anti-anorexia

Less than a week after the French fashion industry signed a charter promising to promote healthy body images in magazines and on the Paris runways, the French parliament's lower house adopted a controversial bill that would make it illegal for anyone to publicly incite extreme thinness.

The bill has yet to be approved by the French Senate, which will review the proposal in coming weeks, but if approved, it will be the strongest of its kind anywhere.

However, doctors warn that the link between eating disorders and media images remains hazy, and Didier Grumbach, president of the French Federation of Couture, made no secret of his strong disapproval of such a sweeping measure. "Never will we accept in our profession that a judge decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny," he said. "That doesn't exist in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France."

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Yesterday, the French fashion industry joined with the country's Health Ministry to sign a charter promoting healthy body images in magazines and on the Paris runways.

The charter outlines a series of guidelines, committing the industry to work toward "a diversity of body representations" and refrain from using "images of people, in particular youth, that could contribute to promoting a model of extreme thinness."

This action follows the recent inquiry by the British Fashion Council on the effects of airbrushing, all spurred by the anorexia-related deaths of several South American models in 2006, including Brazilian Ana Carolina Reston.

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