A 21-year-old Australian model walking in the Alex Perry show during Australian Fashion week on Monday apparently drew gasps from the audience due to her thin frame, and prompted one editor to call her agent to express concern about her health.
Marie Claire editor Jackie Frank was front row at the show when former Australia’s Next Top Model contestant Cassi Van Den Dungen walked down the runway, and was so horrified by her appearance she decided to get in touch with the girl’s agency to find out why she was allowed to walk in the show.
‘When I saw those legs I nearly died,’ she said. 'I rang the model agent and said ‘why is that girl walking down the runway when she’s clearly not healthy?’ reports Mamamia.com
Cassi’s agent assured Jackie that she is healthy and eating normally, noting that she had just returned from Paris and was in the process of ‘bulking up’. The Paris shows are notorious for expecting girls to be incredibly thin in order to be case in the shows. The agent also said that Cassie has a two-year-old child and was busy running around after her toddler.
Jackie Frank isn’t the first Aussie editor to speak up about severly underweight girls working in fashion. A former Vogue Editor Kirstie Clements released a book last year entitled The Vogue Factor, in which models admitted to fainting daily from hunger (believing it was normal), and spoke about girls who had a coating of light fur develop on their anorexic frames, as their bodies tried to keep warm enough to survive. ‘I have never, in all my career, heard a model say, “I’m hot,” not even if you wrapped her in fur and put her in the middle of the desert,’ Clements said in the book.
The Vogue Factor is filled with alarming stories of models who refuse to order dinner, who say things like, ‘It’s my job to not eat,’ and even quotes one agent as saying her girls were eating tissues to stay full without absorbing calories. ‘The top casting directors are demanding that they be thinner and thinner. I’ve got four girls in hospital. And a couple of the others have resorted to eating tissues. Apparently they swell up and fill your stomach,’ she whispered to Clements over lunch.
Australian editors are leading the charge with the stance against extreme skinny, the question is: when are the American and European magazines going to follow suit?
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.