France’s Minister of Social Affairs and Health has protected the healthy status of affairs in the fashion and modelling business. The new law in France officially banned an extremely skinny models, no more famine mannequins, promised Minister Marisol Touraine.
France banning the use of unhealthily skinny fashion models has come into effect, at last. The fashion designers also supported this extremely useful initiative. Ironically, the same fashion editors had another point of view ten years ago when they required from models to be ultrathin. How many healthy incidents the fashion business faced over this period, nobody knows.
Since May 2017, the fashion models will need to provide a doctor’s certificate attesting to their overall physical health. The special regard is their body mass index (BMI), which shows a measure of weight in relation to height.
The health ministry stressed in her official statement that beauty and skinny has nothing common, in fact. First of all, a woman has to be healthy to be beautiful. The new French law aimed at the fight eating disorders and inaccessible ideals of beauty, and that is the first step to making fashion more healthy.
France bans ultra-thin models and requires to label the retouched photos
The law insists on the labelling the manipulated fashion photos with the special remark ‘retouched photograph’ from 1 October.
The draft of the law about models’ BMI in France suggested a minimum BMI for models, prompting protests from modelling agencies in France.
Employers breaking the law could face fines of up to 75,000 euros (£63,500; $82,000) and up to six months in jail.
“Exposing young people to normative and unrealistic images of bodies leads to a sense of self-depreciation and poor self-esteem that can impact health-related behaviour,”
said Marisol Touraine in a statement on Friday.
