Fashion Diary
Jump to full article: New York Times, 2007-09-27
Author: GUY TREBAY
Intro: Not the first time 5- or 6-year-olds had been seen on a catwalk, the Heatherette show was, however, a first for showcasing girls just barely past "Dora the Explorer" age doing credible impersonations of the runway siren Carmen Kass. . . .
The one thing you will never hear anyone utter a peep of concern about when it comes to models is smoking. Yet it’s pretty common knowledge that they smoke more than long-haul truckers, road workers or Sylvia Sidney in “Beetlejuice.†The blue-collar reference here is intentional since, despite its putative glamour, a modeling gig is more like that of a supermarket checker than one would imagine. Both draw on a work force that tends to be uneducated and young. . . .
No matter where, fashion-show readying areas all seem subject to local fire-safety standards, which designers observe by posting No Smoking signs prominently above the communal ashtray. Models smoke every place and all the time, in a nimbus of backstage hairspray, in alleyways at the rare shows (Prada, Bottega Veneta) whose designers won’t permit smoking indoors. They smoke at smart fashion parties and in the little Smart cars their agencies use to ferry them from one casting to the next. They smoke in a number of surprisingly tolerant restaurants here, of course, because the maître d’ has not been born who would tell the gorgeously sultry 18-year-old Australian Catherine McNeil to stamp out her cigarette.
Of course, little of this would be anybody’s business but that of the persons involved were it not that so few of them are voting-age adults. Models are called models for a reason. Ask one of the 5-year-olds from Heatherette. . . .
If people didn’t look to models or celebrities for behavioral cues, Hollywood would not currently be looking at banning cigarette smoking in movies or treating it as grounds for a ratings change. Hollywood probably knows what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knows and also what the researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville recently found in a study released last month that established a connection between dieting, smoking and drug use.
After analyzing the dieting and smoking practices of 8,000 adolescents, the study found that, particularly among girls, dieting seemed to lead to smoking and for reasons any model could explain: nicotine suppresses the appetite. . . .
It happens that there’s a sinister circularity in this process. Killing appetite is one reason people reach for a Marlboro. And there is no question that dieting is an occupational necessity for the girls paid to make the refined but punishingly slim clothes that Raf Simons showed in his much-lauded Jil Sander show on Tuesday (brave and courageous were words that were used a lot) look chic and also humanly feasible to wear.
It is also true that smoking to lose weight only leads to more smoking. Or at least that is what animal studies linking food deprivation to the use of stimulants have found. When the fashion community is used to its next fit of moral dudgeon and wakes up again to the problems of underweight girls and the largely hidden abuse of things like clenbuterol, it will be worth reminding them that there is good science demonstrating that when you starve an animal, you make it a lot more vulnerable to self-abuse.
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