When the Designer Chickens Come Home to Roost

I feel genuinely sorry for Donatella Versace. As a mother, I can’t imagine what it would be like watching my 20-year-old daughter starve herself to death (and G-d willing I should never have to). Right now Donatella’s daughter, Allegra, is in a treatment facility and being fed through a nose tube. Doctors are worried that her longtime battle with anorexia has left her vital organs susceptible to shut down at any minute.

It is a tragic story. However, it also happens to be one of the most ironic circumstances I have seen to date. The Versace Empire was built in an industry that has continued, without conscious, to champion sickly thin women. In fact, they have recently given the greenlight to begin including Size 00 into fashions for those women who are so skinny that a Size 0 is baggy (i.e. Allegra and her gaunt peers).

When London and Madrid drew a line in the sand telling promoters of the cities’ fashion weeks that unless catwalk models had a normal range Body Mass Index they would pull financial support and cooperation, they were criticized. Fashion industry gurus claimed that the mayors of both cities were exercising censorship, and that it was up to the industry itself to be its own fashion police, because that seems to have worked so well up until now…NOT!

The sick, sad situation that is the current fate of Allegra is the same story we have witnessed over and over again in nearly every Western world community; young girls very influenced by the media’s perception of beauty trying to achieve an unrealistic physical ideal at all costs. This is what the London and Madrid mayors and city governments realized and that was the main motivation for the BMI restriction. Mothers in the U.K. and Spain stood up and said, collectively, ‘I’m tired of my daughter feeling like garbage, because she can’t be a Size 0, and I’m not going to let my tax dollars support this negative influence anymore.’ Hats off to those parents!

My sincerest hope is that Allegra’s treatment will yield positive results. I hope those counselors can find a way to tear down her negative self-image and build within her a new sense of confidence, because if they don’t succeed, she is going to die. With that said, as a mother of a girl who is still too young to understand the “be skinny or you’re worthless” messages, what I want to know is what the fashion industry plans to do from here.

One of your own is losing her little girl to the images that you have forced upon popular culture for years. In 2006, two young models in their early 20s dropped dead from anorexia. How many more human, and tragically female, skeletons have to spill blood before you come back to reality and begin featuring healthy models in your ads and on your catwalks? How many more young girls have to enter treatment before you quit making sizes that most women don’t fit in to? And by the way, here’s a little bit of help for you, the average female in the U.S. is a Size 12, not a 2 or a 4, not even a 6, but a decent Size 12.

By the end of the summer this Versace story will end either with Allegra getting better and returning to some semblance of a normal life, or sadly, with the same fate as befell her uncle in an untimely death. My hope is that Allegra will not only get through this, but she will emerge as an advocate for a return to reason in the fashion industry. It would be great to see her on television chastising designers who continue to use hyper thin models to sell their wares and railing against stores that choose to carry the new Size 00. I would love to see Allegra become a healthy, normal sized role model for what a 20-something woman should be by standing up for a cause, getting her education, and maybe, just maybe, designing a line under the Versace label where the sizing starts at a 4 and goes all the way up to an 18.