Anorexia

Published: 29/03/2007

Gianni Versace, a dazzling designer with a complicated sex life ends up murdered. His sister, Donatella inherits his fashion house and turns into as famous a couturiere, the queen of catwalks treaded by ever thinner models. Now we discover her daughter, Allegra, 20, and a student of fashion, is an anorexic. The sweep of the saga is Shakespearean and the impact of this news will resound around the world.
On the internet some moralists see Allegra’s descent into self destruction as a sign of divine retribution, a punishing lesson for a vain profession. People can be so cruel.

Donatella says:’ Many mothers will know what I am going through’. Of course we do. Whatever her wealth and fame, here is a mum, worried sick and helpless as her daughter hurts herself. Millions of mothers in this country will identify with that pain. But in her case, deep sympathy comes with conditions attached for she does represent a cultural force that has engendered self loathing in an increasing number of girls and woman who believe they are gross because they are not all bone.

Will this searing experience compel Donatella into action against her own sort?

The fashion business arrogantly sweep aside warnings by doctors, mental health professionals, policy makers, child care experts and parents who believe the beauty image of cool emaciation is partly responsible for the epidemic in eating disorders. Right now 90,000 Britons are being treated for these. Girls as young as six are susceptible. Go into any girls school and you hear endless confessions of fattiness and crazy diet tips. The leader of any pack is always the thinnest and tallest girl while normal sized and chubby girls have to know their place. I have witnessed this in junior as well as senior schools. Good to be Anorexic websites are now thought chic.

Models have died of starvation in the past two years and the dim Naomi Campbell still says her industry is not at all culpable. We do, t’is true, now have an independent panel set up by the British Fashion Council looking into the connection, but I am cynical until proved wrong. As the erstwhile editor of Cosmo, Marcelle D’Argy Smith says: ’They were pushed into this. They have to make the right noises’

When Allegra hopefully recovers, the world she inhabits needs to have transformed itself so she and other victims can feel whole and beautiful again. Her mother, a powerful insider who now feels the damage, should give a lead by starting a global campaign to banish (and help) skeletal models from catwalks.

Published in Evening Standard