Fashion shows have started and TV, newspapers and the web show the best of Italian and international fashion. There is the new innocence of Miu Miu, the Grunge, fashion for young girls and the cougar clogs with knick knacks. But there are above all the skin and bones models on the runways of Milan and Paris. What happened? Didn’t they say and write in all languages that they would have abolished under weight models, that they would have fought against thinness to save thousands of young girls who let themselves die because they do not want to eat? Hypocrisy, cynicism, indifference, superficiality and business.

Everything is in pictures, videos, everywhere you turn on the runway. The most famous fashion designers, but not all of them, we must be honest, have taken enormous responsibilities. Consequences are devastating. Anorexia has become a cause of death among women all over the world. Millions of young girls feel beautiful when they reach the dream to become like them, the super-paid models who walk along the runway with an absent and sulky face. There is more behind the psychological trouble that causes anorexia, obviously: the deadly challenge against one’s self has very deep motivations, it comes from an uncontrolled diet, from the refusal to consider anorexia like a mental illness which has to be treated immediately. Once inside the tunnel, it is difficult to reach the way out.

Those who treat anorexic girls also show the pictures of thriving beautiful girls to “detox” the idea that the ill girls have. And for doctors it is difficult to succeed, even because in fashion everything changes but the Devil does not wear Prada, but dresses girls who are skin and bones.

Translated by Chiara Nunnari from John Milton Institute