We all collude in the fashion world's obsession with size, says Sarah Mower. As for the exploitation of child models, she recommends passport controls at the catwalk to reduce the proliferation of size zero models When I was trying to check out of my hotel at the end of the haute couture shows in Paris last week having witnessed as many wince-makingly thin teenage models on the catwalk as ever, a wedding party got in my way. I looked up to see a little girl in a pink Chanel dress at the centre of attention.
Child bride: size zero actress Eva Longoria at her Paris wedding Horrors, it was the bride: Eva Longoria, a 32-year-old the size of a child, and dressed like one, too. Here was one message from fashion, and one from the universe of Hollywood celebrity, both promulgating the infantilised image synonymous with female success in the 21st century. It is food for thought, coming as it does in the same week that the interim report of Lady Kingsmill's Model Health Inquiry recommends that girls under 16 be banned from the adult catwalk and from magazine shoots unless they are portraying childrenswear.
This is, of course, the only moral move possible, it being scarcely believable that children are allowed to work in an adult industry in the first place. To me, it's simple. I'd like to see every model take a copy of her passport to be checked before she sets foot on a catwalk or in front of a camera.
No arguing with a birth date printed in black and white. Trying to protect the under-age from the strains of modelling is one thing, but who will accept blame for the eating disorders it propagates? Designers blame model-casting agents, who blame model agencies, who blame fashion stylists, who blame their editors, who blame designers for the thin aesthetic.
What we want to hear is someone with an authoritative handle on what is happening. That voice came from Dr Adrienne Key, a specialist at the Priory Clinic, who silenced the room at an open forum. She calmly pointed out that the spectrum of eating disorders covers everything from anorexia to obesity.
They are all part of the same psychologically disrupted attitude to food that is endemic in Western consumer societies. Third world cultures, she categorically stated, do not suffer from them. In the part of the world we live in, women are trained from childhood to be mentally unbalanced about size.
Now, we live in an age of such extremes - of wealth, cosmetic surgery, exercise, drug-taking, alcohol abuse - that we no longer know what "normal" looks like, let alone feels like. If you look at the women's magazines on newsstands, every lurid cover is splashed with photos of so-called celebrities in bikinis and blaring straplines about how they've lost or gained weight. My moralistic side says "this is revolting female-on-female psychological bullying no one should tolerate", but the other side says "it's only there because women buy it".
The awful part is that I don't for a second believe that the readership of this trash press is made up of women who like to judge and criticise others for being too thin or fat. It's part of an addiction. Once you have read what they have to say, you turn the information inwards to attack yourself, a process that is quite possible even while you disapprove of it.
We are all distressed beyond measure about this, even while colluding in it. And the trouble is, since feminism died, there's been no structure for anyone to raise a peep against it. As long as we remain silently screwed up about it rather than intelligently vocal, how will anything change?
Haute couture is so, so dreamily inaccessible that the only way I can rationally process it (other than in terms of technical appreciation) is to join up the dots between what's on the catwalk and what the audience is wearing. This summer, it was a question of snapping your eyes between the collections and the French. The Parisiennes, let it be noted, are disdaining printed smocks, tents and Empire maxi-dresses, leaving that to the high-street Anglo-Saxons or, possibly, St Tropez.
No, for urban purposes, the chic have returned to black and, by no coincidence surely, some of the most perfectly beautiful dresses of couture week were LBDs. Black's not the message we were led to believe in for summer, is it? It's been "all about" cobalt, yellow, green, orange, magenta.
Irritatingly, I'd almost brainwashed myself into believing it, and showed up with only one black thing in my luggage. I'm happy to say that it was a 10-year-old black Chanel dress which, though it cost something like 700, has now got down to a pay-per-wear price of about 7.50.
Out it came again, in as good nick as when I bought it, after seeing Karl Lagerfeld's inspiring Chanel show, which included a glorious extended riff on knee-length LBDs. The only difference between now and 1997 is how to wear it. The footwear should be platformed, as opposed to strappy-stilettoed.
And the jewellery is just much more showy: gold cuffs and chains, multiple ropes of pearls, and stonking great crystal brooches. Bring out your bling and your LBD and you're sorted. You have to sit next to an American fashion editor to know exactly how far behind the times you have unwittingly slipped.
One of them looked at me and exclaimed: "Oh! You're the only person I know who still wears a watch." For the denuding of the wrist - and that stinging little aside - blame the mobile phone.
"Everyone" now uses her mobile, or BlackBerry, for time-telling purposes. The watch-free wrist is a bit of a status signal that one is up to speed in the instant-communication age. How could I have been so slow as not to notice this?
My children have as little interest in wearing watches as they have in writing with fountain pens, since handwriting, to them, is an almost obsolete skill, now that keyboards rule. But does that mean pens are redundant? Au contraire, for the civilised and the aspiring to be civilised, lovely pens to hand-write thank-you and condolence notes are de rigueur.
(Why else, Smythson and Mont Blanc?) So my position on the watch dig is this: yes, I do have a mobile phone and a BlackBerry, actually. Yes, I've noticed they show the time, actually.
I just didn't think it was terribly chic to wave them around at an haute couture show, actually. It is interesting to calibrate the minute changes in fashion etiquette. I have noticed that no one in the inside circle now overtly competes on phone-flashiness.
We are more discreet about even showing them now. BlackBerries have superseded them as status thingies, though I don't fancy their chances of enjoying more than six months' grace before plummeting to infra-dig level. In any case, I am continuing to wear my watches in a stolidly British way, which turned out to be just as well come last week's Bal des Artistes at Versailles.
An American had arrived disporting her advanced iPhone, which she declared "does everything!" Tragically, it wouldn't even make calls. And when the hour came for drivers to reach the gates after the ball, guess who could tell the time?
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