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CBC Canada has a report on a law under consideration in France's lower house that would require models to meet a minimum body mass index standard.
The link between high fashion, body image and eating disorders on French catwalks may lead to a ban on super-skinny models.
Style-conscious France, with its fashion and luxury industries worth tens of billions of dollars, would join Italy, Spain and Israel, which all adopted laws against too-thin models on catwalks or in advertising campaigns in early 2013.
Under the proposed legislation, any model who wants to work has to have a body mass index (a type of height to weight ratio) of at least 18 and would be subject to regular weight checks.
The law would enforce fines of up to $79,000 [US] for any breaches, with up to six months in jail for any staff involved, French Socialist Party legislator Olivier Veran, who wrote the amendments, told newspaper Le Parisien.
The bill's amendments also propose penalties for anything made public that could be seen as encouraging extreme thinness, notably pro-anorexia websites that glorify unhealthy lifestyles and forums that encourage eating disorders.
Body Mass Index (BMI) is is a measure of relative size based on the mass and height of an individual.
c0lo's random thoughts:
- On one side: governments regulating the BMI... (large soda ban)... hmm?
- On the other side: how is this different from laws against public indecency, laws which are well-knitted into the fabric of westernized societies?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:31AM
Which means that any models that are particularly short are now unemployable, as BMI (with an exponent of 2, despite the fact we live in a 3-dimensional world[*]) doesn't scale sensibly with height. So not only is this a bullshit law in principle, they'll be using a broken methodology to enforce it. Morbidly unhealthy lanky 2m models will be fine, but perfectly fit 1m50 models will be pariahs. Total nonsense. I.e. politicians/lawyers doing what they're best at.
[* an exponent of 3 doesn't work well either, as we don't scale equally in all directions (unlike lizards which from 8cm 3g geckos to 250cm 90kg kimodos follow m~l^3 remarkably closely). If you want a round number for honouring human somatotypes, 2.5's not far from reality.]
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @06:43PM
Which means that any models that are particularly short are now unemployable, ...
Fashion models are all very tall, so nothing was lost.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:12AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves