Thin people

The fashion industry has a lot to answer for. It has promoted the idea that thin is not only good but an aspiration. It's said that advertisers want us to look at the clothes and not the body and therefore thin is better. But in fact the clothes and the body wearing them are inseparable. The idealisation of skinny is one of the perverse consequences of an industry that is obsessed with dehumanising both us and the models.

I have never understood why the world of fashion thinks that making a model look (or be) anorexic, should make us want to buy their product. The gaunt sickly look of Paul Smith's Summer 2016 models made me want to go out and eat gargantuan portions of pasta to make sure I didn't end up looking like that. It's the same with ultra-thin women models. They just me feel slightly nauseous. That kind of skinniness, where you see all the bones of the body and the model resembles a wire coat-hanger, is not only deeply unattractive, it's also really unhealthy. I associate it with people starving in Africa.

This year, France joined Italy and Spain in banning super thin models.

"Exposing young people to normative and unrealistic images of bodies leads to a sense of self-depreciation and poor self-esteem that can impact health-related behaviour," said France's Minister of Social Affairs and Health, Marisol Touraine.

In other words, you feel crap about yourself and it wrecks your health.

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