What a surprise. Filippa Hamilton, the model who made headlines last week when her employers, Ralph Lauren, digitally altered her image so that her waist and hips were smaller than her head, has been fired. Something to do with her not being able to fulfil the terms of her contract. I can assume only that this means the poor girl decided she’d prefer to keep all her major internal organs intact rather than have them surgically removed to accommodate the marketing fantasies of her bosses.

Aside from the staggering corporate irresponsibility of a clothing company as powerful as Ralph Lauren promoting an ideal of the female form that is anatomically impossible, it is hard to understand how it could be so straightforwardly idiotic. Sure, fashion is all about fantasy; but it’s not the just designer’s fantasy that sells clothes, stupid, it’s also the customer’s. If you make a model so absurdly thin that Miss Average can’t possibly imagine herself being anything like her, then you are shooting yourself in the Louboutins.

Women need to be able to look at the picture on the poster and think, “Hmm, maybe I too could look like that.” Yes, fashion is about inspiration but it’s also about inspiration. That is the commercial trigger that drives us all. This is a concept that continues to elude the German designer Karl Lagerfeld who, in response to the news that Brigitte, one of Germany’s top women’s magazines, is going to publish only pictures of “real women”, announced rather airily, “No one wants to see curvy women.” He added, with his customary charm, “You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly.”

Wrong. What’s ugly is trying to get every female on the globe to comply with the fashion police interpretation of beauty: pre-pubescently thin, with small features, big eyes, pouting lips, and a pale face on which no mark exists. Clearly a man who swans around dressed as an 18th century dandy and uses a fan in public is not much in touch with his inner hausfrau; nevertheless, as an elderly ex-fatty himself, Lagerfeld (and his associates) should understand this simple psychology. The more the industry shrinks its models, the more it shrinks its customer base. Lauren and Lagerfeld may not like it much, but there are a lot of us “fat mothers” out there. It might pay to start thinking of us as people instead of playing us for fools.

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