Yesterday's style section of the New York Times splashed an unappealing picture on its cover: two models backstage at the Prada fashion show in Milan, one on her Blackberry, both smoking cigarettes.
In the past year, there has been uproar in the fashion world about the health of its cat-walking beauties. Last September, for Madrid's fashion week, Spain required every model to have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of at least 18, otherwise the aspiring Twiggys were banned from walking in the fashion shows. But not every skinny model suffers from an eating disorder; some are naturally wiry.
If the fashion industry is truly worried about the health of its models, instead of using BMIs as benchmarks, it should focus on an obvious and easily-recognizable killer: cigarettes.
In the Times article, the author reports that at fashion shows "models smoke every place and all the time." Dieting and smoking is also linked, the Times said. In a University of Florida in Gainesville study of 8,000 adolescents, dieting seemed to lead to smoking (nicotine suppresses the appetite).
While a pack-a-day compulsion may help these young models fit into size zeros and help their careers (which don't last long), the habit is deadly: Nearly 500,000 Americans die from smoking cigarettes each year.
Fashion world, I urge you to take a step in the right direction and consider anti-smoking programs for your models. Tyra Banks took a big step this week when she announced on her program _America’s Next Top Model_ that smoking kills and that none of the wannabe models will be allowed to smoke on the show this cycle. Now it's time for the fashion industry to take note, too.
Corrie Driebusch is a research intern at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com) -- which created the website TheScoopOnSmoking.org.