I was going to write this week about the most arresting collections from each of the four big city's (New York, London, Milan and Paris) fashion weeks - Alexander Wang, Rick Owens and Miuccia Prada's Miu Miu amongst them - but I realized that there was something much more important than the clothing this year.
Models are skinny. This is practically a fact. I have heard the argument that a model's job is to make clothing look good, and a slimmer frame just is better for demonstrating how a piece of clothing looks.
Perhaps this is true, but if that argument claims that a curvier body could distract from the clothing, than this year, more than ever sadly, many models were so skinny that their stick thin limbs were distracting from the clothing.
In 2006, first Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos died of heart failure brought on by anorexia nervosa.
Two months after, Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston also died after experiencing kidney failure from subsisting on a diet consisting soley of apples and tomatoes.
The World Health Organization considers a person with a body mass index (or BMI, a statistic used to compare a person's weight to their height) of 16 to be malnourished.
Ramos died at 14.5.
Reston at 13.4.
Following these deaths and several similar ones (including that of Ramos' younger sister, Eliana, also a model, who died three months later of a heart attack at only 18 years old), some action was taken in the industry.
Madrid Fashion Week banned models with a BMI of less than 18. The Brazilian and Italian fashion industries also started drawing up guidelines.
It's hard to say how much of these words have been taken to action.?Based on the overall look of models at the big four Spring 2010 shows, not much is being done.
It wasn't one model or one designer. I could supply a laundry list of girls tottering around the runway on pixie stix-like legs, limply swinging barely-there arms.
Top model Freja Beha Erichsen's skin spread thin, clinging to her legs and chest, at Balmain and Burberry Prorsum.
The models walking Alexander McQueen (one of my favorite designers, and one who put out a really beautiful collection this season, that I wish I could focus on) all had knobby knees and dramatically protruding collarbones.
It is very possible for someone to be both healthy and skinny. I'm sure that some, even perhaps, many, of the models at Fashion Week are slim from their genes.
But what is passing for arms on someone like Vlada Roslyakova (who walked at Versace, Michael Kors and Oscar de la Renta) or Anna Selezneva (who walked at Burberry Prorsum, Preen and Alexander Wang) is a little shocking.
I have, and have had, several friends who have struggled with eating disorders. A lot of models develop problems after being put under pressure by the industry.
Model Coco Rocha spoke out in 2008 against the weight and image problems she has faced, recounting how when she weighed 108 pounds - at a height of 5'8" - she was advised to lose more weight.
But I feel blaming the fashion industry often puts the blame on the models themselves, dehumanizing the models, painting them as unreal dolls that are forced at girls and young women to make them feel bad, which completely discounts some of the tragic stories we hear about.
I've heard over and over from friends with eating disorders that, "It's not a big deal."
I've discussed here some very extreme cases but they are not unrealistic for the young women (or men!) that anyone here at Hopkins may know.
A family friend of mine should have graduated from Stanford two years ago. But she left school half way through her freshmen year, struggling with anorexia nervosa, and has yet to return to any school.
It's been five years and she still looks like a bobble head - her body absurdly out of proportion with her head.
I don't know how to solve this problem when I see it in people I know, because it's far easier said than done. It's not as simple as therapy, but perhaps this is something that we as a community should be trying to improve.
The would-be Stanford grad has spent these last years in and out of hospitals, and is only inching towards recovery, with many steps backwards.
