Will super-skinny ever stop being in vogue?

One of the perplexing paradoxes of modern life is that even as the fashion-buying classes grow fatter, the industry itself remains fixated on super-thin models to advertise its wares.

Logically, designers should be turning their creative talents to clothing increasingly bloated humans, especially since calls for diet moderation and more exercise for trimmer bodies has fallen on deaf ears. However, designers seem to be stubbornly focused on creating clothes for individuals who are 30 kg lighter and 6 inches taller than the average fashionista.

Or at least they persist in creating clothes that only models with impossibly attenuated vital statistics — natural or contrived via starvation diets — can fit into for the catwalk.

Earlier this year, France made it mandatory for models to provide medical certificates that their Body Mass Index, or BMI, is fine and they are in good health. And this week, the two biggest French-owned fashion conglomerates decided not to allow very young and very thin girls to model their wares.

Considering most buyers of couture collections — the “face” of most luxury brands — are neither very young nor very thin, the companies’ initiative stands to reason and other fashion houses should follow suit. Maybe then, designers will also finally shed their preference for super-skinny, underage models.