When Spain recently banned models with too low a Body Mass Index from its fashionweek runway shows, a tempest in a well-coiffed teapot erupted, with everyone from bloggers to fashion editors to designers weighing in. "I think it's aggressive and repulsive to do this to young people. They are under so much pressure anyway — and now people want to add to it by criticizing them about their weight," Biba London designer Bella Freud recently told WWD. "Sometimes young girls are just skinny. That's all. And there's a big difference between being skinny and having an eating disorder. Why should they be penalized for being skinny? We have to remember to cherish young people — and not to criticize them so much." The organizers of fashionweeks in Paris & Milan are having none of it. "The Camera della Moda does not believe runways today are an aesthetic model and, in any case, the market now favors healthy models," explains Mario Boselli, head of the Italian Chamber of Fashion. "We work with serious, professional agencies and fashion houses that would not even consider [working with models with eating disorders]. We do not want to follow Spain's example as we don't believe these matters can be regulated and we would rather use our judgment." Didier Grumbach, head of the French Fashion Federation agrees: "Every designer is free to do what he or she wishes and every model is free to be who she is. Frankly, it's not an issue." Whether or not models are indeed anorexic – or simply blessed with great bones & a fab metabolism – what’s interesting is the way both the public & fashion insiders are responding to the Spanish ban. No one is forcing designers to book excessively skeletal models for the runway or their advertising campaigns; rather, both are used to sell the collection, which indicates that that is what the public wants to see. It’s ironic: the fatter we get as a nation - here in US & a growing number of other countries – the less we want to see anything remotely realistic in our fashion spreads. Rather, seeing someone too "healthy" would serve to pour cold water on the fantasy lifestyles that the fashion business perpetuates…in which a fashionista can never be too rich or too thin.

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