Two health experts are calling for the fashion industry in the U.S. to implement necessary guidelines to promote a healthier body image among the models.
According to them, the country should follow what France has done by passing a bill that prohibits fashion models who are too thin from working, Newsweek reported.
For Katherine Record and S. Bryn Austin of the Harvard Chan School's Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders, companies and employers in the fashion industry should refer to a base guideline when hiring models.
The researchers believe that doing so not only promotes a better image in this line of profession but can also help ensure the health of the models.
"Indeed, the fashion industry refers to its top models as clothes hangers - the less mass within the outfit, the better the display, the better the employee," they wrote in the study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
"Not surprisingly, this takes a toll: models have died of starvation-related complications, sometimes just after stepping off the runway," they added.
Record and Austin also noted that the U.S. should enact a similar public health bill recently passed in France.
According to The Guardian, French politicians held a meeting last week to enact a new bill promoting a healthier working condition for models in the country's own fashion industry. Originally, the bill prohibited companies from hiring models with a body mass index below 18.
This condition, however, did not make the final draft of the bill. Instead, lawmakers insisted that a qualified medical official should be the one to determine if a model is healthy or not through examinations.
In addition, before they will be allowed to work, models need to provide a medical certificate signed a doctor. Those who will not be able to show a certificate will be punished with a fine of €75,000 or around $82,000 and six months in jail.
In addition, under the new law, advertisements and other printed materials that were modified and digitally altered to make the models look thinner should be captioned with the phrase "photograph touched up." Failure to comply will result in a fine of €37,500 or around $40,000 or 30 percent of the advertisement's total cost.
Supporters of France's newest law noted that the new health bill was also drafted to trim down to increasing number of anorexia and eating disorder cases in the country.
However, modeling agencies criticized the bill and said that anorexia and the skinniness of models should not be linked to one another.
"It's very serious to conflate anorexia with the thinness of models and it ignores the act that anorexia is a psychogenic illness," Isabelle Saint-Felix of Synam, the governing body of many agencies in France said.
