, even if they are approaching 6 foot tall. Fashion shoots can often make models look Amazonian in print, but in real life, 21st century models really do, in most cases, seem almost wraith-like off camera; there's very little that's Amazonian about them at all.

The late 1980s and early 1990s seem a long way off now. When I see pictures of the supermodels of that era - Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer - I get a sudden jolt. Yes, there was a time when models had breasts, hips, thighs! These models, so beloved and admired in their time, would probably be considered "too big" for the catwalk now. What a strange irony.

There is another, even less discussed implication in fashion's predilection for the ultra-thin model. Black women, until reasonably recently, had become virtually redundant on the catwalks of Europe. Why? Because with the exception of stick-thin black models like English girl Jourdan Dunn, most black models have figures. Look at any picture of Naomi Campbell, with her impressively athletic body, and you'll know what I mean.

While I expect a barrage of comments suggesting that, as a fashion editor, I am part of the problem, not the solution, I would argue in my own defense: when the modelling agencies start signing up models who look like women, not pubescent girls, then I will start booking them.