Last week in Paris, as the fashion elite were gathering at the Balenciaga show, 17-year-old model Ali Michael was heading home to the United States far earlier than anticipated.
Michael was last season's model du jour, and she looks wraithlike, with a still-developing body and a 23-inch waist. But this season, after gaining five pounds, she was told by casting directors for the runway shows that her legs were too plump, according to her mother, Mary Ann Michael, who travels with her daughter. And so, after doing a string of major supermodel shows in September, Michael snared only the Yohji Yamamoto show in Paris this time around.
Nobody here has been talking about last year's skinny-model cause celebre, when a few fashion-industry leaders in Milan and Madrid began talking about instituting body-mass-index requirements after the starvation deaths of several models. This year, the models are just as thin — if anything, they look thinner. This was particularly visible in Paris, which sets modes for clothes and fashion shows around the world.
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"I think it's gotten worse," said Nina Garcia, fashion director at Elle magazine and a judge on cable television's "Project Runway," while we waited to see Balenciaga.
The Paris runways last week were as flamboyant as ever, and exceedingly thin models are a big part of the show.
Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquiere opened his show with two demure little black dresses that would look awkward on anything but a rail-thin frame. Dior went 1960s Mrs. Robinson with a finely tailored collection that will make people rush for a martini and cigarette — and the models were little more than highly stylized hangers for the clothes.
"If you look at the girls, they are not beautiful like models were 20 years ago," says Jimmy Pihet, spokesman for the Federation Francaise de la Couture, which oversees Paris fashion shows. "The girls are thin, they have strange faces. . . . At first, you look at them and you're not sure if they're beautiful or disgusting."
Everywhere on the runways, it's apparent that the emaciated look is still "in."
Pihet says that France has had laws since 1990 requiring models who are under 18 to obtain health certificates from doctors, and that the federation receives complaints that the laws are too strong. But he claims that models aren't role models for young girls — that actresses play that role.
This is a contested point. As any parent of an adolescent girl can tell you, fashion magazines become dog-eared as girls study them for beauty tips.
But it isn't fair to just blame a few designers. The fashion industry moves en masse, and no one is using models who look like models did 20 years ago.
It's hard to imagine Ali Michael, a willowy, 5-foot-9-inch teenager, being told her legs are too fat. Last season, Michael made herself sick keeping her weight down, said her mother. Michael's reward was to be heralded as the next supermodel.
She opened Lanvin in Paris a year ago and walked the runways of Karl Lagerfeld, Christian Lacroix, Chanel, John Galliano, Dior, Rodarte and others. She appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Teen Vogue and W magazines and was personally congratulated by Vogue's Anna Wintour.
Her mother said her daughter's model friends have struggled to get thinner in recent months and that her daughter, worried about her health, chose not to starve herself.
"Our bags are packed," Mary Ann Michael said sadly as she and her daughter prepared to fly home. Still, she said that she felt a sense of relief that her child was getting out of the fast lane of fashion, at least for now. "I have a really good, good daughter," she said.