Slim chance

Giles Reed, brand manager of the watch company in Britain, temporarily withdrew his company's advertising from Vogue because it's glossy pages featured super-waif models.

And now campaigners of the hour-glass figure and those, including Princess Di, who believe skinny models help create a sick generation of people with eating disorders, have jumped on the bandwagon.

In a matter of days, one man's stand-point, although later over-ruled by senior bosses, was whipped into a frenzied national attack on raw-boned fashion models and the agencies and magazines who promote them.

Gaunt models are nothing new. Look back at the snaps of 60s icon Twiggy or the face of that moment Jean Shrimpton known as "the shrimp" for her slight physique.

Both were a few missed meals away from the emaciated third world-type figures hitting catwalks worldwide today.

The difference in the 90s is that now we are bombarded with these images every day in the media with the influx of new magazines aimed at the female market.

They promote the belief that painfully thin is 'in' and an undernourished look is a beautiful one. As a result, thousand of impressionable young women everywhere, and Lancashire is no exception, are starving themselves at a time in their life when they most need to sustain a healthy diet.

Darwen mother Valerie Lomas, who lives with her four model daughters Sarah, 14, Cheryl, 13, Rachael, 12, and Charlotte, ten, on Bedford Street, is disgusted with the emergence of the skeletal figure.

"What are agencies thinking recruiting such skinny models. They are absolutely horrifying. I've always told my girls that a skin and bones person is not attractive and a healthy look is much more sexy," she said.

"I do worry that modelling is so competitive that they will think they have to be skinny to get ahead and stop eating but they are very well balanced .

"Personally I think Jodie Kidd is horrendous," stressed Valerie, who knows an anorexic model.

"Sarah worried about her weight because her friends were slimmer but it only lasted a week and she had three sisters to make her see sense.

"Young girls are impressionable and having waif models puts pressure on them at a difficult time in their lives.

"Their bodies are going through a lot of changes and they need a well balanced diet just to get through."

Dr Michael Launer from Burnley Health Trust, who is instrumental in setting up a new care home clinic in Colne Road, Reedley, for people with eating disorders, believes that waif models are not responsible for the mushrooming of eating disorders and should not be banned.

He said: "It is not really irresponsible. I don't see problems showing these sorts of models but we seemed to have moved too far towards this. We can't ban everything. There would be nothing to show and life would be pretty dull. But we must balance the stuff and say that Marilyn Monroe type persons are also attractive."

He added: "People with slimming diseases are not interested in fashion and are not striving to look like models. It is to do with how they feel about themselves. Severely ill girls with often low weight anorexia often don't even read magazines."

But therapist Nigel Sernandez, who works with patients recovering from eating disorders at Blackburn's Beardwood Hospital's Priory Suite, disagrees. "All the patients I see from Lancashire cite emaciated models as a problem and a symbol of how society wants them to look.

"It is also a problem with women who think or feel like a bulimia or anorexic but don't have the physical symptoms. We have a relentless pursuit of thinness which is believed to make you more attractive and give you power, wealth, success and popularity, so when women fall short of this, they feel ostracised from society."

He added: "Research shows negative body image can lead to mental illnesses such as stress, depression and anxiety which can lead to over eating and eating disorders as a way of coping.

"Models reinforce this negative body image and women envy them for having the control to say no to food.

"Omega have made a step in the right direction. Women are special whatever size they are."

Lorna McDonough, who owns Pamela Holt, one of the biggest modelling agencies in the North West, said: "The more models look like real people the better. Some are too thin. How can people identify with them. Our clients are in the real world and don't want waif models."

" You'd have to go to the children's department to dress some of the thin models. We just can't get them work. One of our models lost a lot of weight recently and was dropped from a fashion show. It is only 10 per cent of modelling agencies in London who use super-waifs. We usually sign people up with a 34-25-35 figure."

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.