The return of heroin chic is a cynical betrayal of young women, says LIZ JONES - the former magazine editor who went to war with the fashion industry when ultra-thin models first stalked the catwalk

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For me September 22, 2022, will from now on be known as D-Day. There’s a war — but this time it is upon women’s bodies. Because what does the D stand for? Diet. 

The reason I’ve nominated that date is it was day I was live-streaming the Prada catwalk show from Milan Fashion Week. The Italian designer has long been my favourite. What did I see, staggering down the catwalk, like a scene from Halloween? Young women so emaciated that their garments were flapping around them, like sails on a mast. 

One model stuck out, literally; her thigh bones looked so frail they resembled those of a concentration camp victim. I showed her photo to a GP I know. Her diagnosis was that the model probably had a BMI of 14 — a healthy BMI should be over 18. Her health was clearly perilous. 

This season’s womenswear shows — we will get to the word ‘womenswear’ shortly — were the thinnest in decades. And I don’t mean the quality of the fabric. 

A model walks the runway of the Bally Fashion Show during the Milan Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2023. Liz Jones says that she loved fashion all of her life but was ruined by trying to emulate what she was seeing in the magazines and the reality of the front row

I was so shocked that, later the same afternoon, I recorded my Daily Mail podcast detailing what I’d seen. I was incandescent, horrified at the pitifully frail models and the irresponsible portrayal of how a woman should look. These girls were hobbling, miserable, hollowcheeked. . . and everyone was clapping and Instagramming! 

Mine wasn’t the only concerned voice. The feminist writer Camilla Long agreed, writing in the Sunday Times: ‘It amuses me to see the same people slavishly praising these dismal pickings then posting horrified reports of what’s happening in, say, Iran, even though the veil, relatively speaking, is far­ preferable to this absolute shower of body-hating straitjackets and hooker binbags.’ 

A model walks the runway during the Tom Ford Ready to Wear Spring/Summer 2023 fashion show as part of the New York Fashion Week

The designers appeared completely blind to this. Miuccia Prada had the cheek to take a bow at the end of that shocking show, in all her seventy something matronly glory. 

‘There is a sense of the life of women,’ the most influential woman in fashion said. ‘Life and humanity craft the clothes.’ 

How dare she utter the words ‘humanity’ and ‘life’? Girls this thin are in huge danger. 

Of course, some models might be born this way, but my prime concern remains the girls who see them and try to emulate them. Girls this thin run the risk of depression, brittle bones, muscle loss, compromised immunity, infertility, premature ageing. Ultimately, their organs may fail. 

Left: Burberry Ready to wear spring summer 2023 at London Fashion Week. Right: Prada Ready to Wear Spring/Summer 2023 fashion show as part of the Milan Fashion Week

I know all this because I was an anorexic from age 11 to my 40s (I have had one period my entire lifetime). My campaign to ban young, very thin models began in the late-1990s when I was made editor of Marie Claire. I had loved fashion all my life, but I was inevitably ruined by trying to emulate what I saw in magazines and I was traumatised by the reality of the front row. 

I felt as though everyone else in the fashion industry was asleep — why were we being peddled clothes on bodies that were genetic freaks? — and so made it my mission not to let what happened to me happen to any more girls. 

In April 2000, I co-hosted the Body Summit with the then Labour government. We passed a motion for a code of conduct to which editors of women’s and teenage magazines would voluntarily sign up, banning skeletal models from their pages. We wanted them to agree not to use models under 16 or those with a dangerously low BMI, and to stop airbrushing pictures too. 

I desperately hoped everyone would get on board, but I returned to my office to find a letter signed by a group of other magazine editors and model agents opposing the move. They were having none of it. No10 Downing Street stopped taking my calls. 

You can see by the photos on these pages how miserably I failed. I’m speaking out again now because I think the models today are even thinner and the reach of the images even wider. 

It is no surprise that, despite some of those who shared my concerns setting up independent advocacy group the Models Trust in 2016 — which set out to assure models’ welfare, including counselling, anonymous feedback surveys and the fact food had to be provided backstage — the prevalence of eating disorders in the UK has got worse. 

A model walks the runway during the Miu Miu Ready to Wear Spring/Summer 2023 fashion show as part of the Paris Fashion Week

Health Survey England states the number of over-16s who screened positive for an eating disorder has soared from six per cent in 2007 to 16 per cent in 2020. These figures continue to grow. Since lockdown, the British Medical Journal reports that the increase in eating disorders is ‘striking’, with ‘enforced social avoidance’ — less socialising, more secret eating — causing the increase. 

Nor does social media help. On TikTok, one trend sees youngsters post videos showcasing things they are doing to ‘act like a model’: eating fries without salt to avoid water retention and bloating, extra lettuce in a burrito bowl, nothing but a bottle of water and a piece of gum for seven hours.

But why is what was dubbed heroin chic now back? Spooked by the pandemic, the economic downturn, a war in Europe and a dearth of Chinese shoppers in Western capitals, I believe that designers have reverted to what worked before. 

Namely, fashion from the late1980s and early 1990s. Bulimic fashion, I call it — chainmail tops, miniskirts, slips. We just need the bodies to go in them. 

A model walks the runway during the Valentino Womenswear Spring/Summer 2023 show as part of Paris Fashion Week

But in the process of trawling the skinny archives, designers are trampling on the progress we’ve made over the past few years with the inclusivity and body positivity movement. 

When heroin chic first appeared – culminating in the infamous Kate Moss shoot for Vogue in 1993, where the model resembled a troubled child – we thought the perpetrators were women. Vogue’s editor, stylist, photographer, were all female. They thought they were exercising choice. 

They weren’t. Kate Moss certainly wasn’t, as she revealed on Desert Island Discs in July: she hated showing her nipples, and the photographer, the late Corinne Day who did the shoot, made her cry. 

But male designers were driving it. Famously at one Paris show back then, probably the most famous designer in the world at that time told a model he thought her hips were too wide for the catwalk. 

And for this latest version of heroin chic, we again have a series of rich old men — and some younger ones — to thank. A man had a hand in that Prada cadaver: Raf Simons, late of Dior, hired by Prada in 2020. 

A model walks the runway during the Annakiki Ready to Wear Spring/Summer 2023 fashion show as part of the Milan Fashion Week

Balenciaga? Where the models look as if they’ve been stranded at sea? That’s down to someone called Demna Gvasalia. 

Balmain? Is it a woman? Nope. Olivier Rousteing. 

Burberry, where the models had their their teeny breasts strapped in bondage-like gear? Designer, Riccardo Tisci, now replaced by Daniel Lee. 

Tom Ford sent women down the New York catwalk this season with their crotches exposed. 

Designer, Pierpaolo Piccioli, is responsible for Valentino. His creations were modelled by some models with ribs like mine when I was hospitalised with anorexia aged 21. 

Not that female designers are much better. 

What about Victoria Beckham, who proclaimed in May that being thin is ‘old fashioned’ and women want to be curvy? She went back to dressing what she knows best: stick insects. 

Dior’s designer is Maria Grazia Chiuri. For spring/summer 2023 she takes us back to the tiny, nipped-in waist of the Bar jacket of 1946. Progress! 

Versace, helmed by Donatella? The models looked in need of palliative care. 

This season, the female models aren’t even conventionally pretty. Their bodies are sinewy, hard, not feminine at all. 

This is a multi-faceted problem but I believe at its heart lies the twin axis of powerful men in fashion and deletion of womanhood. 

From politicians erasing the word ‘woman’ from proposed changes to the law on maternity leave and replacing it with ‘person’ (a move that was stopped by the House of Lords), to NHS hospitals asking doctors and midwives to say ‘birthing parent’ rather than ‘mother’, the identity of what it means to be a woman is under attack like never before. The radical trans-activist movement is behind these demands, of course - and it is women who are bearing the brunt of their extremism. 

Now the eradication of women is evident in fashion too - in the skeletal figures that bear little resemblance to a normal woman’s body. Even the shows are no longer called ‘womenswear’ - merely ‘ready-to-wear’. 

The men in charge don’t want to see hips, breasts, tummies, just the colour of our money. We’re being erased, while simultaneously having our pockets picked. 

Of course, there are many financial factors, too, which explain why brands prefer smaller women to wear their clothes. 

It’s faster, easier and cheaper to manufacture clothes for pipe cleaners. Remember the outcry in 2009 when M&S were found to be charging £2 more for a bra cup size above a DD? They soon backtracked, despite pointing out that bigger bras require more fabric, machinist time, skill, packaging. 

Also, the use of bigger, older models hasn’t really worked. In the interests of diversity we’ve seen fashion and beauty brands using larger women to advertise their products over recent years. But even though most of us with money to spend are older, and very few of us are a size 6, the sight of a 64-year-old Andie MacDowell on the catwalk may generate headlines, but it won’t necessarily translate into sales. Yes, the majority of British women are more than a size 16, but fashion still wants [itals]us[itals] to change, not them.

Why? Because women who are happy in their own skin – which diversity encourages - don’t panic purchase in the way those of us who feel bad about ourselves do. 

Meanwhile, luxury brands just don’t do plus-size fashion well, with designers often not knowing how to design for bodies that don’t look half-starved. 

Until recently, our premier fashion school, London’s Central St Martins, so the course director, the late Louise Wilson once told me, devoted only half an hour to pattern cutting for curvy women during a three-year course - a drop in the ocean compared to the hours spent catering to smaller figures. 

After decades working in the industry, I expect to see fashion revivals... but I always — foolishly I see now — hoped the heroin chic trend was one that would never darken our catwalks again. I was wrong.