The Greek-Australian fashion designer Alex Perry has apologized for casting an extremely thin model on the runway at his show at Sydney‘s Fashion Week.
The editor of the fashion magazine Marie Claire, Jackie Frank, was the first to express her concerns as the model, the 21-year-old Cassi Van Der Dungen, looked really sick. “I was just taken aback when I saw the visuals of what the girl looked like and it just kept ringing in my head what message it was sending,” Frank said.
Alex Perry commenting on the issue, agreed that he didn’t make a good choice. “That’s not the image that I think is a good one to put forward. It’s certainly not what I’ve presented my brand to be about,” he stated.
The Australian political scene is very concerned on the issue of skinny models as they constitute a bad influence on young children, especially young girls, causing serious eating disorders. In 2009, the then Labour Government founded a National Advisory Committee on this issue, which suggested that models should have a healthy weight.
However, things haven’t much changed. The head of the Butterfly Foundation for Eating Disorders, Christine Morgan, claims the fashion industry is still sending the wrong message. “What we’re seeing now, is not only non-adherence to that code of conduct, but actually something where it seems we are using models that portray a very unhealthy body shape and size,” she said.
A study conducted in 2012 showed that more than 913,000 Australians suffered from eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia.
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